A Short Man In A Wide World

All Lost in the Christmas Markets

2011-12-27T19:02:00.000-05:00

Strasbourg Christmas Market

What’s the difference between life in Europe and in theU.S.A.? It’s a common question, especially when talking to one’s grandparentson Skype. It comes up in expat-American conversations from a number of angles.

The difference is, in general, not large. Our life in Europedoes not differ greatly from our life in America, no more than life in New YorkCity differs from life in Ludington, Michigan, or life in Paris differs fromlife in Esch-sur-Sûre, Luxembourg.

Differences exist, but mostly mundane, everyday ones: e.g. Europeanpencils are skinnier (I speak from personal experience). There are countless pettydifferences on this order. On a deeper level, there’s always the generic freedomof living abroad, the ability to lose oneself in the local language (languagesin Luxembourg), and the daily challenge of making oneself understood. All ofthese things are great, but they have to do more with being abroad than whereone is, or than Europe.

For all that, one thing that stands out in Europe is therhythm to which the Old World sways. Europe, or at least the Northwesterncontinental corner (i.e. the upper half of France, Germany, and Benelux) appearsto have an established approach to traversing the year, one based on weather,tradition, religion, ancient harvest rituals, and a dash of modern industry.

The year begins with New Year’s celebrations and theleftover Christmas season holidays (Epiphany). That last burst of holiday joyand as many cords of wood as a household can manage sustain homes through thenext six or so weeks, a grim period where “sunlight” lasts about 7-8 hours aday, mostly appearing in grim, gray-white cloudy form. Winters are dreary,cold, and rainy, with a surfeit of snow to lighten the spirit. Everybody likelytucks their heads into their coats, stays inside as much as possible, and bearswitness to the relation between the word “hibernate” and the French word forwinter, “hiver”.

Carnival, that last bastion of sinning on the Catholic calendar before Lent,offers the first upbeat of excitement. Whîle much of this region has Catholicroots, if reformed religious views, the impetus to celebrate probably comes asmuch from cabin fever as anything else. The celebration takes place in mid-to-lateFebruary, spring lurking around the corner. As such, a week of festivities leadsto a shorter, more excited waiting period for the return of warmth and the sun.

Spring sets its own rhythm, with Easter, nature’s ownresurrection, and the joy of returning to outdoors activities and longer daysovertaking the continent. Spring will be lovely and summer no less so, though inAugust, everybody goes away on vacation. September marks the return to work andschool, but also the beer and harvest festival season; one can find a festival everyweekend until mid-November. It makes it difficult to schedule other activitieswith beer connoisseurs.

And in mid-November, the rhythm beats with Christmas Markets,to be described here forth.

Les Marchés de Noël

Strasbourg street

Annual market festivals of modern times emerge from basictraditions of people coming together to sell their goods. In Luxembourg thereis the annual end of summer Schueberfouer, a fair that hasits roots in the late Middle Ages, with this year having been the 671^stcelebration.

The idea of having a market around Christmas time appears todate back to a similarly late medieval date, at least as far back 13^thor 14^th century. While I didn’t find unequivocal evidence for whereand when they began, most sources and intuition suggest this to be anoriginally German institution. The small wooden cabins that house each vendorand his/her wares, the ruddy nature of the fare and the people, and theadaptation to cold weather all suggest Germany: the markets feel like prefabportals into a Grimm Brothers tale.

I knew naught of these markets before coming to Luxembourg. Asan American Jew whose main prior abroad experience was in Israel, I might notbe expected to know much about Christmas. Christmas as a child meant threethings: 1. Watching movies; 2. going to my best friend David’s house to seewhat he got for the holiday that I could share in – mostly, I hoped for videogames; 3. a day off from wrestling practice. In college, I would be home for onlyabout 5-7 days centered on Christmas, and in addition to that sense ofhomecoming, I had to maintain my weight for a tournament that awaited me on myreturn to the South. After college, I spent two Christmases in Israel, whichbecame a time where Amy would go home and I could relax in our apartment. Allin all, Christmas hasn’t been on my radar.

The Christmas Markets, however, arrested my attention. LesMarchés de Noël (the French name, which is easier to type than Christkindelmärik), do more than just propagate the big 3 C’s –Christianity, Commercialism, and Capitalism. They also provide a vibe, a senseof community, and a chance to drink hot beverages and interact with people inother languages. This mixture sucked in my interest as a secular, American Jew,and draws thousands of other people as well.

First, a ChristmasVillage in Belgium

On what we in the U.S.call Black Friday, where stores put on grand deals and people frantically fightover those deals, Les Marchés de Noël openhere. It was on the Saturday after, following a Thanksgiving celebration inLuxembourg the night prior, that Ben and I stumbled on our first Christmasmarket, in Belgium.

We were visiting Liège, a proud, independent city in east Belgium, just barelya part of the French-speaking half of the country, Wallonia. The brick-ladencity stood as an industrial powerhouse, and remains twice the size ofLuxembourg, with just under 200K residents. There’s a grand view to be hadafter climbing300 some-odd steps to the Citadel, and the author George Simenon,creator of the Inspector Maigret series,was a native of the city. We decided on Liège as our weekend destination forall these things, and because it was the best we could do for one day and aless than 3 hour train ride.

"I don't see a 'She-Wolf', do you?"

It was to our surprisethat, after we dumped off our bags and began our cruise through the center ofthe city, we stumbled upon a bunch of the wooden houses and a skating rink.There at Place St. Paul we found booths and waffles and chocolates galore, aswell as modern dance music that can be found anywhere (read: Shakira).Europeans enjoy taking things outdoors as much as possible, and Les marchés provide another example. With mobile heaters setup and an array of hot chocolate and hot wine stands surrounding the rink,people congregated to exchange holiday cheer and body warmth.

Having tasted a bit ofthe holiday spirit, we continued through the pedestrian streets of the citycenter and round a corner, whereupon we discovered another market. This marketwas officially a “Village de Noël,” though despite their website’sexplanation, I can’t really say there’s a difference between the two.

The village held the realaction, in any case. Held on Place St. Lambert (the site of a recent violent attack),the village offers a Ferris wheel, large slide to ride down, food booths,trinket and ornament vendors, a large brass band playing marches, and all the glühwein,hot chocolate, and beer one could ask for – truly the heart of the Liège Christmasfestivities.

The Chocolate and Marzipan in action. Photo by Benjamin Chang.

Being in Belgium, we decidedto do as the Belgium tourists do. I bought a cornet of fries, drenched inAndalusian sauce, but our chocolate choices were more noteworthy. Ben couldn’tresist a large slab of white marzipan at the Charlemagne chocolatiers’ booth(Charlemagne’s purported birthplace is close to Liège). We stopped there topick up the slab and buy some gift chocolates. As we deliberated and workedthrough language barriers, a local cut us in line, picking a bag of chocolates unhesitatinglyand demanding the right to pay. The woman behind the booth muttered herapologies to us, eyes wide with helplessness. The man, a swarthy fellow,remained unabashed, however: “I tell everyone when they come to Liège, theymust come for the chocolate. That’s why you come to Liège!” He faded back intothe crowd, but his words, or at least his breath, left the impression that hehad come for the glühwein as well.

We returned at night, thebest time to visit the markets. The glow of lights; the ongoing excitement foundin the way people walk and talk in waves and spikes and streams and rambles;the defiance of the weather and the earlier and earlier onset of night, allthis brings out the best of Europe and of Les marchés. Well, that andthe hot chocolate and waffles we munched on from Galler, who have a factory inthe town.

The Humble Home Front

Luxembourg’s Christmasmarket is a more humble affair. Everything in Luxembourg is a morehumble affair, except maybe the approach to global finance. The city ofLuxembourg sets up two marchés, one on the Place de Paris near the trainstation, and one in the center on the Place d’Armes. The central marché isthe main one. Four rows of 5-10 booths snake across the square. Various localbands and artists play carols at the gazebo on the west end, though in theirabsence a DJ is liable to spin some modern takes on the season’s songbook – I’mpretty sure I heard an Mariah Carey Christmas song in there.

Luxembourg’s market, likemost of its social life, is sort of rinky-dink, but with a few special items.First, they sell grompelkichelchen, which are crepe-sized potato cakes,and quite tasty. Also, the Luxembourg marché, like most other marchés,sells Glühwein, the mulled wine specialty of les marchés. Glühweintranslates into French as vin chaud, which translates into Englishas hot wine, which gives you the essence of the stuff. It’s wine, usually red,that is heated, spiced, and sweetened. (The second meaning of “to mull” is “toheat, sweeten, and flavor with spices for drinking, as ale or wine,” which alsocaptures the essence of the stuff. I did not know that definition).

I had my only full cup ofglühwein in Luxembourg. To drink glühwein in Luxembourg, one pays3 euros for the wine and another 2 euro deposit for the mug; I drank mine outof a Christmas shoe shaped mug. Despite the charm, the sticky sweetness was alittle bit too much for me. Some on the internet call glühwein theGerman winter version of sangria, but somehow what I had didn’t work for me thesame way.

The last nice thing about Luxembourg is a shared qualitywith other markets, but significant. Placed in the center, the market serves asa universal meeting point. Anybody can come in, check out the booths, drink a glühwein,and soak in the atmosphere. The center of that center square features a set oftables, so that the main food booths look on each other and people gather underthe glow of those heaters and act merry and cold and like themselves, but thebest part of themselves. I’m not sure Black Friday allows for the samebehavior.

Le Capitalede Noël

The largest decorated Christmas Tree in the world (or so they say).

Last for this tale is the market in Strasbourg. Strasbourg,a French city of 280K residents on the border of Germany, is significant formany things, but those things belong in a different article

The important thing to know here is that Strasbourg is theself-dubbed “Capital of Christmas.” Here I thought I visited the capital of Christmaswhen I went to Bethlehem for Christmas 2008,but no. What right does Strasbourg have to the title of Christmas Capital,trumping Bethlehem’s renown as Jesus’ birthplace? Well, as best as I can tellit rests on three claims, all of dubious veracity.

11. Strasbourg, according toone of my French teachers but not most other people, held the first Christmasmarket. Strasbourg’s market dates to 1570, meaning it’s pretty damn old, but asnoted earlier, probably not the oldest.

22. Strasbourg is thebirthplace of the Sapinde Noël, i.e. the Christmas tree. The Internet renders this debate moreunclear. Some sources say yea, verily, and others claim that the Christmas treewas first added to the end of the year festivities near either Riga or Tallinn.Both claims pin the innovation in the 16^th century, so at leasthalf-credit to this claim so far for Strasbourg.

33. Strasbourg has a reallycool set of Christmas markets and celebrations.

This last claim could only be verified in person. Amy, A. (afriend of ours), and I took a weekend trip to scope out the situation. Wearrived by train on a rainy Friday evening, rented a car, ate dinner, and thenheaded out of the city to our village B&Bs; we got lost, confused in therain, angry at each other, and then eventually inside late enough to wake theproprietors of the inns. Les marchés would be a Saturday thing.

Also part of the promise - Christmas-themed pastries.

On Saturday, we arrived in the city to visit the marketsjust after noon. Strasbourg’s center is called “Grande île”, or the big island.It’s an apt name, as the center is an island surrounded by the Ill River, whichfeeds into the Rhine River a few kilometers farther east. The whole island is aUNESCO World Heritage site, with a grand Cathedrale de Notre Dame its heart.That World Heritage site held at least 9 separate markets (two others are offthe island). This is Strasbourg’s Christmas promise – a series of markets indifferent places and with different themes strewed across the dense citycenter, so that in one day one can experience a full array of Christmas in theheart of Europe.

We started by getting off the tram in the center and walkingto Place Kleber. The market there was unspectacular, but we got a hotchocolate, the initial rush of the crowds and street musicians to be foundeverywhere in the city, and Le Grand Sapin de Noël. Strasbourg claimsthat their Christmas tree is the tallest decorated tree in the world. Whether or not that’s the case, it’s prettygrand, standing there in the middle of Place Kleber, an open square capable ofhosting such a big Christmas tree.

Romance has its downsides.

After the tree, we stopped in an ornate chocolate shop,where the ladies bought gifts. I watched as a two-story, two-horse cart clompedalong a curving street, leaving a string of photographing tourists and, well,horse shit behind them. This throwback transportation guided us to the Place duTemple Neuf, a smaller square that is normally a parking lot, but did well inproviding a couple places for vendors to vend. I did most of gift shoppinghere, but we also tried some chestnut and blueberry jams.

Rue des Hallebards

This prologue led us to the Rue de Hallebards, over whichhung a series of chandeliers enclosed in glass cases. This striking decorationforewarned us of the main attraction of the city one block to the south, theCathedrale. The crowds thronged in 10 person-wide waves spanning the street,cresting in the market at the foot of the crazy Cathedrale, the center of theCapital of Christmas.

Impressively, the crowds and the markets almost obscured thehuge building behind, as the eye naturally fell on the red and brown of thebooths, on the accordion players sitting street level, on the people, thepeople. We wended our way through thecrowds, lost one another, reunited, and then decided to split up, the ladiesone way and I another.

My wandering took me to the south side of the Cathedrale,where Strasbourg had set up their skating rink, less central than the one in Liègebut still popular. I then drifted down to the river, left the markets for alittle bit, strolling through the east side of the Grande Île, but I didn’twander long: the girls sent out the bat signal, too cold to continue shoppingin the marchés and eager to get indoors to some old-fashioned modern stores. Irejoined them, helped them install themselves in a café, one with no room forme, and went back on the walk.

I turned to the western section of the city, knowing awell-touted literary café awaited me in that direction. I walked past thevillage for children, a tent that housed games and activities at the foot ofanother pink sandstone church (pink sandstone the most available buildingmaterial for the city). The waves of crowds thinned and grew less frequent as Ifound the river again and walked along it to the Petite France district. ThereI found the former industrial heart of Strasbourg, set on a few fingers of landin the middle of the river. Restaurants serving endless variety of sauerkrautdishes, as well as a good share of pig knuckle, surrounded a market toutinglocal crafts. I finished my gift shopping here and at another market of localAlsatian flavors around the corner: cognac-flavored egg liquor was my big find.

That ended the daytime Christmas market touring. Thoughtired, burdened by the fruits of our successful day of shopping, and wary ofour half-hour commute to the inn, we still had the night ahead of us. We stillhad the best of the markets to look forward to.

Petite France at night (Market on the right)

I met the girls at the Place Kleber, where we took thenecessary photos of the tree at night. From there, we returned to the PetiteFrance area. Though we didn’t find a prompt, authentic eatery that could satisfyeach of our culinary concerns, we did get to wander about in the cold, throughthe continuing crowds, amidst the glow of the market, and with sips from Amy’scup of Glühwein. While we were stressed and cold and not overly warmedby the wine and the Christmas cheer, it was cute all the same.

After at last finding a grand Thai meal, we drifted back tothe river on our walk to the tram that would take us to our car. Christmasdecorations lit up both banks of the river. The red and yellow and green stoplightglare of Christmas bathed in the pink sandstone tint of the city harmoniously.The river lapped at the bank as we trundled along with our booty, past amorouscouples, families, and groups of students. The relief of a full day’s endwashed over us.

***

Hot wine 'neath the Cathedral. Just as the pope would like, I'm sure.

Our ride home was probably not all that different from onewe would have taken if the three of us had gone shopping in, say, the Mall ofAmerica in A.’s home state of Minnesota. We would have felt the same relief fromfinishing our gift-buying. In either situation we would have had stories totell about the people we saw and the encounters we had. Inevitably, in our corewe would have faced the paradox of feeling good about buying gifts for othersand feeling bad about feeding the consumerist colossus and the endless need formore and more stuff (or maybe that was just me).

Maybe Les marchés de Noël is just a grand gimmick,capitalism disguised as quaint nostalgia and doused in hot wine. Tradition ornot, the idea of the markets is that they are markets; venues to sell products.Many of those products are unnecessary. The Christmas market is just hype.

But then, gimmick or not, the feeling is different. Bringingpeople together, placing them outside, putting them on a map in a locationtogether, removed from the stronger waves of modern advertising, moderntechnology, modern post-modern detachment from the world, this still stands asa difference from the malls and the Walmarts and the consumer is king mentalityof the U.S.

Europe still doesn’t really bring Christmas any closer tothe original idea of celebrating Jesus. I’m not close to becoming a convert tothe Christmas season (nor to Christianity, natch). But if one has to choose totake part in the Christmas season, one can do worse than to go to the markets,and to get outside on the streets, together.

Between the tower and the café - Seeking Balance on a week in Paris

2011-11-07T05:22:00.002-05:00

We took the shorter line to the elevator at the West leg of the Eiffel Tower. I held my umbrella gingerly above our heads, nevertheless poking one or two of the taller gentlemen joining us in line. At the ticket control, we showed our pre-ordered tickets, receiving compliments from the agent for the green paper that served as our tickets’ backing. Within minutes, we crammed into the elevator and climbed to the second floor. And so I was here again, on Monsieur Eiffel’s beautiful monstrosity.

The view from the Trocadero Gardens the day before we climbed

This past week, Amy and I visited Paris for fall break. The week off from school, due to Luxembourg’s observation of All Saints’ Day, provided the perfect opportunity for Amy to visit Paris for the first time. It wasn’t my first time. I had visited thrice in the past five years, and on my one childhood foray to Europe, a two-week trip with family 16 years ago.

On one’s first visit to Paris, or to anywhere really, one is a tourist and must do tourist things, the Eiffel Tower standing above all other items on the tourist list. I visited the Eiffel Tower on my first trip to Paris – one of my strongest memories of that trip is the shame and fear I felt as I tiptoed up the open-air stairs to the second floor while my younger brother raced ahead of me with not a hint of hesitation. I also visited the Eiffel Tower in 2006, on my best friend’s first knowing visit to Paris, and in 2009, while leading a school trip for many high schoolers who had never been to Paris, which made this the fourth time ascending through the metal crosses and bars, with the fourth virgin companion (counting myself the first time).

There are a few ways to explore a city. One can follow the tried and true approach of guide books and tourist sites. One can search for the forgotten corners of a city, those considered out of fashion now. Or one can seek out the new, the untouched, the mythically authentic.

In a world capital like Paris, especially in Paris, the latter approaches are all but ridiculous. In seven days, one can either follow the tried and true or flay themselves in the self-righteousness particular to experienced travelers, those who “refuse to conform” and “blaze their own trail.” I am not above self-flagellation, especially of this nature, but it gets silly, and when there’s the moderating force of a reasonable traveling partner alongside, I find it best to succumb to my inner tourist and push the traveler’s ego aside.

Finding it best doesn’t mean submitting willingly, nor easily. Throughout the week, I tried to find the balance between seeing what must be seen and feeling at least a bit liberated from the standard, from the road well taken. Not (only) to wage a futile battle instead of enjoying a vacation, but to heighten the enjoyment, to enrich it. At least, I tell you that.

Meanwhile, we climbed the second elevator and ascended into the clouds. When looking for novel inspiration, we humans often look skywards. I comforted myself with the idea and took in the cityscape below.

***

Our fundamental circumstances made this a different trip than the previous ones I had taken to Paris. For the first time, I visited Paris as one should, with a lover (considering my “bounteous” history of lovers, I know that’s surprising). For the first time, we visited by train, the TGV regional fast train that made the 230-mile journey from Luxembourg in just over 2 hours. For the first time, we spoke a modicum of French, at least a little bit more than “bonjour,” and “merci.” And for the first time, we stayed in one of the hipper neighborhoods of the city.

La Butte Aux Cailles, Quail Hill, is a small city hill in the 13^th arrondisement (district) of Paris, in the Southeast of the city, near Place d’Italie. The hill, the tallest point in the city according to the “official” website -, actually takes its name from a businessman named Cailles, who bought the hill and set up a vineyard there in the 16^th century. The district became an area of workers and rag collectors (chiffonniers), and then the setting for a major battle in the counterrevolution against the Paris Commune of 1871 (the Commune lost). Until the 1990s, the hill remained a local haunt, insignificant, before at last a mayor of the area decided to build up the bar and leisure scene to welcome the tourists and hipsters. Et, voila, we arrived.

Credit to Monsieur Jacques Bousiquier. I'm not sure what's going on with the pink sky.

A nice article in the New York Times tipped me off to its existence, and shortly after I booked our stay in a hotel there, located right below the Place de la Commune de Paris. Our suspicions that the area was hip were confirmed twofold: first, by the abundance of bars, restaurants, and cute tea salons that we passed each morning and night; secondly, by my friend C., a Frenchman who for me epitomizes young Parisian cool, and who often chooses these bars to visit when he comes into the city from his suburban home.

Of course, Amy and I are far from hip when it comes to our night lifestyle; we would note how the hill buzzed each night around 9 or 10pm as people started to fill the bars, while we like pumpkins returned home to our hotel to go to sleep. For while the neighborhood was a plus on the whole, well located, interesting, and with a hotel that was cheaper than its quality would fetch in the center, it was also not super close to the center, not close enough that we could easily return to the hotel before dinner. With one exception, our days were long affairs, morning till evening of touring and shopping and sitting in cafés, and then at last of dining and returning home, with no interest in joining the buzz. At least we two are compatible in our unhipness, and we enjoyed our hill all the same, and said we’d be glad to live there if we ever move to Paris.

So each night and morning, at least, we shared in a new place.

***

Kids Hanging out in the shadow of the Sacre Coeur's dome

Our touring was long, hard, and fruitful. All the places I wanted to return to or visit for the first time, we reached. I hadn’t been to Montmartre in 16 years, and so gladly climbed up the steps to the Sacre Coeur and walked around the winding roads, re-informed both by Amelie and this fine book on the hill’s beauty, and its artistic and cultural history, respectively. I missed out on the Musée d’Orsay five years ago and hadn’t been since my philistine youth either, and so we made sure to stroll through the Impressionist Gallery and check out the big Toulouse-Latrec paintings. I wanted to visit the Musée de l’Orangerie, home to famous art dealer Paul Guillaume’s collection of 1900-1920 Parisian-milieu paintings, Modigliani and Soutine and all the rest, and we detoured into here after finding a much too long line at the Louvre on Halloween (we did make it to the Louvre three days later).

The last museum was our favorite, or at least mine (Amy waffled on choosing a favorite), of the three. It is most known for its holding of 8 giant paintings by Monet of his beloved water lilies, separated into two rooms of four paintings. While I remembered that as a child, I held Monet’s fascination with his water lilies as the prime example of why art was lame when I argued with my parents about going to museums, I could appreciate his effort to bring stillness to the center of the city (the museum is located on the edge of the Jardin des Tuileries along the right bank, between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre). A temporary exhibit on turn of the 20^th century Spanish painters also suited Amy’s and mine interest perfectly, and we especially appreciated “La Granadina”, a piece by Hermen Anglada-Camarasa.

Human Lily in Contemplation of Water Lily

Modligani's portrait of Guillaume's elegance

Monsieur Guillaume’s collection most excited me, however. Very fine works from my favorite art period included Picasso and Matisse, Renoir and Cezanne, Derain after his fauvist fame, but also Henri Rousseau, Maurice Utrillo, and Chaim Soutine, all well displayed. Amedeo Modigliani, one of my favorite painters, had several paintings represented in Guillaume’s collection. Beyond this joy of old favorites, my happiest discovery was the work of Marie Laurencin, a French woman I knew nothing about before and plan to learn much more about afterward. What better can art, writing, or museums do than inspire new learning?

Chanel 1923, by Laurencin

We also lucked into choosing the right days to go into the museums, weather-wise; Tuesday and Thursday, the worst days Paris threw at us, with rain and wind and a trace of the dismal European gloom that had settled into Luxembourg two weeks before, found us in the Orsay and the Louvre, respectively. The rest of the time, we marveled at the sun, the yellow leaves, and the buzz in the streets. Before we left, I postulated that early November is the time to catch Paris in its most natural element, and this week only confirmed my guess. Not yet plagued the cold of winter, nor the emptiness of August, but instead imbued in the perfect distillation of the grays, browns, and blues that represent the breadth of the city’s palette, tinted now with those yellows and oranges on the trees.

In that color template we took strolls through the Jardin Des Tuileries and the Jardin du Luxembourg, the latter on Sunday morning, as formal and informal groups of tai chi practitioners rotated their hips and arms on the fallen leaves. In the Tuileries, we stopped to watch people feeding seagulls and ducks in the pond, and then the seagulls and ducks fighting like needy children, the seagulls louder and more insecure, in larger packs; the ducks more centered, zen even, focused on beating the seagulls back only as a means to food, and not an assertion of ego or pride.

Those Jardins gave us the necessary space and contemplation to brave the human maze beneath the pyramid in the Louvre, or the bustle of the Champs des Elysees, if not for long, and to squeeze into the Arc de Triomphe and the Notre Dame. We climbed neither of the heights in those two sites, nor the dome of the Sacre Coeur, glad just to register and check the sites off our list. And on our last day, Friday, after checking off most of our sights, we took the clichéd but still worthwhile boat cruise, receiving a nice summary of all the places we had been along the Seine. Plus, the guide had an amusing bit going in both French and English, which can be fun for an hour.

All these things on our list were necessities, unavoidable for any tourist coming to Paris. We didn’t avoid them. We tried to do them smartly, I guess, but we went to all these things. To take the long view, going through all these tourist sites, we ran the baptismal gauntlet, the initiation process that will allow us to be mere visitors next time we go to Paris, and not tourists. I did score one major victory on this front, at least: we did not attend the Moulin Rouge. The once and present cabaret, now home to a tacky Vegas-style revue (www.moulinrouge.fr) along the red-light district street bordering Montmartre, gave off an aura of tackiness and gaudy crudity, such that Amy decided she didn’t need to shell out 100 euros for the show. A big relief.

Enough madness in Montmartre for us

***


About to explore the Latin Quarter. Reading as ever. It gets irritating sometimes.

Outside of the touring though, we explored Paris as well as one can on foot over seven days. Amy and I unveiled our patented travel strategy, tested in smaller cities (and not really when we visited New York this summer, because we were busy and only there for 4.5 days), and lo, it worked wonders in Paris! Or maybe not wonders, but we got to see a lot of the city, just the way each of us likes to see a new place.

To wit: on four different days, after blundering around under my guidance towards or through a neighborhood, sometimes eating lunch, one day gawking at the Pompidou (Amy hated it), we found a café. Once settled in the café, respective bladders empty, we went about our tasks: Amy went out shopping, while I sat there and read, wrote, and studied French, meanwhile sipping tea. So we settled into Montmartre on our first full day, I nestled in the corner of a café near the Place des Abbesses, as the radio played cheesy French pop songs, while Amy explored the artsy boutiques and shops, picking out a new purple coat for winter. So again in the Latin Quarter, me first at the relatively corporate Malongo and then the neighborhood El Balto, where I enjoyed the soft indie-sounding music and the cute bartender, as well as the eclectic gathering of customers, while Amy held long conversations with clerks in luxury boutiques about their lives to date, and also bought clothes.

Brass band clearing the street on Ile de St. Louis

We explored Le Marais and Île de St. Louis this way, areas I hadn’t been to before. The former, part of the broader Bastille district, houses the Jewish quarter and a number of intriguing alleys and shops. The latter is the island behind the Notre Dame and boasts a great collection of mansions and private homes, but also a long street for shopping that, due to the high buildings on each side of it, does at least somewhat feel separate from the rest of the city. There I found a salon de thé called La Charlotte de l’Île. The woman behind the bar was actually behind a bar of keys, plucking out a beautiful etude on a piano. The two customers, a middle-aged man and a girl my age, chatted, she talking about how this was her only day in Paris, he about how he hated American coffee. I sat in a corner opposite totem-like pieces of art on the wall, unpacked my backpack, and got to work, while Amy put a bow upon her shopping efforts, buying gifts for friends and family, and for herself too.

La Charlotte's Wall

***

While that sort of traveling wasn’t explicitly “Parisian”, we made sure that our culinary experience was authentic. Or rather, I made sure. Amy’s taste is not for the heaviness of French food, and so we catered to that some nights – Thai, Mexican, Moroccan, and macrobiotic veggie restaurants all appeared on our dinner docket, and Amy found fish two other nights.

But, as stated, I ensured that at least one of us tasted the best French cuisine had to offer. Twice I ate steak tartar - raw beef, essentially, served looking like an uncooked burger but tarted up with onions, capers, and other spices on these two versions that I hadn’t had before, making this the best steak tartar I ever ate; I had French onion soup several times; a croque madame and a croque monsieur once each (elegant ham and cheese sandwiches, the first one with an egg on top); we both ate crepes twice, once for dinner dessert, once for lunch; one day for lunch I ate rabbit; and the coup de grace, as it was, the best meal of the trip for me, was the foie gras/pot au feu combination, or in other words, goose liver paste and then a beef stew. This eaten on our second to last night, in a restaurant called Le Tresor, the Treasure, in Le Marais. Something about the way the fig marmalade offset the sticky texture of the bitter paste, how it all melted in my mouth, how it all revolted Amy on three different levels, made for a delightful Parisan meal.

I'm not sure what part of that could gross anyone out. Mmmm.

***

There’s a lot I love about traveling, much of which was covered on this trip. I love planning for trips. I love taking the train. I love seeing new places. I love feeling like a foreigner, and I love blending in to the anonymous crowd at the same time. All these things, and those covered above, the food, the sites, the exploration, all are part and parcel of getting on the road.

But I also love that feeling of displacement, that mentality that one must adopt to travel. The feeling of not being where one belongs. This displacement opens one up to see ordinary things as extraordinary, to regain an awareness of the world’s strangeness. Standing back from the fishbowl of everyday life, the traveler can glimpse the little things that add up to make life whatever life is, in all its weirdness and tragedy and joy and glory.

These little things, they appear in moments, in encounters, in quiet spaces. We found the moments most when eating, where our most direct contact with others came. In the macrobiotic restaurant, we sat in tight quarters next to an American and his French female companion. He had white hair stretching back into a pony tail and down into a full facial beard, and he stretched his conversation to talk about his political views, favorite French directors, traveling itineraries, ex-girlfriends’ tattoos, and down into the finest detail. His companion took it all in far more grace than we managed to, I starting to break out laughing right towards the end of dinner as he pulled out series of magazines he brought with him when he traveled to show her.

Or there was Halloween night. Dia de los Muertos, as we went to a Mexican restaurant recommended by our Mexican-American friend in Luxembourg. Both of us were somewhat sick, each in our own way, and the Mexican disappointed. What didn’t disappoint was the performance of the two girls sitting behind me. Young girls, about my age, Mexicans, clearly good friends, they spent the whole dinner looking at their phones. Texting, checking email, updating facebook, I don’t know. If there’s a set of circumstances that sums up the world we, Amy and I, live in, it’s sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Paris, feeling ill, while two Mexican girls living in Paris spend their whole dinner on their phones. Sigh.

Not all of these moments were happy ones. As we went to cross Place de St. Michel, we heard a thud and then saw a man fall down on the sidewalk. A bus stopped in front of him. We missed the collision, but it appeared that the man walked into the bus which had tried to run the light. There was no Jordan Baker around to explain what happens when two careless people crossed paths. Anyway, we stood and watched and wondered while others attended to the man, who appeared to have suffered a blow but was moving all his hands and legs, and with no signs of bleeding. We crossed the streets with much greater caution for the rest of the week.

But then there are moments of silly confusion, rather than the grim sort. The group of elderly Italians in the metro station who couldn’t figure out the tickets, and so we spoke broken Italian to them, they spoke broken French and English to us, and finally, unable to find a complete Italian sentence beneath my French, I showed them that the ticket machine actually worked in Italiano. “Bravo!” said a joyous man in the group, and he cupped my right cheek in gratitude. The cheek glowed in warmth for the rest of our metro ride.

Or like the middle-aged American who came on to Amy at the Musee d’Orsay.
“Vous etes Parisienne?” he asked.
“Non, je suis Americaine,” she responded with a smile. I walked back over to her at this point. He saw me, broke into a grin, and said, “Oh, me too. You know, I picked the wrong person, but gotta practice that French.” We encouraged him to keep working on the French.

Really though, when I talk about moments, I don’t mean any of this. I mean the opening into a peace of mind, into a harmony with the breath and with the air around, a quiet space. Many people find their quiet space through spirituality, or through rural towns, or through nature.

For example, a slice of nature in the middle of the Seine

I am fond of those things. I can appreciate those things, and include them in my life. For me, however, the quiet space is to be found in a city, among the convenience, the noxiousness, the bustle, the rush, the bums, the haughty elitists, the overpriced stores, the touristy areas and the undiscovered nooks, but the agglomerations of people and buildings and stuff all in a smaller, denser area. The moments come for me when I can find space amidst that area.

The moment came on Thursday night, in the steady rain. I stood outside, under an umbrella, while Amy made a last purchase for the night, of pharmaceutical products hard to find in other places. Darkness had long set in, the glow of streetlights filtered by that rain, lending a fuzzier, more romantic lens to the evening.

I stood across the street from a church. We were in Le Marais, and an orthodox Jew in his wide-brimmed black hat walked by me, buzzed or tapped in a code, and entered a building to the right of the store. Shortly after, the church bells started, ushering in 7:00pm. I was across from one church, but one or two others were in earshot, and their clocks were not perfectly synchronized. One chime from one church chased the chime from another, and soon the two or three separate bells chased each other, unclear which was leading and which following. The chase lasted for a minute, bells falling on one another like the rain on my umbrella. And then the silence returned, or rather, the buzz of the city preparing for dinner and a lively night. The moment settled on me. Amy then came out the store, and we went off to dinner.

***

View from Montmartre

But I can’t end without finishing off with the Tour de Eiffel. The Eiffel Tower, a ridiculous structure, built only to perpetuate its own glory and that of its city. A ugly metallic phallus pointed upwards to nowhere, an eyesore, a cliché, an irrelevancy.

Or else the Eiffel Tower, a brilliant piece of work, a shining example of constructed meaning, literally. The Eiffel came to serve a purpose as a broadcast tower, which is why it outlived its original 20-year life span. But it also served its own purpose, as the current centerpiece of the city, its most famous structure, and the guiding light to all visitors of Paris, at least.

One can’t escape the Eiffel Tower. There it is looming from the window of the Louvre, or the Musee d’Orsay. Here we see it around the corner from the Sacre Coeur. There it is from the boat, of course, the last stop before the cruise returns eastward. The Arc de Triomphe now serves as a prime lookout to see the Eiffel. The Trocadero Gardens unroll perfectly at the Tower’s feet. Everywhere you go, there you are, in the Eiffel Tower’s shadow.

So we didn’t escape the Eiffel Tower, but submitted to it as wisely as we could. We came with preordered tickets, printed on that lauded green paper. The positive side to preordering was that our line wait was much shorter. The negative side was that our date was fixed, and we picked the worst one, Tuesday, where the weather was perfect to visit the Musee d’Orsay, but not to see the city.

Things looked grim, or dim, actually, from the second floor. Through the fog we could barely make out the Arc de Triomphe, we could just catch the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides below, we couldn’t find the Notre Dame, and the Sacre Coeur blended in with the white around it. Rain fell on us as we stood out on the edge to get our photo taken, and again sideways as we waited in line for the summit elevator.

The soupy fog - can you see what's behind it, just visible?

I hoped that we might somehow rise above the clouds when we reached the top, but I obviously did not take any meteorology classes in college. The cloud was thicker from the summit, so that we had to strain to regain what we had seen 500 feet below. We took one quick tour around the top of the tour, had enough, and did our best to descend as quickly as I could.

I apologized to Amy for not checking the weather before booking our tickets, even though I booked about a week before. “It’s ok, we didn’t have to see everything,” she said. “The rain’s kind of nice, anyway.” I smiled, relieved that at least this, the one major duty of our stay, wasn’t a failure with the audience that mattered. (And I tested her feelings on the rain by leading us to walk to the Orsay, about a half-hour trip.)

I also smiled because I thought about the next time we would have to deal with the Eiffel Tower. Probably, it will be when Amy’s family comes to visit next summer (right guys?). In any case, I will be more than capable of buying them the tickets online in advance. And Amy will be more than capable of leading them up to the top. After four times, I think I’m well through with the damn thing for a while.

Soft Silly Music: Meaningful or Magical? Beauty and Narrative at a Jeff Mangum show

2011-09-17T10:51:00.002-04:00

The crowd kept clapping. Minutes after the encore, a lesser-known b-side from the artist that many fans didn’t recognize, the crowd’s needs persisted. 1,500 people, more or less united as one, stood and clapped and whistled and yelled, their rhythm fluctuating between cacophony and a focused monorhythm of quickening beats. The house lights were up. Their cause felt slated for sure disappointment; once the house lights go up, it’s over.

Five minutes into the ovation, I had already left my second floor seat. Ostensibly in the states for the wedding of a friend from high school, I texted Ben, who was waiting for me in Harvard Square to begin the 90-minute drive to the house on the Cape where we and our friends were staying. I told him that I would surely be there in a couple minutes, that the crowd would give up.

All the same, I ducked into the first floor, in the hall behind the seats. This was not an unsavvy crowd; they knew how unlikely they were to prevail against the Rule of the House Lights. They kept on anyway. Maybe it’s because the show was in and of itself so unlikely, one that for years none of us imagined would ever happen. Jeff Mangum had played for us that night, giving us 13 songs from the two albums that made up the Neutral Milk Hotel discography, and then he played us “Engine,” the aforementioned B-side. On the one hand, we could not ask for anymore; on the other hand, if we’d reached this far, how could we stop before reaching our limit, before finding if we could get one real encore out of the beloved, prodigal musician? The crowd, as such, kept clapping.

And then I had occasion to amend my previous text message, the one stating that you should always take the house lights against the crowd. I wrote, “except this time.” Mangum had returned to play. Again.

***

Those familiar with Jeff Mangum – those who can identify him by name, without his band attached to it – probably already understand the hoopla, and understand how the announcement of his concert was what pushed me to fly over the Atlantic Ocean for the weekend rather than anything else. For those who don’t, a brief explanation:

Jeff Mangum is an American musician, probably close to the age of 40 if not there yet, who wrote and performed music in the 1990s. A member of the amorphous Elephant 6 collective – essentially a group of friends, many of them from Ruston, LA, who lived in Athens, GA and played music together in a variety of bands and songwriting vehicles, eventually garnering notoriety and popularity on a national scale, though I can’t really say how great that scale was at the time. The collective became known for making great music in a generally throwback manner, with nods to 60s pop, the Beach Boys Pet Sounds, that sort of thing. The three most well-known groups or artists from the Elephant 6 collective, I believe, were Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Each project had a Ruston native at its core – The Apples, still active, revolved around Robert Schneider in making their 60’s inspired power pop; Olivia Tremor Control, who have in the past couple years started playing shows again and even recorded a new song, had Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss at the center of their psychedelic pop masterpieces; and Neutral Milk Hotel was the name of Mangum’s longtime project.

If the Apples made the easiest to understand music of the original E6 group, and if Olivia Tremor Control tossed off two records consisting of brilliant pop but also long tracks of tape loops and “experiments,” (and if, for that matter, the younger affiliate Of Montreal actually found the most success in their second, post-2004 recording period), Neutral Milk Hotel are probably the most loved of the E6 bands. I have little grounds for affirming this beyond internet browsing and sharing a love of NMH with friends in college and through 30music, but it is the only band in the group to be enshrined into the 33 1/3 canon, which stands as at least one strong piece of evidence (Kim Cooper’s fabulously reported book serves as the major source for the info in this article, by the by).

In any case, the short story goes that Mangum made two full length albums. The first, On Avery Island, was essentially a solo record that Schneider produced and a bunch of other people played on as necessary. The second, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is the one everybody remembers, featuring a full four-piece band (Mangum on guitar and vocals, Scott Spillane on trumpet, Jeremy Barnes on drums, Julian Koster on just about everything else). After that album, released in February 1998, the band toured for much of the year, and then Mangum didn’t want to do it anymore. He stopped playing shows, broke up the band, disappeared from the indie scene, and didn’t do much publicly for about a decade. Then he started making random appearances at his friends’ shows (including the Olivia Tremor Control reunion shows), and then he played a random show in Brooklyn last winter, and finally this year it was announced he would play a few shows on the east coast and a festival in England. That catches you up as far as the quick and dirty goes.

As for my attendance, the story is as follows: upon learning about the shows, I first thought about going to the festival (I’m still considering it), but then realized that his dates in the Boston area coincided with the wedding I was invited to. And since it would have been impractical to go to Boston on a Saturday night when I was meant to be in Harwich, I fixed my eyes on making the show at Sanders Theater on a Friday night.

This was the first show I have ever gone to that involved buying tickets immediately, on the day of. Never have I had to deal with the frustrating process of queuing up online and calling repeatedly in hopes of getting through for one or two seats. I tried on a Thursday when pre-ticket sales were supposedly on sale, but they “sold out” in minutes. The next day, I geared up for the gates to open, clicked and clicked and called and called, varying between requesting one or two seats (in case I could find an interested +1), despairing that despite total preparation, I would be left in the cold. So long to the wedding as well, I thought, it wouldn’t be worth the $700 flight.

And then, at last, I got through. One seat, in the balcony, for September 9th, 2011, at Sanders Theater in Cambridge, MA. I had my ticket to see Jeff Mangum.

***

Whether instituted at Mangum’s suggestion, by Wordless Music, or by the Sanders Theater management, the controls on the tickets were stricter than for normal shows. Due to great concern about scalping, ticket holders, all of whom had to pick up at will call, were required not only to show ID but a print out of their ticket receipt or confirmation. I was not alone in not reading the fine print on the email detailing the process we ticket holders got the week before. I thought perhaps to tell the uptight dude running said process that we lived in 2011 and not 2004; he might have easily countered that most people have a smart phone in 2011, which could have shown the confirmation as well. Foiled in my mind, I found a Staples, printed out my ticket confirmation, and returned armed for music.

Sanders Theater, home to Memorial Hall, is a church-like building on the western edge of Harvard’s campus. Brick and stately, with busts of significant people on each side, and a tall-roofed hall that held 1,500 people, mostly in wooden benches, it’s a theater my grandmother comes often with her Russian-language community of elderly folks to see classical performances. The theater was the perfect setting for Mangum to play; it could have been the source of the images depicted on NMH posters like what they were selling at the show, with old-fashioned victrolas and society dames in the balcony and the general love of old and lost that in this scene, in the hall of Sanders Theater before Mangum’s 6th official show of his return, almost felt pornographically kitschy and attuned to the NMH aesthetic. What I mostly mean to say, though, is that Sanders Theater was a good place to see this performance.

I began milling around the building just after 7, waiting for doors to open at 7:30 – concert literature boasted of a prompt 8:00pm start. Also, seeing as I had pre-wedding buffoonery to join as soon as possible on the Cape, I thought I could help encourage an on-time start by setting the example and arriving in my seat early. Outside, a small crowd walked around the grassy plot in front of the building. A few stray fans walked around either asking if someone needed a ticket or, more commonly, if someone was selling a ticket. Hanging to our north was a soon to be full moon, not shining in the late daylight but nevertheless impressive, ominous. Amongst the crowd I saw a larger percentage of flannel shirts worn than I’ve seen since middle school, probably – whether the guys sporting the checkered look did it as a conscious homage to Mangum’s preferred form of outerwear or because that’s just how they roll, I quietly thanked the universe that my girlfriend’s taste do not include that style.

The doors opened at 7:30, I entered, found my seat, and began reading. Slowly, the hall filled with spectators, and by the time the show unpromptly began at 8:17pm, it was about two-thirds full, and a diverse mix – the tattooed, dads with their sons (I wonder who dragged whom to the show), college bros, and indie types like the couple next to me who spoke of not wanting to seem all “anti lo-fi” but really preferring the earlier Mountain Goats records. Of course, diverse in a relative sense; most of the crowd appeared to be middle-class white, with a few Asian, Latino, and other minorities breaking up the monochromaticity. The gender divide was fairly even however, which for a nominally “indie rock” show speaks of Neutral Milk Hotel’s broad appeal. In the background, the sound system piped in recordings of chanting that sounded African, Asian, or in between (i.e. Arabic).

The gentleman running Wordless Music, a man possibly so excited by the monumental nature of this show that he awkwardly quizzed people about whether they were coming or going in the ticket collection process, appeared to applause and introduced the show. He explained why photos and recording devices were barred; not just, as I guessed, because Mangum might have asked for this restriction but because, as I realized when he said it, it’s really annoying when everybody is recording the show and taking pictures with the phone and everything else. When we live through our handheld devices, we’re not living as much, and a live performance from Jeff Mangum was a place deserving of living as much as anything else.

Without further ado, a classical string quartet going by Acme came on. Four girls dressed casually in jeans and what not, they sat and played three pieces by Erik Satie that I noted only for the long bowstrokes that featured heavily, in the first two pieces especially. Meanwhile, the crowd seeped in during the 3rd piece and grew closer to capacity. The new arrivals, ignoring restrictions, used technology rampantly; at least, one guy in the row in front of me posted “Jeff Mangum” on his facebook status. Inescapable.

Similarly inescapable was the last song of Acme’s set, a 20-minute or so rendition of a Gavin Bryars piece called, “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” Over a tape loop of an English homeless man singing the titular refrain a few times, Acme gradually built up an elaborate backing, took over the lead melodic role, and then faded into support and then nothingness. Interesting conceptually, the piece wore out the patience of the crowd, at least based on my section and some comments I saw on a web board afterward.

The song and the set ended around 9:00pm. A few last stragglers joined the crowd, a few others stepped out for a cigarette, a breath of fresh air, or, paradoxically, both. I’d be lying if I said there was a great tension in the crowd, necessarily, but I certainly felt eager, and as the break extended to 15 minutes and then 20, that excitement surely built in other parts of the now-packed hall. At about 9:20pm, a fan in the balcony whistled loudly, exhortatively.

On cue, the house lights dimmed. Seconds later, Jeff Mangum, clad in trademark flannel, emerged from the back of the stage, sat down in a chair between four guitars and two microphones, picked up the guitar, and began to strum In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’s epic centerpiece, “Oh Comely.”

***

As a person with spiritual aspirations but an overly rational mind, I allow myself very few speculations about life “finding” me in any ineffable way. One of those speculations regards music. I believe that in my life music has frequently entered at just the right moment, just the time when I was ready for it. I’m aware that as I tout my examples they could be easily ripped apart as spurious, but all the same, I have a feeling of serendipity regarding the music in my life.

The first example was finally getting into Saves the Day and the rest of the brand of emo my friends listened to in high school not long after my first and only high school break up. This example becomes all the more laughable when you consider I dated the girl for, really, three weeks, and that I had no real excuse for feeling so sad, just as most high school boys from upper-middle class backgrounds who listened to emo had no real excuse for feeling so sad, but there it was. Similarly, Nirvana, The Beatles, and Dylan hit me in college at all the right points, when I was finally ready for them. I remember listening to Blonde on Blonde for the first time on a Delta/Song Airlines flight home from Fort Lauderdale after wrecking my engine of the first car I ever owned by driving it for 5.5K miles and 8-9 months without ever getting the oil changed. Go ahead and tell me that wasn’t an appropriate time to hear about everybody getting stoned.

Few records found me at a more appropriate time than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I’m not sure how long I had heard about it before I received it, or when it first came on my radar; between hearing of Of Montreal in early 2004 as the first aural introduction to Elephant 6, listening to Pet Sounds in May of 2004 for the first time and knowing that Brian Wilson was a big influence on E6, and maybe falling in love with Saturday Looks Good to Me’s Every Night over the summer of 2004, a band All Music Guide shamelessly linked to NMH (shamelessly because there’s not much relation between the two, but AMG, personal friends of Fred Thomas, SLGTM’s front man, have supported him in every way possible, which is great by the way), as well as writing for 30music where a few people touted the album as indeed worth it, I became aware that I needed to try it out. Still, I was skeptical; besides not wanting to join the proverbial gang, I thought about the new comic someone had designed for 30music with a girl protesting that she was into NMH before everybody knew them, the joke being that everybody knew them already.

Without directly resisting or seeking out the album, I skated by until mid-September 2004. Home for my mother’s funeral, delayed by the unfortunate timing of Rosh Hashanah that year and the unavailability of a rabbi, I was on my AIM at the kitchen table in my dad’s house when one of the writers for 30music, a girl named Marisha, started talking to me. I’m sure I didn’t tell her about what was going on, being as I only knew her through online correspondence and not all that well but, perhaps because I had requested it from her earlier or, more likely, she told me she would send it to me at some earlier time, she sent me In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Again, those who have heard the album understand why it was appropriate at that time. Simple harmonically and melodically, but with a grab bag of weird and interesting sounds (accordions, singing saws, horns, fuzz on the guitars, and so on), the album had the immediate hooks to draw me in to its songs and its lyrics, which in their classic melodies and vivid themes spoke to the heart, to beauty and sadness and joy and pain and revelry and exhaustion. In large part inspired by reading Anne Frank’s diary, Mangum concocted a gritty and sparkling tribute to music and life, revolving around nine basic songs and two instrumental interludes. It was a song cycle, with two pairs of tracks explicitly tied together, a series of intersecting lyrical themes, and very basic chord changes. Weird and at the same time immediately accessible, direct and loud and soft and naked, always honest, the album creates its listening audience, such that almost anybody who is thoughtful and patient enough to put it on two or three times will fall in love with it.

Clearly, it didn’t take me long to join the NMH orthodoxy. Still a newcomer to the guitar, I learned almost all of the songs on the album. The first two tracks are in F; 3, 4, 6, and 8 are in G; 11 in G#; 9 in E; 5 and 10 instrumentals; and I never learned 7. Also, just about the only thing Mangum does with his chord structure out of the norm is to make the 3 or the 6 chord major instead of minor; he plays a B major instead of minor on track 4, “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1”; a C major instead of minor on track 11, “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2”; and a E major instead of minor on “Oh Comely”. In the spring of 2005, I performed an open mic on my college campus where I played a song I wrote about my mom and covered “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1,” enjoying the rickety liberation that Mangum’s vocal encouraged me to sing with.

***

Mangum began this show, as mentioned, with “Oh Comely”, that E major to C major progression that, in its dissonance, sounds significantly sadder and more weighty than it would if he just stuck with the E minor (these chords, reversed, are how the Kinks get the shimmering effect on the initial strum of “Lola”). The crowd, unsure what Mangum’s tone would be on the night and afraid to spoil anything, stayed silent as he boomed through the 8-minute song, humming the horn parts that enter in the last section of the song, and then ending the song suddenly, without the ritardando of the album version. The crowd erupted, Mangum thanked them, and settled in for the night.

In terms of a concert, it was pretty straightforward. I’ll post the set list below, but it mostly conformed to expectations – every major In the Aeroplane… song was played, as were the best cuts off On Avery Island: “Song Against Sex” especially, but also “Naomi,” “Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone,” and “Baby For Pree/Where You’ll Find Me Now.” Mangum played a Roky Erickson cover that he had played at previous shows on this tour, a simple lyric about love that fit in well.

Mangum also had an easy grip of the crowd. He changed a lyric in “Naomi” to refer to Cambridge and then, almost like a nervous newcomer on the scene, asked if the crowd heard the reference. He invited everybody to sing along to “In the Aeroplane over the Sea”, and then again on the last verse of “Ghost.” I never sing along at shows, a habit I must have gleaned from reading some clever bastard’s writing about why it’s lame to sing at shows instead of listening to the artist – I don’t claim originality – and while that’s a fair point for many shows, this one had the feeling of a reunion between Mangum and his fans, of a community; I joined in on “Ghost”, and later on “Holland, 1945,” and I felt the chill of union with others washing over me as I sang about the girl falling from 14 stories high.

The communal aspect played a huge role in this concert, which was as much a gathering as an artistic performance. The crowd reminded me of two other concerts I’ve been to: the first is a Jonathan Richman show I went to earlier this year, whose crowd was similar to this in their eagerness to lap up everything the performer said and then encourage him to come up with more. Some in the crowd shouted for “Little Birds”, a song mentioned in Cooper’s book as a dark, harrowing, disturbing song, the only post-In the Aeroplane… song Mangum has performed in public, and that only once 12-13 years ago. This knowledge of the artist corresponded with folks at the JR show who knew Richman’s trademark leg kick dance by heart and hoped to see it come out every other song.

The other show it reminded me of was a Cat Power show in Greensboro the summer of 2006, shortly after she had declared her sobriety, and just before she hit into the fullest boom of her career, it seems, in performing cover songs with sultry Southern swagger. There she stopped many of her songs in the middle out of frustration with the sound in the monitors, shared the news about her sobriety to great cheers, and finally ended the set only to light a cigarette and hold an impromptu Q&A. There as at the Mangum show, the crowd understood that they were dealing with a delicate artist, and so coaxed her along, supporting her at every stumble and wobble, hoping she could ride that bike on her own and amaze us with her talents therein.

This eager support did indeed coax some singular moments out of the shared Mangum/Sanders Theater crowd performance. During “Baby for Pree/Where You’ll Find Me Now,” the sound system cut off, and Mangum, losing the sound in the monitors, stood up and walked to the front of the stage without breaking his rhythm, sitting down and continuing to play, his booming voice still reaching us in the nosebleeds, everybody leaning on the edge of their seat to join in the intimacy. In an interlude between songs a few minutes later, somebody from the balcony shouted, “Now I can die happy!”, leading to a funny exchange where Mangum thanked the guy without knowing what he said, then finally nodded his understanding and said he could die happy too, to great cheers. Finally, before his last pre-encore song, as the shouts for “Little Birds” and “Communist Daughter” and others, he interrupted to ask, “Ok, do you guys want to sing Holland now?” For all the stories of damaged genius and reluctant performer, Mangum had a fair share of self-awareness and detachment about the show.

***

Anybody who’s made it this far is more than forgiven for wondering what the big deal is, then. If Mangum played songs not as a crazy savant but as a normal, centered man, if the crowd enjoyed it and supported it, isn’t that enough? Can’t we just go home happy? Can’t I just die happy without writing all of this?

There’s still something to explore. There’s the issue of the museum and the battle between narrative and beauty.

In another 33 1/3 book, one about the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society album, Andy Miller writes about the fifth track, “Last of the Steam-Powered Trains.” The whole song is a joke on the Kinks still playing R&B, and on a deeper level about, as Miller writes, “How do you reconcile your past and present?” The lyric talks about the last rebel, locked up in a museum, and Miller later compares that quixotic lyric to the Kinks’ fate, especially regarding this album, a failure at the time but enshrined in the museum of rock after the fact.

Attending any rock show, especially for non-social people like myself, is something of a strange phenomenon. Often, shows are just live performances of what you can hear on the album from the comfort of your home. It’s a vehicle for supporting the museum artifacts that are modern musicians, but unless the band itself is notorious for putting on a great or special show, there is often little extra benefit to the spectator beyond the social experience and that feeling of altruism.

Further, any reunion or comeback tour becomes immediately an exercise in nostalgia. Especially the first time around, no one wants to hear anything new. So an older band or artist is reviving material from 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, playing it in a new context, but also owing great fidelity to the original. The spontaneity and improvisation that often serves as the key selling point of a live performance is not only unlikely but not desired in this case. Which leads us to narrative and beauty.

Before Jeff Mangum returned from his self-imposed hiatus to appear at shows again and then play them on his own, he existed as a narrative for his fans. We watch sports and consume art, I’d argue, for two main reasons: narrative and beauty (in sports there’s also identification, a cruder if more essential concept that, for this essay, I’m not interested in). Sports, for example, offers endless narrative, as various plot lines are shaped, erased, altered, changed, renewed, and grafted on to men hitting, throwing, or bouncing a ball at or past one another. These narratives are largely meaningless, and also rather arbitrary, but they are enjoyable, and life too is largely meaningless and arbitrary when we dare think about it.

On the beauty side of the occasion, sports suffer compared to art. In all my years of passionate and then casual fandom, I can think of only one athlete I witnessed in person who consistently performed beautifully: Pedro Martinez, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox during my high school and college years, time of my passionate fandom. Otherwise, due to us taking for granted the unbelievable athleticism of modern athletes, and the competition level that somehow renders most athletes on an equal plane with one another, I haven’t witnessed anybody else at that level.

Art, of course, provides a great deal of beauty, as well as a great deal of thought into how we live our lives and what it’s all about. On the macro scale, however, art rarely provides us with easy narrative. Everybody is accessible in our time, on facebook and twitter and all the rest of it, and it becomes hard to idolize or glorify artists, never mind construct back stories about them. I’ve been lucky enough, through my time with 30music, to meet a lot of my favorite musicians, and I understand that they’re just normal men and women who are good at music and who have gone on their own path, not heroes or idols or anything else. I could make a narrative up about them, but it wouldn’t be any more special than making up a narrative about you, or about the guy who records their sound, or who serves the drink, or anyone else.

That said, Mangum offered us one of the few time-tested narratives in art: that of the damaged artist who burned out rather than fade away. He became the Internet Age’s Salinger, its Cobain, its Greta Garbo, a feat all the harder because it’s the Internet Age, where no one can disappear and none are forgotten. A myth rose around him, a sense that in some way He was not like us, whether for ill or for good or, as it is with most chosen ones, for both.

Which of course is in some way ridiculous, as most narratives are when deconstructed. Mangum wrote a couple great records, went on tour, got tired, and stopped playing and talking to people in public. It wasn’t really that big of a deal. When pulling out that 33 1/3 book about In the Aeroplane…, I was surprised to see it was written in 2005. Of course, I must have read it as soon as it came out. In 2005, Mangum had been gone for seven years. Seven years, when observed from a few steps back, should hardly be long enough to build up a legend, no matter how good the album was. And yet, the rumor mill had long been churning, with brief reports flaring against the dark backdrop of mystery enveloping Mangum, a Pitchfork interview and the quest to find him from Creative Loafing most notable. Never mind that Mangum made it reasonably clear, as much as he could, that he just didn’t want to play music anymore, for reasons that included the grind of being a popular touring musician, sadness and depression over his friends’ continued suffering despite his own success, his desire to remain himself at a time when people overreacted to the depth of his music, and just because he didn’t want to play anymore. It sounds strange for him to stop doing what he loved to do, but it also makes sense for his mood to change, if we allow people freedom to decide the course of their own life. Mangum obviously either had that innate sense of freedom or acquired it through the success or struggle that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’s reception brought him. He changed.

Then why come back? What changed between 2003, say, and now? Did he need the money (unlikely)? Did he just finally realize how much people out there cared about him as a musician and as a person? Did he just get over it? We as consumers of culture and as thinkers and as people also have the freedom to come up with our answer to that first question.

For example, I constructed a narrative that makes sense to me – Mangum hit on a raw nerve with In the Aeroplane…, both with listeners and himself. Cooper often posits that Mangum may have “channeled” his songs rather than write them, and while the idea comes off as overly hippie-dippy, there is something to it: many of Mangum’s melodies are simple and effective in a way that makes them appear timeless, more discovered than written – a more common example of the eternal melody that blends into what came before and yet stands out on its own is Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Neutral Milk Hotel songs have that feeling. “Two-headed Boy Pt. 2” would sound brilliant covered by a professional church-type choir, especially the last bridge, the “When we break, we all wait for our miracle,” section, where a perfect harmony/counter-melody offers itself a register above the main melody.

So there’s something fully-formed about the songs on this album, eternal. The lyrics trade in ugliness, death, rebirth, pain, joy, and similar weighty themes. For this reason, the album becomes a hit with everyone who really listens to it. Those listeners react to it in a deep way, and expect something out of Mangum. Mangum meanwhile has to perform these songs over and over, songs that came out of a personal lode of creativity but also emotion and energy; he tapped into a source inside himself that maybe was hidden, maybe was painful to reach, maybe opened up other difficult thoughts and flows. Performing these things might have challenged Mangum, might have physically or emotionally or spiritually have hurt him and drained him night after night. Add that to his new obligations to the press and his fans, and to his disappointment upon coming home and seeing others don’t have it the way he does, and we can imagine the beginnings of his funk.

From there, it’s not a huge step to the end of the funk. Love and support from those dear to him; understanding (which he flexed several times in this concert) that his songs are loved and he is loved as well by strangers out there; and time and distance that allows him to process the energy released in writing these songs, to detach himself from the creative process and to wholly embrace these songs as now formed entities, as something he can perform for others without giving a piece of himself from that dark place, and all of a sudden playing music for strangers doesn’t become as hard.

That’s my theory, at least. Like most plausible narratives about other human beings, especially strangers, people we can’t really imagine or know beyond superficial levels, it’s probably total bullshit. Just like Mangum’s level-headed control of the crowd ruined every narrative of damaged genius. That’s the thing about narratives about people: they’re highly contingent on facts we don’t know and feelings that often change, and memory besides.

Which leaves us with beauty. On a night where all we wanted was the museum versions of the song, where the early bootlegs from a Mangum comeback show suggested he was playing his songs straight up, with little nuance compared to the album versions except some added sweetness in his voice, where we all knew what we were getting, and where the chance of improvisation and narrative spectacle was minimal, all we were left with was beauty. Which may be the ultimate reason Mangum came back: to perform his songs that many of us find beautiful, to allow us to reconnect to songs we’ve heard so many times we know them front and back, to hear them for the first time live (I assume), to join a community for an hour and unite in something bigger than ourselves. In something beautiful.

***

“Except this time,” I texted to Ben, as Mangum reappeared and the crowd roared and the house lights came down again. I, out of my seat, settled into a spot in the aisles. Now I was closer to the stage, anyway. Mangum wanted added closeness too, apparently – after picking up the fourth guitar, the nicest looking one, a red and white one he hadn’t used yet, he walked out to the front of the stage again, away from the microphones, and began strumming vigorously. There were only two songs he really hadn’t played yet, “Communist Daughter” and “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1,” and the latter, one of the clear highlights of an album and career chock full of highlights, was the obvious choice, both from context and the vigorous strum.

So Mangum ended the night with his spookiest, most unfettered hit. His unamplified voice still rang out in rickety liberation, but there was the triumph of the return in the air, not a chauvinistic triumph but a communal one. In Cooper’s book, E6 member and contemporaneous Mangum girlfriend Laura Carter suggested, prophetically, that what Mangum wanted to do was, “be a recluse and then come out with an album in ten years and shock everybody.” While little can shock or surprise us in the Internet Age, and we’re still waiting on the album, a couple of years after the decade Carter suggested, Mangum has returned. Locked up in a museum, but returning to his songs and their beauty.

***

Jeff Mangum show setlist for Sanders Theater on 9th September, 2011:

1. Oh Comely
2. Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2
3. I Love the Living You (Roxy Erickson cover)
4. In The Aeroplane Over the Sea
5. Song Against Sex
6/7. A Baby for Pree/Where You’ll Find Me Now
8. Naomi
9. Ghost
10. Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone
11/12. King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 1-3
13. Holland, 1945

Encore
14. Engine

2nd Encore
15. Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1

Source: My memory and this website.

After Their Falls, or the Lack of Listening

2011-09-08T07:57:00.001-04:00

This Sunday, September 11^th, returning from a weekend in Massachusetts for a wedding and a concert, I will take an overnight plane back to Europe from Logan Airport in Boston. Logan was the origin for American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, both to Los Angeles, both hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center Towers.

I can remember where I was for several of the 9/11 anniversaries, if only because the date’s significance made me more attentive. The 3^rd anniversary, a Saturday in 2004, marked the last time, one of the last times, or the day after the last time, that I talked to my mother on the phone, from her hospital bed, before cancer killed her on Tuesday three days later. The following year, at home for the fall, I went with my younger brother and sister to an Of Montreal concert that Sunday night, the band just about to hit the inflection point of their rise to success and relative fame, my siblings and I nearing a similar inflection point in our mutual bond through music, self-forged rather than handed down from above. Last year, I was in Copenhagen with Ben and Amy, where we came upon a rally, a small one, in a main square, calling on the U.S. to reveal the truth about 9/11 being an inside job. Lastly, if not chronologically so, on the 5^th anniversary in 2006, I was also on a plane, flying a couple hours from Tallinn to Moscow as I ended my initial European jaunt and began a 2 ½ month stay in the city of my parents, of my mother. Somewhere I have my journal from that trip, where during that flight I wrote down the things one could live for, that I could live for, which basically came down to love – of another person or of what one does in life – art, and serving others, as well as some combination of these elements. At the time, I thought I had neither the fortune nor the constitution to succeed at anything but art, cynically, naively, pathetically believing the romantic love that had yet to reach me in 21 years never would. I’ve been wrong, occasionally. In any case, it makes me wonder whence and whither I will be flying on September 11, 2016, and how my worldview will have changed.

***

I’m not making too strong a political statement in saying that we as a country have, at best, struggled in our response to the attacks over the last decade and, at worst, failed. Economically, politically, militarily, and in terms of safety, we are no better off than we were a decade ago and, in most of these and other measures, worse off. While no one at the time expected the brief sense of unity that emerged in the aftermath of the twin towers falling to last, no one expected irony to disappear, no one expected our culture to reinvent itself, it still strikes me how much our unity has deteriorated, how much our culture eats itself into paradoxical irrelevance, how guarded and ironic and snarky we’ve become, we’ve had to become.

(I will insert here because I don’t think I have a chance later – having visited New York City again this summer, I’m reminded that the city, more than anywhere else in the country probably, has internalized the lessons of 9/11, has reacted appropriately, and has grown from the experience, exceptions like the Ground Zero mosque controversy notwithstanding. Whatever else I’ve said about the city, it is clearly our greatest city, and best represents our hope and dream in 2011.)

Living abroad, I have had experience with both sides of the “telescope effect”. I’m not sure if that’s the technical term, or if anybody has conceived of this idea (though surely someone has; also, what I’m talking about differs slightly from the “CNN effect”, which has certainly been coined), but the idea is that when we hear about news from another place, some place faraway, we are inevitably going to hear only about the most important events or stories, and the most important events or stories are inevitably going to be bad. Israel is a good example of this, I think – when in the U.S., in Europe, one only hears about Israel through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict, or in this summer’s exception, about social upheaval in the country over the price of housing. Living there, I found a sense of normality, a sense of the mundane, and while the newspapers ran a conflict-related headline on their front page almost every day, there was more to life than the news. But living away from Israel, as I am now, I fear for the latest violence, fret about the situation, and freak out just as much as the next interested observer, and forget that life goes on there.

The same goes for living outside the U.S.A. From afar, from the news, the U.S. appears to be crazy. The healthcare “debate” especially hit me – the raucous town hall meetings, the vulgar insults, the Nazi comparisons (usually thrown in hand in hand with “socialist” cries, which reminds me that my saddest moment teaching high school history last spring was when I had to convince a senior that no, Hitler was not a Communist. Those Americans who confused the two may not have had such corrections in their schooling). It seemed like the country was going mad, and since this was the only decade in which I have been something of an adult, since I had no true grounds for comparison, it startled me. It scared me.

Last year, mostly living in the States, I found things calmer on the day to day, of course, and many of the most vitriolic debates were stowed away until the debt ceiling clash of last month, but news remained full of crazy events. Politicians certainly seemed incapable of talking to or with another, rather than past one another, and I felt like normal Americans, citizens, continued to exist in their own circles, talking about politics, for example, only with people they agreed with, supporting themselves with their own online sourced arguments that all of the group in the circle had read and shared, refusing to talk to the other side because they wouldn’t listen. Neither side listens. Even a circle-closing, uniting event like the killing of Osama Bin Laden led to several inane political arguments, though fortunately short-lived ones.

Then again, perhaps it’s always been this way. Maybe it’s inevitable that any democracy of our size will become irreversibly fissured, if they didn’t start out that way (which makes watching India and, if the Communist Party ever loosens their grip, China fascinating as we move forward). Look at U.S. history. We had to make several great compromises to put the Constitution together, the two-chambered legislature that has the anachronistic Senate, the Electoral College, and the Bill of Rights chief among the results. Under John Adams, the government tried to outlaw dissent. The antebellum period included a series of last-minute, crisis-averting compromises and violent incidents and crises nevertheless, leading up at last to the Civil War. Slavery and its legacy continue to stain our nation, as does the legacy of gender inequality. Immigrants were controversial and discriminated against every time a new wave hit land, with the previous group of immigrants often the ones to conduct the train of spite against the latest arrivals. The Cold War brought with it a series of near-apocalypses, its fair share of reductive “us vs. them” thinking and grandiose vilification of the them (see: President Reagan), and the frequent sense that we were falling behind, even when we weren’t. The 90s, the decade of my childhood, was a calm one in the U.S., maybe an exceptional decade, a beautiful decade to grow up in if one is interested in peace, prosperity, and happiness as an American, though not if one wants exciting big picture events – then again, the persecution of President Clinton for his wandering libido, while ultimately not consummated, was as much an example of craziness as anything we’ve seen since, though now we look back at it comically.

Or, perhaps, the issue is that we are weak for the first time. Really weak. In the 20^th century, the turn of which saw the U.S. become the world’s largest economy, the U.S. was seriously shaken from its eternal, beautiful optimism, its dream and its self-belief, by four events, I would argue – the Great Depression, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The first struck us economically on a level theretofore unseen; Pearl Harbor was the only instance of a military attack on the U.S. in the 20^th century, I believe (though even then, Hawaii was not yet a state); the Cold War was our first encounter with the paranoia and competitive urge that comes from trying to be the world’s leader and superpower; and the Vietnam War proved our leaders utterly fallible, our government’s intentions not always clear and noble, our world leadership not necessarily a blessing to others or ourselves.

Through all of those traumas, our nation emerged. We emerged due to the blessings of geography, of isolation and natural resources, of demographics, but also due to the attraction America held and holds for other peoples in other nations, free or not, the principles of religious freedom and personal freedom and everything else, due to the power of our dream and due to our nation’s strength, especially that much vaunted greatest generation which, forged through the hardship of the Great Depression, perhaps the last time the middle class lived on the basis of need rather than want, served in our time of greatest need, when indeed our goals were clear and noble, World War II, and paved the way for the 50 years of mostly uninterrupted prosperity that followed. While I am one of those who would likely be tarred as an apologist, as someone who denies America’s exceptionalism, if I ever got into a conversation on the topic with someone of a certain political bearing, or if I wrote for a publication with more than five readers, and while I believe that indeed every country is in their way exceptional, for better or for worse, and that chauvinism is not a necessary ingredient of national pride and patriotism, I will state that America is indeed exceptional, and that has led to good things. I will always be grateful for growing up in the U.S.A., and even more so for the country accepting my immigrant family and providing them a climate of opportunity and freedom they wouldn’t have had elsewhere.

(Bad things too – the U.S. WWII museum in New Orleans, a fine museum, does indeed have a section on the internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans living in the states, as well as a series of awfully racist posters teaching citizens and soldiers how to distinguish between Chinese (our friends) and Japanese (our enemies) through physical and racial characteristics. No matter how much one is inured to the biases of the past, it still shocks to see in actual print. Or in other words, no matter how far we have to come in racial equality, anybody who has seen Gone with the Wind can acknowledge the great strides we have made in that area, thank God.)

In the first decade of the 21^st century, however, we’ve been suffered almost as many traumas as in the 100 years previous. Iraq and Afghanistan combined loom as something similar to Vietnam in its impact on our nation’s psyche, public coffers, and image abroad; the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession that we struggle with today is not quite the Great Depression, but the situation doesn’t look much more promising; China already looms impatiently as the next world power and the greatest threat to our global preeminence since the Soviet Union, and indeed a greater threat at that; and of course the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of 10 years ago, the yet to be replicated second time we have suffered an attack on American soil since the Civil War.

(I could change the typology slightly and claim the war on terror is the parallel to the Cold War, but I think this works better.)

The combination of these events instills a self-fulfilling quality in our national spirit. These events or situations suggest that we are not what we once were, that we are indeed in decline, that we need to change direction. Hence, incumbents get voted out of office quickly, the winning side presumes a huge mandate instead of accepting that we live in a divided country and that one has to govern either brilliantly or carefully, not foolhardily or timidly, leading to another cycle of new politicians, new overstated mandate, and new disillusionment. Hence, people grasp to further and further extremes in the hope of finding an answer to the nation’s problems, which leaves a widening gap between the two sides, even if one side or the other manages to pull the whole conversation in a direction they prefer (as the Right did in the debt-ceiling debate – I suppose you could argue the Left did this in the healthcare debate or, even better, gay rights, but I don’t know enough about it. I think I can objectively state that the Right is currently better at shifting the conversation). Hence, at a time where to solve our problems and show our strength amid this typhoon of challenges we need to come to greater consensus on a national level, a greater agreement of what sort of sacrifice we should share, what sort of country we want in the big picture, and what we are willing to give to that country, we pull at one another’s hair and allow the recession to persist, the war to continue without clear direction, and China to go past savoring our struggles and into scolding us for threatening their economy and vision of their slower rise to preeminence.

Hence, dead or not, Bin Laden did pretty well in fucking America up.

***

September 11^th, 2001 was the first day of the school year, of my senior year in high school. It was a sunny day. As tradition demanded (and probably still demands), after the three lower classes had been seated in the chapel for the All School Meeting that would begin the school year, we seniors marched in with great pomp and cheer, holding up two fingers for the class of 2002, yelling a lot, and acting out a sense of naïve chauvinism that can only belong to high school seniors. I’m sure I participated in the revelry less than most of my classmates, not because I have a disinclination to naïve chauvinism, though I’d like to think I do, but because I have always had a bit of the contrarian asshole in me, and felt it was silly to whoop it up the way everybody else did.

The All School Meeting must have ended by 8:30. We had a day of abbreviated classes, as befits the first day of school. I think I had Physics first period, and then a free period that started somewhere in the 9:00am hour. With nothing productive to do, I went down to the Ryley Room, the “hangout” area below our dining hall. They had TVs there, and I watched a rerun of SportsCenter.

This is the part that always embarrasses me upon recollection. As I was watching ESPN, sitting on a stool on the elevated platform area in the first back corner of the room, unconcerned with the world outside, as it were, my friend Tom O. came down. He had a free period too, obviously. After standing by me for a second, he went over to the far end of the room, towards the other back corner, to buy a snack or a drink and watch the big screen TV they had put in Ryley Room that summer (not a big screen TV, actually, but a big screen on which a projector projected TV programming).

A few minutes later, he called out to me. “Shvarts, you gotta check this out! A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t move. I might have said I wasn’t interested. It just seemed like news to me, and I was not yet a news reader.

Some twenty minutes after that, towards the end of our free period, I still at my small TV watching my small picture sports news, Tom yelled again. This was when the second plane crashed, I think. At the time, I think the significance had yet to sink in. I collected my things and went to English class.

It was at that point, walking over to the English building, that I was aware that the news had traveled. Students were talking about skipping class to watch the news. Teachers in our classrooms talked about what was going on, about what the school’s response would be. News was happening, the world was changing, and we shouldn’t be made to sit there and wait for it ignorantly. In my International Relations class, as we talked about what was going on and who might be behind it, appropriate a discussion as it was for that class, I thought in a very Jewish, which is to say provincial way, that it might be Palestinians, but that that would be crazy, it wasn’t like they weren’t doing anything in Israel now, it wasn’t like they were silent (at the Rosh Hashana service I attended at my temple a few days later, the Rabbi’s sermon tied 9/11 to the recent Jerusalem Sbarro bombing).

Later that day we had another All School Meeting, less celebratory than the morning’s. Gathered on the grass in front of Samuel Phillips Hall, we heard our Head of School and Associate Head of School tell us about the gravity of the day’s events, about what connections it had to our school, and about our response. I don’t remember what they said, really.

I remember checking with my roommate Matt, a Manhattan native, to see that everyone he knew was ok. I remember waiting twenty feet away from my friend Derrick, an African-American from Brooklyn, a guy who as a freshman we dubbed “Grandpa Warrior” because he seemed so much older than us, tougher than us, a friend on whom I happened to walk in once a year or two before at an inconveniently romantic and personal time with a lady friend, a friend who more than any from high school I am not in touch with and wish I could be in some way, even though time and distance and experience has rendered that unlikely (Facebook does not help in this effort, by the way), as this strong kid waited for a response on his cell phone with a worried look on his face before finally finding out, around 3:00 pm, that everything was ok.

That night, I remember thinking how awful it all was. I still thought out nightly prayers back then, whispered them even sometimes, prayers to God for my mother’s health and happiness, for the happiness of those I cared about, for things that would lead to my happiness, though I tried to avoid asking for that directly. That night, I prayed for all affected by the attacks, those who died and those who lost someone and those missing and those hurt and so on. I don’t think I directly prayed for the lands from which those who killed themselves came, for their neighbors and peers and countrymen in poverty and oppression, for relief from whatever could drive people to such madness and hatred (even though, yes, many of the terrorists involved and Bin Laden himself were middle class or wealthy), but I thought about it. I tried to understand where it came from. I couldn’t. I fell asleep, eventually.

***

This trying to understand is at the center of what I think has been missing from our decade since the attacks. Understanding, seeking understanding of the other is the only way forward in a problem with two or more sides (in a problem with one side, the way forward is understanding oneself, which is harder). Understanding does not mean acceptance, condonement, or even that dreaded buzzword of political correctness, tolerance. It means tying together at least a plausible background story that led our enemies to become our enemies, in the hopes of defeating them or changing them or knowing what comes next or improving ourselves or growing or living in the middle of these options or all of the above, as ultimately the solution will always be.

For example, trying to understand the terrorists could lead to the following thoughts: anybody who harms civilians is a bad person. The attackers on 9/11 chose to attack America. Why? Partly because of the American military presence in the Middle East and America’s support of Israel. Some might jump off here and say let’s end both of these things. I would encourage continued thought (Israel on its own is a topic that requires great effort to understand all sides involved, and a place where they do that more than in the U.S., but where all sides need to reach understanding more urgently).

I would suggest that we think about how unique America is or isn’t in suffering a terrorist attack. I can remember off the top of my head major terrorist attacks occurring in Madrid, London, several places in Russia, Israel of course, India, and Norway since the attacks on the U.S. The scale may not be the same, but the frequency is much higher. When I lived in Russia five years ago, I remember having dinner with my uncle and talking to a friend of his. I was telling him about how I was writing a novel, largely autobiographical, centered on the traumas a young girl (not autobiographical) faces growing up when I did. Two of the main three traumas were the death of her mother and the events of 9/11. This man, hardly a Russian patriot, Jewish and hence disinclined to trust Russia in fact, but also possessing that old world elitist view towards America that, say, my father so well embodies, asked me if I thought 9/11 was really significant enough to base a novel on. “One attack and you want the world to cry for you?” Later, I dated a Russian woman who, in part referring to our response, described America as a child.

(Note to prospective literary agents reading this: that novel is finished and sitting on my hard drive, shockingly not yet picked up by any major publishing houses! Inquire within.)

I don’t think their criticism, especially its barbed tone, is wholly legitimate, but we would do well to remember the traumas that we, or our leaders and government at least, have visited upon other places, whether through action or passivity (Cambodia, for example, suffered from both). If we want to view ourselves as exceptional, as the preeminent power in the world, if we think Pax Americana is a good thing for the world, if we want to believe in ourselves and our manifest destiny this way, we need to try to understand, or indeed to understand how the world views us, and why. It’s not enough to just say that America is the best and if you don’t like it, you can get out. It’s not enough to make French jokes and wonder why they forgot about World War II, just as we forget about the American Revolution. It’s not enough to fight the terrorists and fear China. It’s not enough to call the Right batshit crazy or the Left liberal communist apologists (or, yes, Nazis). If we want to be exceptional, great, we have to try to live up to it, to what made us great: our openness, our attraction for immigrants, our ability to revive ourselves, and perhaps our newfound ability to understand one another and those beyond.

***

My 9/11 this year will be festive. High school friends and I will wake up in a house rented on Cape Cod for the wedding, amidst empty alcohol containers, strewn about clothes, and the vague silliness that memories the morning after a wedding consist of. We might watch the beginning of that day’s football games, many of us in a fantasy football league together, before Ben and I drive in his rented car up to Logan, possibly stopping by my dad’s house to pick up some things I could use in my Luxembourg apartment. We’ll hang out in the international lounge, then he’ll go to Madrid, I’ll go to Luxembourg via Paris, and somewhere over the Atlantic, hopefully asleep, I will pass that arbitrary day of significance, arbitrary in the way all measurements of time are, and awake on September 12^th, 2011.

I would be mildly surprised if, amidst our revelry, any of us bring up what day it is (hopefully they don’t read this before that weekend, or else I will have spoiled my experiment and hypothesis). I would be more surprised if, even amidst our revelry, we don’t talk at least a little, indirectly, about the effects September 11^th has had on us, individually or collectively. About the economy, about jobs, about the recession, about politics, and so on. It may be lazy to draw a direct line between all of those things and September 11^th, but it would be foolish to deny that they are part of the same web.

On the plane, I will not pray. My belief is vaguer than it was ten years ago, more of an agnostic-tinged Jewish-Universalist view that I’m sure you’re not interested in hearing described. What I will do is what I have done since I was in high school, if not earlier, which is to tap my forehead with the first two fingers and thumb of my right hand in the shape of a triangle, first pointing up and then down, forming the outline of the Star of David. I cribbed it from Catholics crossing themselves, obviously, and I’ve stuck to it through years of spiritual wandering and wondering.

Were I to pray on the plane, I would not pray for my and my fellow passengers’ safety: I fly frequently and well, with little concern, and whatever fears I’ve had on planes came only after I started having someone to come home to, someone I would be afraid of losing and who would be afraid of losing me. I would not pray for my happiness, for the happiness of those who matter to me, for my mother to rest in peace, or anything that I prayed for before (which included, often, praying for the Patriots and the Red Sox, hardly noble subjects). My experience suggests that goal-driven prayers are not very effective, and that actions taken to achieve those things are more valuable.

Were I to pray on the plane, I’d pray for our country, and the world, prayers not meant to be mutually exclusive. I’d pray for us to continue to try to understand one another. I’d pray for us to listen more and browbeat less. I’d pray for America and the world to show renewed strength, to enter a new era of cohesion, of prosperity and growth and happiness. And I’d pray for us to understand one another, again.

I would have no illusions about these prayers being fulfilled.

Luxembourg after eight days, in ten words or in 2,000

2011-08-15T08:33:00.000-04:00

A few possible mottos for Luxembourg, the capital of the country of Luxembourg:

“Luxembourg: Always Take an Umbrella”

“Luxembourg: Everything’s Smaller Here”

“I don’t need to look like a Luxembourger to know how to say, ‘I’m a bad mofo’ in Luxembourgish”

“Luxembourg: Notre grisaille est notre beauté“ (Our grayness is our beauty)

“Luxembourg: Come for the Eurail Connections, stay for the view”

“Luxembourg: Non, we are not a city in Germany.”

***

The first impression one has on Luxembourg, before one arrives, is a collective “Really?” The relatively non-EU exposed will say, “Luxembourg is its own country? Really?” The geographically curious will say, “Luxembourg is smaller than Rhode Island and a sovereign country? Really?” The young man moving to the city and looking for a job will say, “I might have to learn Luxembourgish? Luxembourgish is a language? Really?” Luxembourg is something of the fairy tale on which the hopes and dreams of modern Western Europe are built, and much of it challenges credulity.

Luxembourg is the world’s only Grand Duchy, meaning the only place ceremonially ruled by a Grand Duke. They have pictures of the current Grand Duke, a tall and handsome man named Henri right out of “Choose your Royal Figure!” casting books, everywhere in the city, a degree of admiration and worship I’ve only seen surpassed in less politically balanced countries; I saw about as many pictures of Paul Kagame in Rwanda as I have of Henri here.

Luxembourg is a tiny country, one that not surprisingly suffered from invaders and changing rulers for much of its history. It gained its independence in the mid 19^th century, discovered a deep iron ore shortly thereafter, and managed to maintain some wealth for the rest of the century. In the 20^th century, twice the country suffered under German invasion and occupation. It makes sense from that perspective, then, that the country would be one of the founding members and driving forces of the EU, which in its first form was the European Economic Community, if my memory of undergraduate history serves me correctly, and that community may have well been based around the trading of iron and steel, at the time a cornerstone of Luxembourg’s economy. In the 21^st century the country serves as one of Europe’s financial capitals, holds the European Court of Justice to boost its claim to being Europe’s 3^rd capital (behind Brussels and The Hague, I believe? Or Paris?), and due to a relatively low tax rate also hosts a number of multinational companies (Amazon and Skype (pre-Microsoft at least) are two examples that come to mind).

Luxembourg is a tiny country and host to a tiny population. The capital, where we live, boasts of 100,000 or so residents. The country as a whole has a population of 500,000. Meaning Boston’s official population is about 100K people more. Like Boston, however, Luxembourg has a huge commuting population during the regular working day. According to our relocation agent, that 500K swells to two million people on a given weekday as workers stream in from Belgium, Germany, and France (the three surrounding countries) to take advantage of Luxembourg’s strong economy and generous worker benefits. Even in the height of the August vacances, every other car I’ve seen seems to have a D or F license plate for Deutschland and France, respectively.

Which leads to one of the major benefits of this tiny ‘burg (any city that makes Tel Aviv look big, well…): the multitude of languages and peoples that make up that 500,000 population (never mind the two million). I’ve seen and heard various quotes for the immigrant percentage of the population, anywhere from 37% to 49.9%. Many of the people who live here are not from here: that much is apparent. Among the largest groups represented here are Portuguese and, more historically, the Italians. The Portuguese are the largest group, weighing in at about 20% of that 37-49% of the immigrant population, which makes them just under a tenth of the total population. Of course, that means there are about 50,000 Portuguese natives living in Luxembourg, hardly a grand wave of migration, but everything is smaller here. Amy and I have also been impressed, walking around, by the evident diversity of the city, both in its restaurants (in 8 days we’ve eaten at Luxembourgish, German, Italian, French, Indian, and mediocre Middle Eastern) and the people walking the streets, with Africans, Russians (Eastern Europe, what what!), and Indians, among others, offering a pleasant blend in the city.

That human diversity leads to linguistic. The official languages of the country are French, German, and, yes, Luxembourgish, a Dutch/German patois with a bit of French sprinkled in. The order in that previous sentence marks the order in which we’d like to learn the languages if we stay here long enough, though Amy reports that Luxembourgish has a charming sound to it: their word for ok, it appears, is “Tiptop.” Beyond those official languages, one hears of course the omnipresent English, in its British, American, and International varietals, one hears the Portuguese of that community, one hears a fair deal of Italian and then Spanish from tourists, one hears Dutch that is vaguely distinguishable from German, one hears when he strains his ear some Russian, some Arabic, and even the barest snatch of Hebrew. For language whores like us, it’s hard to imagine a better place than Luxembourg for the size.

(One interesting footnote to this linguistic diversity, for me, is as follows: I asked J, our main relocation agent, how the hell he knows what language to use with a given person. He, a handsome man of about my age, with a skin complexion that suggests Mediterranean, South American, or even African heritage somewhere down the line, who claims Belgian as his nationality but has lived in Luxembourg all his life, and who of course speaks all the languages needed, recalled, “It’s interesting. If someone looks foreign, I would probably speak French to them first, unless I hear them speak German or English or something else. If it is a setting where I know they’ll speak Luxembourgish, I speak Luxembourgish. Sometimes, people, like just now at the bank, will begin speaking to me in French because I don’t look Luxembourgish, and I’ll say, ‘it’s ok, we can speak Luxembourgish if you want,’ and they’ll say, ‘sorry,’ and we’ll speak Luxembourgish. So it’s hard to say. Sometimes you just know, sometimes you don’t.”)

***

It’s August here in Luxembourg, and in some ways you’d know it, while in others you wouldn’t. You’d know it because there is a lack of bustle during the week, because many of the restaurants are on their congé, because it’s doubtful that any recruiter or company is going to respond to my desperate pleas for another month. You wouldn’t know it because, well, it’s not that warm. On a warm day like yesterday, the temperature bleeds into the mid 20’s Celsius, or low to mid 70s Fahrenheit. Mostly though, I’ve been wearing long sleeves and jeans (though by golly, I’ve actually seen Europeans wearing shorts: the glorious benefits of globalization!).

Beyond that, the fate of the day’s sky never reaches surety or permanence. Any day might start of cloudy, break into a bit of blue and sun, and then fall back into showers or drab overcast, before cycling through again. Even today, looking out on a mostly clear blue sky out our living room window, I expect that there will be rain at some point, and that our umbrellas will again serve us well. (N.b.: posting this a few hours after writing it, I find myself proven wrong – it has been sunny and gorgeous, hitting 30 degrees Celsius, or about 85 Fahrenheit.)

August sentiments do reign over the city’s mood though, in all senses. While much of the rest of the continent and indeed the world may be rife in protest, worry, and fear of debt (despite being in Israel for the better part of three years, including during a war and some seemingly monumental political moments, I feel like I missed out on the action there, for example), here our second Sunday was marked by a concert in one of the town centre fairs, along with a large collection of mimes dressed In different costumes – clock heads, instruments, butterflies, Enlightenment-era bewigged royals – walking around to mug for photos with children and families, some on stilts, other at ground level. Today is a Catholic holiday and, Luxembourg being ostensibly a Catholic country, the city is mostly shut down and quiet. On the whole, Luxembourg holds a nice mix of French flair for life and German industriousness, I say on first glance, but in August the French side is winning.

***

Lastly, on the physical nature of the city.

The Centre on the Left, the Rest on the Right.

Luxembourg owes its existence in large part to its physical nature. The main city was once a fortress; that fortress rested on a rocky formation surrounded by river valleys; as such, the city is something of a land island, surrounded by natural moats. This did little to slow the 20th Century Germans, or many of the foreign rulers from earlier history, but nevertheless, Luxembourg stood out, in a literal sense.

Grund from above.

What that means for our cozy town is that the centre locks onto the olden fortress area; a largely pedestrian shopping area occupies the heart of the city, streaming shoppers past the landmark squares in front of the Grand Ducal Palace (one of five in the country, I hear). Then, surrounding the city are the valleys of the Petrusse and Alzette rivers, as well as les Villes basses. The rivers are hardly impressive, the Petrusse hardly a stream, less than a meter wide, the Alzette a staid stew of a river bearing that grungy green that many city rivers boast of, though without the size or import of those other rivers. The low cities, Grund, Clausen, and Pfaffenthal, offer the classic Old Europe feel, narrow cobblestone paved roads next to a river, replete with Michelin-starred restaurants and a famous church (the Abbaye of Neumunster). We have so far only made it to Grund, home to many of the Portuguese in town, as well as a pair of Scottish or Irish pubs. It was indeed scenic strolling down to the low town on a Saturday night, twilight upon us and the black roofed buildings of the old city towering above.

A Grund street. Ok, a slight incline.

The city is not hilly in the way I often think of European cities as being hilly. In the main part of the city there are mild undulations, but nothing significant. What of the high versus low cities, you might ask. It is of course true that there are different altitudes in the city, but it is better to think of the city height as a discrete rather than continuous functions – to get to the bottom, one descends on a steep decline, whether towards Grund et al. or one of the outer neighborhoods, Cents for example. To get back, one takes a cab or a bus. The high city is mostly flat, the low cities are mostly flat. No, hills are not part of the scenery.

For all that, we do live on something of an incline, and from our 3^rd floor apartment (4^th floor by American counting), we have a slightly elevated view of the center and of the old town, and a peering glance to the train tracks and villes basses below. The contrast between that high and low, along with the contrast between the more traditional center and the modern surrounding neighborhoods (to our northeast, we can spot the beginning of Kirchberg, where the EU institutions are housed), and the ever-present contrast between sun and clouds, blue and gray, lends Luxembourg its beauty, a beauty it can boast of.

At that, I leave you with a picture of the view I have from my desk, as well as a standing invitation, presuming I actually know you, to come visit. And if I don’t know you, just visit this site for more writing on Luxembourg, travel in and near the country, and any other adventures that merit the time. Tiptop? Tiptop. Et Merci.

Convenience, Childishness, Yard Sales, Marches, and Driving Ranges - America, in other words

2011-07-05T17:20:00.005-04:00

Defining one thing makes complete sense only when contrasted to alternatives. For example, a child doesn't realize they belong to a certain nationality or race, or rather they don't appreciate the fact that they are different from others in that sense until they meet people from other nationalities or races. I didn't realize my sense of fashion was poor until I spent time with people who knew how to match their shirt, shorts, and shoes. (Ok, I still didn't realize for a while after that. Years and years. Regardless.)

With that said, yesterday was the 4th of July, and that means a celebration of America and being American. I've traveled a bunch and lived abroad for a decent amount of time. I've noticed some things that, at least in contrast with the places I've been and the people from those places, help define how I and my countrymen act as Americans. Character traits that have both positive and negative aspects, but traits that I think many Americans, those who were born here and those who have come here and adopted the culture, display in their daily behavior.

Herewith I will dispense with three of these traits, and then a brief anecdote about three very American activities I took part in over the past ten days.

The Charm of Convenience - Americans expect things to work.

This may seem as self-evident as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but it is, I think, uniquely American. We expect to find a system in life to which we can conform (or else a system we can outmaneuver and beat), a set of rules that, if followed, affords us a job, a decent life, and ON Demand cable TV. That might be one of the most earthshaking effects of the current economic crisis/limited recovery, the questions that have been raised for that faith, the hint of a new American agnosticism.

But I lose myself in the big picture. It's more on the daily level that our belief in things working manifests itself. We expect that if we need to get a driver's license that we can go to the DMV, fill out a form, stand in line, pass a test or two, pay about $100 (the total cost for permit, road test, and driver's license in Massachusetts), and launch ourselves on the glorious path to SUVs and dads' old minivans. We might complain about this process, but in comparison to most places, we have little grounds for moaning. When I explained this process to a friend of mine who had just immigrated to NYC from Russia, he expressed shock: shock that the process was so orderly, shock there was no one to pay off, and especially shock that the cost was so little - he was used to the idea that he had to pay some guy around $1000 to get a license, and that he had to go to the relatively lawless southern part of the country (the Caucasus in Russia, not Alabama) to take care of all of this.

I can draw on examples from other places. When talking with friend Ben, he of past trips and Madrid residence, about the joys and challenges of life abroad and in the U.S. (the latter from what we can fathom and remember), he mentioned having to accept the slowness of the Spanish bureaucracy. I never wrote about the aborted attempt I made to get citizenship in Israel but it involved many hoops, failed efforts, laws passed just as I was on the verge of handing in all the necessary documents that required a new document, and many opportunities to practice my Hebrew, especially my angry language Hebrew.

These are small examples. I think it would not be hard to find or recall or report others. The end result is that many other cultures adopt a "oh, it'll get done when it gets done" attitude, a blasé approach towards life's minutiae and unpleasantness. Which is healthy to a degree, but also unproductive to a degree. In any case, it's different from the attitude I think most Americans have.

Where there's a Will... - Americans expect there to be answers to most if not all problems. (You'll notice that the three traits I mention are related to one another). There is nothing that can't be reduced, via analysis or gut instinct, into a square peg to be filled, whether quickly or sequentially.

I can't think of any day-to-day life examples to support this statement, but it's easy to draw on Americans' approach to foreign policy and politics in general. We expect any given problem, whether an intractable conflict between two peoples or a trade-off between taxes and government cuts, to have an answer. Increasingly, we feel that the answer will not be found, but we sense that it's there. And why not? For 235 years we've been finding answers, and there should be no reason to think that won't continue to be the case. Again, all of these traits have their positive and negative implications; here, the belief in an answer propels Americans to achieve and to find solutions where otherwise deemed improbable or impossible, but at the same time we shear problems of their intricacy and detail, trimming them into a square peg that might not necessarily fit the needs of the situation.

We're just a bunch of big kids - Americans, on a global scale, are childish.

In some ways, we are too nice to be anything but children. We are, Northeast corridor excepting, more gregarious and polite in public than most other places I've been. We're not necessarily as warm or friendly after the initial layer of an interaction slinks off, but we are generally pleasant at first blush.

(One thing I did notice for the first time on this trip home, however, is that, outside of Christmas season, we don't wish one another happy holidays in commercial interactions the way I've noticed especially in Israel but also elsewhere. Yesterday was the 4th of July, but when going to Market Basket (bison and chicken), the highway to New Hampshire (tolls), and the New Hampshire Liquor Store (Cîroc vodka), I didn't hear one "Happy Holiday" or "Have a good 4th of July" from any of the workers. Now, you could argue they were upset they were working on the holiday - I didn't hear anything while shopping on the 2nd of July either. It's just interesting.)

We also like to make everything a competition. Competition as a means for encouraging people to achieve beyond their own limits, or to find solutions for difficult problems? Sure, that's good. Competitive eating? Just sort of childish.

We like our entertainment to be the best in the world, and it is. No other country can, I think, compare to the size and bombast of American movies, TV, music, and so forth. Even within America, there is competition to see who has the most spectacular entertainment, as witnessed by the hosts of the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular reiterating over and over that Boston has the "Premier" celebration in the country. It's quite a claim.

Then there is our nation's citizens mastery of languages, or lack thereof. At some point, many or most Americans will be bilingual Spanish/English speakers and both will be official languages of the country. Until that point, we will be the ones who stick out in the world for our unilingualism (not a word). Never mind the "ugly Americans" idea. I get more hung up on the treatment I receive as someone who does speak a language or two beyond English. Non-Americans will praise me for my language skills in whatever language, especially in an insecure moment where I fish for compliments about my accent. Then I'll remember that they speak, say, Russian/German/English all fluently and could pick up either Hebrew or French easily enough, or else they combine Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English with little effort, or they'll be an African basketball player shrugging off all the stereotypes they might encounter to point out the fact that they speak five languages. That compliment I got for speaking one or two other languages well? Feels like I'm the little boy who gets great applause for playing a Bb major scale on my trombone without dropping the instrument. "And you know the arpeggio at the end too? Wow, good job!"

Lastly, and somewhat more profoundly, is the nation's trauma of a decade ago. I hope to write on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, but I can anticipate the date a little bit. I remember several Russians, for example, terming Americans as childish for how we dealt with the aftermath of the two towers falling (namely, launching two wars for a war/tower ratio of 1).This is something of a snooty old world attitude, but it's not altogether wrong: America suffered a large attack of any sort for the first time in 60 years. We stood as the clear power of the world, and while still sundered from most threats by two oceans, our technology and culture were in the process of overtaking the globe. The event could be nothing less than shocking, and America's response was different from other nations' responses to similar events as much because America could do more than other nations, fair or not.

Still, there came a sense from many of us that this was the only major attack, that America's grief was worse, that there was an outrage attached to our wound. Which is silly of course; without getting into proportions of loss, statistics, or anything else, many countries in the world suffer from war, terrorism, natural disasters, and other unplanned traumas. This was the first time in a while for us, and it could have jolted us out of our childhood. Somehow, I don't think that's quite how it shook out.

***
Now to the three recent American activities I took part in. The first is...

Yard Sale - I have been to plenty of yard sales. At various times in his life, my dad has been something of a yard sale/flea market connoisseur; I remember looking forward to going to the flea market out by Wellfleet or Truro when we vacationed on Cape Cod every summer in my childhood.

I had never taken part in hosting a yard sale as I did weekend before last in Michigan. What I found interesting and worth sharing was the nature of our clientele. To advertise for the yard sale, we put up two signs on either side of our street and put an ad in the Ludington newspaper. I thought more and earlier signage - we only put up the signs the night before the yard sale - might be needed, but Amy said rest assured, "the people who come to yard sales will be here."

The people who come to yard sales; men and women of all races, ages, and types, though skewing towards the older demographics. Folks who happen to drive by and stop anywhere they see a couple tables set up strewn with clothes, jewelry, and DVDs (many men slowed down as they drove past in their cars, looked at our tables, realized that this was a largely women's oriented yard sale, and sped off). Immigrant families that emerge from large green-striped vans, three generations represented, the children running next door to check out the sports supplies put out, the parents to look at the DVDs and books, grandparents who wonder if there are any pieces of jewelry their spouses might like. Haggard singles, men and ladies, stop by looking for the super cheap stuff, turning down a pair of shorts and a shirt because they didn't come together, meaning it cost $2 not $1.

And then there are the lifers. Two older women stood in front of one table while another woman, more in her 40s than older, noticed them and said hello. (Note: Michigan is in the Midwest.)

First Older Woman: "Oh, hi Maaggie, how are ya?"
Younger Woman: "Hi there Claarice, hi Maary."
Second Older Woman: "Say, did you go to the Jensens' yard sale yet?"
YW: Not yet, I was checking over the sales on Pere Marquette Ave.
FOW: Oh, we saw those, didn't we Maary?
SOW: Good selection of baags at those.
YW: You been over to the one on Haight?
FOW: Over by the lake?
YW: Yeah, the one by the lake. I thought I would've seen you guys there when I went, I went there first.
SOW: We're going there next. I guess we just forgot about that one.
FOW: Oh no, I didn't forget about, just wanted to get to this one first.
YW: Yeah, there's a lawt out here.
SOW: Well, good luck with your shawping.
YW: Thanks, girls, same to you.

(Note: that was slightly paraphrased. Ahh, Michigan.)

That seemed to me to be a uniquely American experience. After the yard sale, I joined Amy's father for a bit of...

Up, right, in the ground, totally missed, one time straight, but especially right - ...hitting golf balls at a driving range. I had never done this before. I've always been skeptical of golf. Despite going to (essentially) a rich man's high school and a rich man's college, or perhaps because of these things, I always viewed golf as a rich man's game. Amy's father is far from a rich man, and so I figured if he golfs a lot, it can't be so bad. I, in my eagerness, offered to go play 18 with him some day. He, in his wisdom, suggested we go to the driving range first.

Imagining it proper to swing with a big backswing, full hip gyration, and good power - in other words, all the lessons one takes from playing Mario Golf, my only education in golf beyond mini golf - I began taking healthy cuts. Amy's father stood aside and suggested some alterations and downsizes in my swing so as to help me hit the ball properly. While each of his shots went more or less straight and 200 yards long, my shots rarely if ever touched the 100 yard mark. Further, I peppered the wall of trees to the right of the range, to the point where the game was really to see if I would hit one of the tall pines on the fly or on the hop.

Those pushed slices to the right were when I hit the ball well. When I didn't hit the ball well, I think I ran through every possible bad drive possible. I aimed to hit the ball left to compensate for pushing it right...and still pushed it right. I duffed the ball (hit the grass under or before the tee instead of the ball flush). I popped the ball almost straight up in the air a few times. I hit on top of the ball, knocking it in a straight line or into the ground. Most embarrassingly, I swung at the ball and missed. Several times. Like four. In a row.

And then, as if provided for a story, on my last shot, making adjustments I in no way can recall or replicate, I managed, while aiming straight, to hit the ball roughly 100 yards right down the middle. A decent golf shot to end on for the first time on the range. I left not exactly hooked, but definitely appreciative of why people play, and interested in going again. And I guess I'm over the rich man's game idea. Or else rich.

If you think driving golf balls does not qualify as significantly American, allow me to add that we drove to the range in a souped-up convertible Ford Mustang. Pretty damn American, if you ask me.

Marching for a March in July - Lastly, yesterday, for the 4th of July, Ben and I visited our friend Jack in New Hampshire. There we swam in the pool, hid from the thunderstorms, ate meat and smores, and watched the aforementioned Fireworks Spectacular on TV. And to that Spectacular, at the right time, we marched.

Jack's family has a special tradition for the 4th of July. When the Boston Pops finally plays John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever", usually right after the "1812 Overture" that celebrates America's liberation from Napoleon or something (note to future employers: I'm kidding! I taught history a couple months ago! I know America threw off Napoleon's reign in 1803 with a bunch of money!), though last night "SaSF" came later, but to return to the initial dependent clause, when this song finally airs on TV, the family marches through their living room holding American flags (or American flag napkins). I was familiar with this tradition, having done this two years ago with Jack and family and another friend. This time around, once the national broadcast rolled over to the Sousa festivities around 10:30, we lined up, prepared for the final triumphal coda to the song, and then marched around the living room, onto the balcony, and into each other, a two-generational group of Americans (and a dog named Liberty) celebrating an important holiday in silly, American fashion.

Which, at the end of the day, is perfectly OK with me, as childish, convenient, poorly hit, regularly sold, and inevitably answered as the occasion is.

(And since this would make three straight posts without a photo, I now post a photo from the 4th of July at Jack's two years ago, or rather the 5th of July, the morning after, when I got a little cosy with ol' Liberty.)

Traveling through our 20s, right before the crash

2011-07-03T13:30:00.000-04:00

(Technically, this post has little to do with travel. More like time travel. I'll explain.)

As an introduction, I offer two lists to sum up the last year of my life, from say 12th June 2010 to 11th June 2011.

List 1: Israel (Tel Aviv, Even Yehuda, Herzliya), New England (Burlington, Boston, Nantucket, Cape Cod, Hampton Beach), Michigan (Ludington), Israel (Tel Aviv, Herzliya), Europe (Amsterdam, Hamburg, Denmark), Israel (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem), Africa (Rwanda), the broader U.S. (Burlington, New York, DC, Durham, Nashville, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco), the North American North (Ludington, Grand Blanc, Sarnia, Toronto), Massachusetts (Burlington, Boston), the Midwest (Chicago, Ludington), Massachusetts (Burlington, the Berkshires), New Orleans, Burlington, Michigan (Ludington, Ann Arbor), Israel (Herzliya, Even Yehuda), the Midwest (Ludington, Charlevoix, Petoskey, Chicago), Israel (Herzliya, Even Yehuda, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv), Michigan (Ludington).

And a possibly less obnoxious list.

List 2: Library Aide, Model United Nations co-coordinator, M.A. Student, online journalist, tourist, volunteer with genocide survivors, Greyhound bus customer, job-seeker, construction volunteer, job-seeker, cat-sitter, long-term substitute teacher.

The former list includes all the places I either spent significant time in (a full day) or slept a night in over the aforementioned timeline. The latter provides an order of the various positions I filled over that year. It's been some year.

While finishing my time in the final role, as long-term substitute teacher, I had the privilege (read: obligation) to attend a high school graduation. As the bright and hopeful valedictorian and salutatorian read fine speeches about the future and all the possibilities that awaited them in this ever-changing world, I sat staring into the flat chicken fields that served as a staging for the ceremony, wondering whether we are ever presented limitless opportunity, and wondering if that limitless opportunity evaporates at some point, whether that window closes, and lastly wondering whether I have taken advantage of that opportunity or squandered it, and whether that window remains open for me.

Excuse the excessive wondering and pondering and spiritual blundering. 26 is not old. I'm not sure what 26 is. I'm not sure what the normal position for someone of my age is, nor how I measure up, which makes it excessively difficult for an eternally competitive person (if one developing a sense of Buddhistic-esque acceptance) like me to assess my life and whether it is on the rails or wandering in the wilderness that are the 20s. I know that, coming from a pedigree of top high school and top college, my circle of acquaintances and friends, as it were, is successful and forming themselves into what they want to be. Perhaps that's why I'm not so close to most of them, the lucky bastards.

I should clarify. In the new economy or the 21st century or whatever excuse there is to tag onto our condition, working immediately after college is not a foregone conclusion, and finding out who you want to be takes longer than it might have 20 or 30 years ago, or in other countries like the Soviet Union my parents grew up in. We are faced with the paradox of choice, where more options impede our decision-making and ultimately make us less happy because we can weigh many more alternatives to the life we chose. This is related to the concept discussed in one of my undergrad economics classes, the idea that Person X is happier making $70K a year when his neighbor (or co-worker or brother or whoever he compares himself with) makes $70K as well than when Person X is making $75K a year and Comparison X is making $80K a year.

Here stands I, a competitive person but one who, I'd like to think, has never begrudged my friend his/her due. One of my favorite parables comes from the New Testament of the Bible:

Matthew 20.1 For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. 20.2 And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. 20.3 And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, 20.4 And said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. 20.5 Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. 20.6 And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? 20.7 They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive. 20.8 So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. 20.9 And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny. 20.10 But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. 20.11 And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, 20.12 Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. 20.13 But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? 20.14 Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. 20.15 Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? 20.16 So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

The essence of the parable is that one should honor their agreements, but even more that one who has reached satisfaction in some way should not allow that satisfaction to be tarnished by viewing others' conditions as a sign of what one could achieve instead. In other words, I am not only a jerk for comparing myself constantly to others, but failing at life and at happiness by not staying in my lane and worrying about how I can do right by myself and those who matter, rather than other people. Or as a friend puts it (and I swear I've quoted it here before, but I can't find it), one should win at life based on the rules of their own game; and as I amend it, one should not judge others by the rules of their own game. If eating peanut butter daily is what makes me happy and successful, that shouldn't mean that you are failing because you don't eat peanut butter daily. (Though you are. I mean, come on.)

This is a long way of saying that this whole essay rests on treacherous ground: the art of finding out where one (read: I) should be at the age of 26, and what is the appropriate path to lead to this point and to extend from this point. The answer of course, is that there is little or no exact answer to those queries, and looking at other people's paths will only add misery and doubt to the pondering process. And yet, here I go.

Last fall on my road trip through much of the continental U.S.A., I visited many of my friends from high school and college. Most of those friends were in my age category, i.e. second half of their 20s. I did not do some sort of list-check to compare the pros of cons of their lives vs. my life, no matter how much I enjoy making lists (very much), but I did listen with interest to the plight of the mid-20 something.

Again, I come from a privileged background and am mostly friends with similarly privileged types. I met few friends who were in dire circumstances: one had the misfortune of moving cross-country to follow a girl who promptly broke up with him upon his arrival; another told me about her parents' struggles to achieve a tenable retiree status due to pension cuts and disqualifications after a lifetime of working as educators; a couple either just had or would shortly thereafter break up with reasonably long-term girlfriends at times where they were, while independent, thrashing about for a direction or a mission in life. Not even the National can spin real sob stories out of those situations. (Well, maybe...)

What impressed me about my visiting and traveling was the number of peers who had undertaken the process of consolidating their self-definition and had launched themselves on a path towards who they wanted to be. 26 is apparently the age for grad school - the number of friends or acquaintances I know in law school, business school, PhD programs, or other MA programs (if not MD programs) has increased tremendously. Even further, I saw friends pursuing dreams with a passion and a focus that thrilled me; two had gone, on separate paths, to LA to pursue Hollywood style dreams; two were invested in their research and academic goals; my brother was in his favorite place of the world and doing all he could to achieve his dreams of making music or movies, whichever came first. And then those who weren't necessarily pursuing dreams were still making life work on their terms: one was a cop and happy about it; another had the next four years of his life planned out and still managed to sound like the same wild-eyed kid who used to try to get lost driving in his hometown in high school.

There are caveats to this pursuit of dreams or this acceptance of the now, of course, in either direction. One of the Hollywood success seekers ended up getting screwed over by his boss, a Mr. Paulie Shore. The cop is on the verge of (if not already having been) getting laid off. Hearts, or at least relationships, have been broken. So the 20-something world turns.

On the one hand, I can 'fess up to feeling pretty good about who I am at 26, amidst the whirlwind observation I have taken of my peers on that trip and otherwise, constantly. I came away from college realizing that I love music, reading, writing, and traveling. I would say my efforts in three of those four fields have been very successful, and I'm still figuring out how and why and in what form I should be writing to feel best about it - I don't think I've achieved the "success" I want as a writer, but I haven't failed either. I have long thought it would be cool to be multilingual, and now I can set a reasonable goal of knowing six languages with decent proficiency and four fluently by the age of 30. Further, I think I continue to plumb the process of becoming the person I want to be, and beyond that I've been blessed to find the person I want to undertake that process with. Shed no tears for me, in other words, and worry not about my whining.

There are sacrifices and tradeoffs everyone makes when blazing through life, one way or the other. For example, as part of sharing in that process of becoming, I will find myself a month from now in Luxembourg. I'm sure Luxembourg will be great. Under no condition, however, would I be choose to live in Luxembourg, a place largely unsuitable to any of my ambitions, whether career-oriented or artistic or otherwise. C'est la vie, as they'll say there, and perhaps the strictures and sacrifices will create new opportunities.

But in contrast to my friends who are carving out a relatively clearer path, who are pursuing dreams, who are having "career" success, I still haven't really figured out what I want to do, never mind how to get there. Another thing I picked up, among the few, in my economics education was the idea that people must feel useful to feel fulfilled. Yes, like most of the useful things I learned in economics, it is a bit of common sense backed with some theory and empirical evidence. Still, it sheds light on the reason I beach on the shore of confusion, of wondering, of the need to defend myself, and not just at home (though, not coincidentally, I'm finally putting this together while sitting in my father's house. Hmm...).

While hardly claiming all trades, I've become a jack of many things, and it's very true that it's hard to do many things well. The idea of a renaissance man is nice, but in practice the well-rounded ideal means many of one's edges are blunted. My resume boasts of a nice variety of positions, but I'm not sure any are strong enough to get a decent job, to get my foot in the door somewhere, to get me on any sort of path. And then there's the problem that I'm not sure I want to be on a path - there's a liberating sensation to not being tied down to a career, to existing as more than a worker. Liberty does little to pay for a room in the hot Luxembourg real estate market, though.

What is 26? Has all this dithering brought us anywhere?

Let's argue that the essay you are now reading is mimetic. That it models itself on the process of living through one's 27th year in the year 2011. The process wanders, it strikes upon a few general themes, it pushes forward in some directions or for some "users" quickly, and in other users' hands and other directions aimlessly. And here we stand, wondering what the point is.

I'm left to make two cultural references that I believe bring this feeling all together. The first is to Calvin & Hobbes. There's a Sunday strip where Calvin goads Hobbes into taking off on his wagon, where they aim to go so fast they will eclipse the speed of light and travel through time. They race past various obstacles, discuss the theory and what they might see in the future, and ultimately crash-land. Upon arrival, dusty and bruised but still enthused, they find that they've moved forward two minutes from the time they took off. That's what 26 is.

Or there's this: "And here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice."

Bob Dylan said that. He was 25 at the time. He's 70 now. I'm 26. I'm still figuring out what I have to say.

Shalom to Israel for now, Attempt #2

2011-06-04T10:47:00.000-04:00

It's probably a cliched place to begin dealing with a country, but the flight into Israel distills much of the country's good and bad parts into a 20-30 minute window, and it's as good a place as anywhere to start, so there I go.

The flight into Israel, however one times it, features a few common elements. First, everybody is usually awake, as a half-hour before the flight lands the flight crew warns everybody over the sound system, repeatedly, that they are not allowed to get out of their seats due to Israeli regulations. Second, passengers feel the anticipation for glimpsing the shoreline, the first view of the Holy Land in all its glory, as it were. Israel is not unique for having its main airport situated a few miles from water. Israel stands unique in the fact that one flies over half the width of the country in about seven minutes from the first sight of the shore to Ben Gurion airport.

So there, all of a sudden, whether in bright sunlight or the eternal electrical illumination of Tel Aviv nightlife, appears the famed Mediterranean beaches, the ever multiplying Tel Aviv skyscrapers, the barren Kikar Ha Medina, and the White City. Two minutes after, the plane is descending over highways and plains, the flat, quiet middle ground between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Three minutes or so later, the plane touches down, and the speed of one's journey through Israel slows, at least.

Which leads to the next special moment of the flight into Israel: the inevitable applause. Most flights I have taken into Israel have, not surprisingly, been filled in the majority by Israelis. Politics, existential issues, complaints, and all the negativity aside, the generalization must be asserted that Israelis love their country. It is easy to be cynical or caustic about this, and I confess that too much patriotism, nationalism, or any ism makes me uneasy, but on the surface, the applause is charming, a throwback to the early excitement of intercontinental air travel and also a testament to the genuine excitement that people, both Israelis and those visitors who join in, eager for their visit, feel for this country. Too much excitement? Yes, but still.

The downside of that excitement is felt 15-20 minutes later or so, once off the plane, through the long lines in passport control, and face to face with the border control agent.

Before I proceed, let me make clear that I'm aware the U.S. is harder to get into than Israel. Many other countries surely are just as stringent on their border policies. Stringency is not the issue with Israel, especially since I've never actually been rejected or really threatened with rejection at the border.

Instead, there is the inevitable unpleasantness that greets a passport that is a little bent, features a ton of stamps, especially many stamps to and from Israel, and no active visa. I restrict the tale to my experiences, though I know others hit trouble either at this same point or at the airport trying to leave, and I've written about that before.

But I have tried speaking Hebrew and English at passport control. I have tried being cheerful and confrontational (though my sense of the impending confrontation always drags on my cheerful efforts). I have entered with and without an active visa. I have told my story unflinchingly, never with inconsistencies or things I would think constitute red flags. And considering Israel has tourist visas available for 3-months anyway, I get confused at the reason for the tough questioning.

The tough questioning comes nevertheless.
"Why don't you have a visa?
"Because our school gets us the visa after we enter the country. That's how we did it the last two years.
"So you're telling me how things are done in Israel?"
Hands up in self-abnegation.
"Tell me, do you think I could show up to the United States without a visa to work, and they'd let me in?"
"I don't know," thinking that I've gotten into Israel without a visa plenty of times, and that maybe she couldn't in the U.S., but at least they wouldn't be total assholes about the process, and yes, politeness does count for something.
"Well, the answer is no, they wouldn't." Stamp on the passport anyway.

Or the time I came back from Rwanda last fall, where I planned to fly out a couple days later from Israel, but didn't have a ticket yet and as such no clear plan. I had no visa that time around.

"Do you have a ticket to leave?"
"Not yet, but I can get one."
"Can you show it to me?"
"I could if you let me use a computer, do you want me to use your computer? Or pull out my laptop?"
"Why should we let you in without a visa?" with a harrumph.
"Why are you not polite? Why can't you be polite?"
In comes the supervising officer in the booth one over. "Polite? This isn't kindergarten, this is border control! We don't have to be polite, this is the border!"
Oh.

Fitting that on that occasion, for the only time in my three years entering Israel, I got sent for a time-out in the back room. Where, ever so maddeningly, all they did was make me wait for ten minutes, then beckon me to follow an adviser to another room, where he had me wait outside, went in with my passport, stamped it, and handed it to me with nary a word. Nothing like a meaningless, no follow-through instance of intimidation to welcome one to a country.

Such are the highs and lows of Israel. The intense joy and pride couples with an aggressively defensive treatment of others from formal agents. There is no distance between private behavior and public-political action. There is little distinction between brother and stranger, for better or worse. All are part of a family, all are treated like family. Family welcomes and opens arms; it also criticizes and smacks harder than anybody else.

***

I do not want to dwell on the negatives. For whatever it's worth, I do love Israel. One's life bristles here, charges with energy and excitement and intensity. Every day poses a fight, a struggle on the streets or the bus or at the market, but the more we fight for something, the more valuable victory feels. It's not for nothing that several different non-native Israelis told me, after a string of complaints about the various things they disliked or even hated about Israel, that they wouldn't want to live anywhere else, that Israel gave them a feeling of truly living, a feeling they thought was not replicable elsewhere.

I also do not want to dwell on politics, though that's one aspect of the fight that exhausts me here. Caring about the future and actively following the present in the papers leaves me in an inescapable state of frustration, confusion, and doubt, one that may trail me wherever I go but that is also specific to my life in Israel. I make no political comment here except to say that I find it a constant irritant that when I discuss the situation with somebody who holds a different political view, especially Russians whom I speak with about this, I hear the response, "But I worry about Israel, I really love Israel," as if my stance on the left means I have no love or worry for Israel. Though I guess my desire to leave is, perhaps, proof that I don't love or worry about Israel, somehow. In any case, I returned for this shorter stint refreshed and thinking I would be able to steer clear of the politics, only to thrust myself back into it after the series of speeches and rebuttals and standing ovations from a couple weeks ago. I suppose it's an early sign of madness to hear voices in your head, but one morning I biked to work and argued with myself in three languages. Such is the life and the madness that Israel can drive one to.

Again, it looks like I dwell on negatives, and I am trying to avoid that. Or in another sense, I'm trying to avoid the sort of reflection that my Hebrew class gave after my first year in Israel. The four of us sat in class with our teacher, a colleague at the school we all worked at, as she asked us what we would miss about Israel. The other three were all leaving after two years there, and I was to imagine what I would miss. The list sounded like this:

Weather.

Beach.

Hummus. And falafel.

Fresh vegetables.

Weather.

Naomi, our teacher.

In other words, not the most positive collection of views about the people of Israel, about the country in its substance, just its dumb luck natural attributes.

But underlying the intensity I harp on is a warmth, a feeling of togetherness and acceptance that quickly veers to anger or harshness if things go wrong. The willingness of the Arab guys to accept my presence in their football game but to fall into confusion or anger when I play the game my way, physical and all elbows and knees (as with any game I play besides wrestling). (Last political aside: my main man in the group was no happier with President Obama than many Jewish Israelis, calling him better than Bush but still "an asshole.") The aid I received on the streets of Jerusalem last week near the government buildings when I asked for directions to Yad Vashem, ("It's a long walk," he said once he realized I was doing the extra kilometer to the Holocaust museum's campus) and the streets of Even Yehuda when going to a party yesterday. The kindness of the local bike shop guy, a religious Jew who knocked his price down 10 shekels for my most recent repair when he realized I didn't have the necessary small change and didn't want to break my big bill, or the local shoe store attendants, one a classic Israeli well-styled macho guy and the other a nice middle-aged woman from Argentina, as I blundered through a second and third attempt to buy a pair of woman's shoes. I bemoaned the lack of American-style politeness at Ben Gurion Airport, and I still don't understand often why Israel and Israelis don't make a tiny bit more of an effort to put on a good face despite things, in the day to day and in the larger picture, but the freshness of daily interactions, the frank quality that avoids idle superficiality, also cuts out some of the social fat from life and leaves a leaner, more power-packed routine. Even when Israelis fall to pleasantries, as when two men will start a conversation that involves three to four phrases each that are all iterations of "what's up"*, there's a sharpness or a humor to them which rescues the conversation from banality. Whatever Israel's problems, banality is not one of them.

*(For example, recently I heard a conversation on the street that went something like this:
"Ma nishma?"
"Ma nishma?"
"Ma itcha, ahi?"
"Klum, ma hadash?"
"Ma inyanim?"
"Ma kore, gever?"
"Ani besder, toda, v attah?"
"Gam tov, toda. Y'allah, ani holech."
"Y'allah, tov, bye."
Translated: "What's up (literally, what will we hear)?" "What's up?" "What's up, my brother (literally, what's with you)?" "Nothing, what's new?" "What's going on?" (What are the issues, literally) "What's happening, man?" "I'm good, thanks, and you?" "Also good, thanks. Ok, I'm going." "Ok, good, bye.")

***

Israel exists sui generis, and with contradictory feelings about its unique qualities. On the one hand, many here would like nothing more than to be an ordinary, if warmer, European country, not isolated in the world, not expected to do anything more than any other country, free to establish their bonds with the west. On the other hand, there is the pride of place, the attachment to history and narrative, and the self belief that emerges from 63 years of existence that many feel has been achieved in spite of the world, not with its help. The frank nature of Israeli life, the aggressive defensiveness, and the intensity of the country can all be attributed, I think, in part to the belief imbued among regular Jewish Israelis that we have done what we have done with no help, and things have worked out; those things could all go to hell in a short time anyway, so why bother with the niceties?

As much as many would like to think of Israel as just like Europe, that framing crops out too much. Israel's Middle East location isn't just a question of politics and weather; the influence of Arab neighbors and the minority percolate Israeli society (as a trivial example, the "y'allah" of the above conversation is an Arabic interjection that is used in both Arabic and Hebrew to mean something like "let's go" (though literally meaning "to Allah"). Ahi, "my brother", also may be derived from Arabic culture. Again, something like the influence black culture has on white America). Israel also treats religion differently than Western nations; this too is a fault line in Israeli life, between the secular and the religious, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, between the modern and the traditional or, horrors, ultra-Orthodox. I don't mean to claim Israel is more religious than Western Europe, for example, but the deadness of Saturdays everywhere but Tel Aviv, the moratorium on work and commerce on most major holidays, and the actual and enforced solemnity of Yom Kippur is definitely a different approach to religion than what I grew up with in the U.S.A. Not that it's a bad thing, necessarily - I like the solemnity of Yom Kippur, and there's something wise about taking Saturday to pause and do less in and out of the house than on any other day - but it is a fact of life here, and another aspect of Israel's special status.

***

The world is either full of places that are sui generis, or else rapidly losing those unique spots on the map as globalization wraps us all up into its stultifying, intoxicating, all-encompassing, ultimately Westernizing bosom. Either way, I am still at the point where I want to move on to new places. Luxembourg, not necessarily my envisioned wildest frontier, represents a chance to savor Europe's fruits definitively, fully, to luxuriate for a few more years in the West before the possibility of renewed adventures and new discoveries, new at least for me. When we look back on our journeys, everything is given a linear logic, and I'm sure Luxembourg will fall into that. After all, learning French would open a few doors in Africa.

As pertains to Israel, I mean to say that I view this departure not as an abandonment of one place but as a chance to go somewhere else. Mired in the haze of my mid-20s, wondering if jack of all trades really is so admirable after all, I should maybe begin to settle a little bit more, develop more of a clear plan for where I'm going or, at least, what I'm doing. And if I had to settle somewhere, Israel would probably attract me as much or more than my home, for example, or most of the United States.

All of which is to say that my time in Israel, spanning at first 26 months and then another 2+ this time around, totaling about 2 full years of time on the ground here, was a success and a thrill and tiring and complete. The perfect introduction to life abroad, in many ways. Never boring. Full of friends from many walks in life, of interesting opportunities and learning experiences and jobs and fun nights on the beach and concerts and various senses of communities, or various communities with their own sense of belonging, of four apartments in three towns/cities, of three bikes (one stolen, one still for sale on craigslist!), of one p.o.s. car, of blessed health and love, of growing pains and mid-20s angst, of (too few) guests and hosts, of learning a great deal of one language (Hebrew) and a few nice morsels of another (Arabic), of speaking another language almost every day (Russian), of visiting Europe and the Caucasus and Jordan and Bethlehem (but sadly, never Egypt or other parts of the West Bank), of arguments and existential debates, of parties and lines on a resume and old acquaintances and new friends and Shabbat dinners and muezzin calls and quiet Saturdays and frazzled Fridays (though never late nights in Tel Aviv), of Tel Aviv the city that will spoil me forever on the convenience of a small city you can walk through, of late nights last summer where I biked home past midnight and Rotschild Boulevard was buzzing with people and warm air and the feeling that as hard as people try to compare Tel Aviv to New York or to Barcelona it doesn't work and doesn't have to, for Tel Aviv is its own beast, and Israel is its own beast, and my destroyed syntax lets me say nothing more except that I am glad for second chances in life: I meant to write this essay the first time I left for what I thought to be "good", for the near term, last fall, but never got around to it, and so when I received the offer to leave my cat-sitting and go work at my old school for the end of the school year, plenty of good came with it, not the least of which is the chance to write my good bye again, one more time, with feeling.

In Hebrew there's a saying, "anachnu lo omrim shalom, anachnu omrim lehitraot." "We don't say goodbye, we say see you." Sayings can be corny, as can eulogistic writing like this, but my second stint is proof of the ever revolving circles of life and the necessity of saying "see you," rather than "goodbye."

In less than a week, I will be at Ben Gurion again, going through a much easier process (I never have problem with security exiting Israel), and getting on a plane to leave Israel again for a while, though I don't know how long. There will be no applause when the plane touches down in NYC, from me or anybody else.

And I will say as I leave, not shalom, but lehitraot, yisrael.

On Patriotism and Independence

2011-05-10T06:00:00.000-04:00

Three summers ago, when I was first preparing to move to Israel, I frequently wore a pair of flip-flops with American flag designs; stars and stripes, red white and blue, non-running colors, and so on. They were my dad's sandals, though, so I had to buy a new pair and give those back to him. When I did, he made a joke about how Israel, "won't be so crazy to have flip-flops like that."

Wolla! Thanks, Google!!

This is where I could paste in a picture of big old blue and white star of David Israeli flip-flops, but I wasn't sufficiently vigilant in finding them on the streets. You'll have to take my word for it: they exist.

Israel is a pretty patriotic place, I'm saying. In a time where some Americans are reconnecting with their patriotic feelings, while other Americans are repelled by the jingoistic overtones that accompany those patriotic feelings, I find myself in one of the few places in the world more patriotic than America. That's not a scientific finding. Nor do I have a lot of hard evidence about how patriotic countries besides the U.S.A. and Israel are; I know Russians are rather proud of their country, and May 8th, V-E day, is a day I'm to remember every year to congratulate my WWII Red Army veteran grandfather for; I didn't notice any overwhelming pride during my two months in Spain, but then not again, I wasn't there during the summer of 2008 or 2010 when the football team, La Furia Roja, took the world and country by storm. I will grant that most countries are patriotic to some degree or another, and maybe it's not fair to rank them on their respective levels of flag-waving and chest-beating. That said, I am sticking to my premise of the U.S.A. and Israel being very patriotic, and focus on those two countries, especially Israel.

(Note: I don't think Luxembourg, my next home, will score very high on the patriotic scale.)

Today is Independence Day. Yesterday was Memorial Day. The juxtaposition is intended to remind observers of the bittersweet struggle for independence and security that has been waged through several wars, ongoing fears, and 63 years, while also attesting to the country's desire for peace and acceptance. (I am not discussing the contemporary political issues of 2011 here, so feel free to read that last clause at face value or as skeptically as you deem necessary.) The holidays, as with all Jewish and Israeli holidays, go from sunset to sunset. Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) starts with a siren at 8pm, where the whole nation is to stand still in silence. There are services that night; the next day at 11am, another siren and set of services. And then that night, on to partying.

This year, there was a unique twist to the combination: Euroleague basketball. Maccabi Tel Aviv, one of the strongest European basketball clubs, something of a Yankees of the Israeli leagues, with all the good and bad that comes with such a connotation, was competing in the Champions League finals against a Greek squad, Panathinaikos. The twist was that once Maccabi made the final, they were slated to play at 5:30, an earlier time than originally planned: the final four organizers in Barcelona agreed to bump up the game to accommodate MTA's wishes to not play during Memorial Day, when all the TV stations go black for the siren and then broadcast services or memorial themed documentaries and programs. The nation hung on both the success or failure of Maccabi's game and the time it took to play, wondering if they could go about their rituals and still see if Maccabi would pull it out.

Though Israelis either love or hate Maccabi in the domestic context, once they play abroad, the team has a full country behind them. The Ha'aretz, the center-left newspaper I read, had an article boasting of Maccabi's fervent fans, outnumbering and outbellowing the other Final Four teams' fanbases while adorned in a sea of yellow, Maccabi's color. Living on a main street in Herzliya, I could hear air horns and cheers from my window leading up to game time, then the hushed attention of people watching the game, and then the dying wheeze of a fanbase that realized it would only be next year - Panathinaikos was too strong.

The positive feelings for the country did not dissipate along with the dreams of Euroleague glory. The next day at school, after a nice, politically correct service about remembrance and world peace put on by high school students, I had a long talk with a new immigrant to Israel, a mother in her late 40s from an NYC suburb who professed Bronx-accented appreciation for her oldest son deciding to move here first and join the army, who wondered how to persuade her younger son to serve the country, and who talked about how her son's commanding officer gave parents his phone number in case of emergency, filling surrogate teacher and parent roles at once. I don't say that I shared oolll of the same views as this mother from oolllmost the Bronx, but it was thought-provoking in the very least.

Last night was the night of the big celebration, from which all these photos (except the shoe) come. I had no plans to go anywhere unless invited to something, but the constant din of horns, both the ones blown by mouth ala last summer's vuvuelzas and the ones kids could just push a button to sound, the little bastards (both kids and horns), and the proximity of Herzliya's festivities spurred me to get out of the apartment. I grabbed my camera and went for a stroll on Ben Gurion street, the main drag in Herzliya, hosting the Yom Haatzmaut (Independence Day) activities and named after the first prime minister and major founding father of the country, David Ben Gurion (the George Washington of Israel, as it were).

The main part of Herzliya, where I am this time 'round, is a nice-sized suburb of Tel Aviv, not far from the city, the beach, or the hi-tech sector buildings located in Herzliya Pittuach, the beach-side of town. Last night, it was mostly host to families; I saw a few older couples, a bunch of high schoolers, but few people around my age who weren't already pushing baby carriages or toting large bellies. The 20-somethings either don't live in Herzliya or make sure to get into Tel Aviv for the night. (Note: last year, when living in Tel Aviv, Amy and I went to a party hosted by one of my M.A. program buddies at which both of us felt awkward, old, and out of place (well, maybe I didn't quite feel old, but you get the point). Then she met up with other friends and went to a party, and I went to bed, this around 10:30pm.)

In that the patriotic holiday in a patriotic country is a family affair, then, it made me wonder about the nature of Israeli patriotism. Undoubtedly, a small nation affords less escape from patriotism and possibly by its size more of a need for unity. At the same time, the contentious nature of Israel's history makes it more essential to cling to the idea of a country. Not to say everyone agrees with "the situation", that all Israelis have conforming views regarding the nation's challenges. More to say that given the ever-present potential for eruption in a political and military sense, and the intense daily behavior everybody engages in, the citizens who stay here will by their nature be committed to the idea of the state; it's the bias of self-selection. I would think that this applies to Arab citizens of Israel and those living in the territories, though obviously through a much different set of circumstances and logic.

There is also the newness of the state and its ongoing sense of danger that propels citizens to celebrate so furiously each and every year (or at least the three I've been here). History has taught us time and again that democracy, while perhaps a noble and desired outcome for all modern nations, does not come about immediately or suddenly, but almost always in an organic process - see Russia after 1991, Germany after WWI, Yugoslavia after 1991, Africa or the Middle East after colonialism, or even the U.S.A. until at least the civil war. Israel is only 63 years old, younger then the U.S. was when it fought itself over slavery; expecting it to solve all its problems is mildly unfair and at the same time a testament to the fact that Israel has done a pretty good job establishing democracy from scratch. At the same time, Israel's situation is unique, and I am one of many who think the country could do much more in seeking a solution, so I'm not nullifying all criticism as unfair.

A local curmudgeon - a mostly left-wing contrarian journalist whom, I sense, most Israelis ignore at this point - argued on one of the previous two independence days that once Israelis get over the celebration of themselves and their great survival that is wrapped in the Yom Haatzmaut national narrative, they can actually take care of the injustice that is the failure to make peace with the Palestinians.

It's mostly a wet blanket argument, one designed to be ignored on the day itself. But removed from the immediate holiday context, it is another thought provoker - would Israelis care quite as much about independence and their patriotism once those things became granted and confirmed in peace treaties and an affirmed right to exist from their neighbors? Is Israeli pride/exceptionalism the result of the conflict, or part of the cause? With peace, would new problems and bugaboos emerge?

Part of that discussion with the Bronxish mother was about how little Memorial Day meant to us in the States as kids - a parade, the beginning of summer, a day off from school, and a barbecue, but not much more. After 9/11, patriotism and the significance of sacrifice and suffering returned to Americans in a way it may not have since World War II. That sacrifice wasn't terribly well shared, and that significance and patriotism became something of a political football, as during the Vietnam War, but in the very least, we became aware of the issues, we Americans who as a nation were and still are, as a Russian condescendingly termed it to me, "childish" in our view of the world, and who have much more to blush and get angry about in both relative and absolute terms than Israel. Is it a good thing that we now think this way, more patriotically and more attached to rituals? That we only got here through a sense of suffering? I don't know.

Just as I was about to go back up to my apartment for the night, where I would stay awake till after midnight, jamming toilet paper in my ears to blunt the incessant if fading blare of the horns, the first round of fireworks went off. Kids previously messing around with skateboards or spray cans shrieked and ran by me to the intersection from where they could see the fireworks. Adults walked over to similar vantage points. I turned around, pulled to the flash and squeal of the rockets.

Fireworks inevitably serve as exclamation points for outdoor celebrations, especially patriotic ones. They are either ineffable joys or simplistic ones, satisfying the inner child's desire to see sparkles and hear explosions. Whatever happens to Israeli patriotism, American patriotism, both countries' desire for peace, or both countries' propensity for war, the ties between fireworks and patriotic revelry are not going to diminish. Neither will the inner logic beneath those ties.

New Orleans Hipsters to Herzliya Arabs - Breaking onto new Pitches

2011-05-07T12:00:00.000-04:00

There was a moment in the game that Monday where a player on the other team stood at little past the mid line with the ball. Though it was a football (i.e. soccer - I'm going to use football the whole article, for consistency's sake) game, not necessarily conducive to man-to-man marking ala basketball, we were only playing 4 on 5 and I was ready to cover him. He stood there, however, with nary an eye towards me, nor towards advancing the ball towards our net. Instead, he looked at his teammate and cussed him out. This opponent of mine, the one with the ball, didn't look all that different than me; he berated his teammate in a language I don't speak, one that isn't too different from a language I do speak, but that to the uninitiated ear has a harshness to its beauty, a harshness that lends itself naturally to ripping into friends.

This yelling, back and forth, went on for about 20 seconds. Were this a true competitive endeavor, I would have had no trouble stealing the ball, sprinting to a breakaway against the distracted keeper, and misfiring on an easy shot. This a friendly outing, at least for me, I sat there and watched the conversation. I, the only non-Arabic speaker in the crowd, may have forgotten to keep my lower jaw from slackening. So when the man with the ball finally stopped his venting and turned his head back to the field of play, the nine of us, aware of the absurdity that featured me in the middle, watching all of this, burst into laughter. The laughter lasted another ten seconds, and then we resumed the game.

All the potential fruits of sports and travel, wherein we cross boundaries, realize anew how differences remain, and play on anyway, those fruits spilled out of those ten seconds.

***

For someone who never played formal football, I've had quite a career with the sport, as it were. There was high school cluster (i.e. intramural) football, where I gained rep as a fearless and athletic if not necessarily good goalie, the type of "intense competitor" who stayed on the field after the finals game senior year, one in which I gave up 5 goals, two of which I still don't hear the end about from a friend on the other team. Then there was fall workouts for wrestling in college, where we'd alternate between ultimate frisbee and football as conditioning games; I was notorious for playing hard and for a zero shooting percentage, my misses worthy of an hour-long blooper reel. For my two full years in Israel, I was improbably the assistant high school football coach, specializing on working with the keepers and the reserves; one of this year's captains still calls my motivational speeches "the best", though I should also point out that the team finished 5th this year in the final tournament without me after 7th and 10th (out of 10) with me.

The football career at the center of this post, however, is even less formal. I refer to the pickup games and local gatherings I've taken part of in various places. The excitement of the World Cup 2006 leading me into a regular game during my one summer in Durham, NC. The games I played that fall in the neighborhood rubber court with the boy from the family I lived with in Moscow, notable for the teenagers, two of them, who would smoke cigarettes during the "halftime" break. The game Ben brought me to in Madrid over Thanksgiving 2008, where the best player on the pitch was a girl who played at Oregon St. The game played in the sunset last fall in Rwanda with genocide orphans.

Here is where I could insert the cliches about the commonality of sports, the shared experience inherent in a game, the way boundaries can be bridged and friendships made over a meeting ground of rules and end lines and balls, all the stuff included in that "potential fruits" sentence that ended the section above, and then remind that there is no larger, more common meeting ground than football. Cliches are nice to lean on every now and then, as Paul Simon said in a recent piece on inspiration and "genius". As such, I allow you the space to lean on that cliche as much as you'd like.

That taken care of, I'd like to avoid the cliche by going into the particularities of these two recent settings, my last two games, one in New Orleans, the other in Raanana, Israel.

***

I lucked into the New Orleans game. One lucks into all of the soccer games they might play. One also creates their own luck. Seek a game and it can be found, as long as one is open to luck.

I lived in a "communal house", as the owner called it, a five minute walk from City Park in the Mid-City area of New Orleans. The house was freezing; the unadvertised downside of living in a warm-weather area is that all the houses are designed to be cool. This makes sense, is a logical approach even, a pleasing example of the convergence of architectural necessity and environmental efficiency. It also means that if the warm-weather area gets cold, due to a natural cycle, a climate change twisted world, or the impending apocalypse, one's abode is miserable to be in. In Israel, this was a problem of tile floors and windows facing North-South to limit sunlight; in New Orleans, big open wood floored rooms with no heating system made nights cold and rainy afternoons more pleasant outside than in. Add in the inevitable disappointment over the false bill of goods that a warm weather area has peddled to the visitor or transplant in winter, and time spent in the house, even for a homebody like me, takes on a significantly lower quality.

Anyway, in this communal house lived four other people. Two were the owner and her husband, she a New Orleans native who had taken on the hijab, presumably upon marriage, and he a Palestinian-American with a heavy Jersey accent, only slightly ground up by his Arabic tongue. Another was a New Zealand gal traveling around the world, paying her way by working as a waitress (on Bourbon Street here; her next stop was Nashville). The last was a Louisiana native of about my age, a nice guy named Bryant who happened to be on a kickball team and, even more pertinently, to organize a weekly football game. Such was my in.

A weekly game on a highly visible if officially private field opposite City Park (we were kicked off this field once or twice in the three games I played there) is bound to attract four different groups to its games:

1. The originals, meaning the founder(s) of the game and then their initial circle of friends who want to play. Keeping it to just this group will ensure a cohesive vision of what the game is meant to be about and what the level of the players will be; the drawback is that unless the founders are really popular, there won't be very big games. In the Israel game to be covered below, for example, I felt that all the players were of this group, with the exception of me of course. Cohesive, but also only enough for 4 v 4 without me.

2. A group of hardcore players, hardcore in the sense that they will show up come rain or shine, Saturday or Sunday, hard week of work or not. In our case, this group did not consist solely of the original members; Bryant invited one or two of them, who then invited the rest of their group, who then decided they needed to take the intensity UP a notch, leading to some friction between the original members who just wanted to play a nice game of footie and those who wanted to play some fucking football, brah!! This friction was resolved before I got there.

3. The semi-regular friends of the hardcore and originals, those who will play once or twice a month, who view it as either an occasional workout to get back to their athletic roots or a social outing (worth noting here I think that, fair or not, about 95% of the athletes at the NO games were male, and 100% for the one game in Israel). Essential to have a regular rotating cast of this group to have a fun, relatively good level game week in and week out. Conveniently enough, until I move to a place for more than a month or two, I fall into this category.

4. Passers-by and other strangers who happen to stumble upon the game via word of mouth or voracious search of a city's fields for a possible game. The biggest wild-card of the four groups, as the strangers can either add a joyous synergy to the game of unexpected quality or drag on the overall group's harmony or level of play. A tough thing to predict, but one can't turn away strangers.

The first time I played was within a week of moving into the house. I hardly knew Bryant, am not the most outgoing person among strangers, and so stuck to my lane. For pickup football, I interpret that to mean three things: volunteering to do the menial tasks that help the game along (playing goalie, fetching the ball when it goes astray in warmups or game time), playing hard but fairly, and keeping my mouth shut except to respond to people talking to me or making jokes in my direction (a smile and a polite laugh is all I need in those situations). Not integrated into the game and not a dominant player (or personality), I carved out the niche of running hard along the outside, occasionally getting the ball on breaks and creating opportunities for my team. I also leveraged my big advantage, besides hustling: physicality. At one point, I bumped into Bryant, who was playing on the opposing team, and threw some muscle into my efforts to take the ball from him. "Oh, hey roomie," he said in mild surprise as we tussled. I made sure to say sorry and put my hands up after I passed the ball away. In my unofficial stat keeping of the number of positive plays I made versus the number of times I messed up, I think I came out in the black, if ever so slightly.

I have long mulled over the words of T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets - "For us there is only the trying/the rest is not our business," though perhaps denuding the statement of its fatalistic/catholic meaning. I consider that to stand as a general prescription for how to lead one's life when existing in the blessed world of the western middle class, where we can expect effort, meaningful effort, to afford us continued opportunities and at least a reasonable subsistence. In pickup football, where no one can really expect anything of a player except effort, this trying becomes all the more singularly essential.

Why I wrapped myself in the protective shell of hard work and amiability, I observed group #2 in action, exhibiting their New Orleans particularity. A group of young fellows more or less my age, apparently NO natives who used to play together in high school or youth leagues, they offered both the upper crust of talent in the game and the majority of the talking, stamping their personality onto the spirit of the game.

Their personality, collectively, was loud and rowdy, reminiscent of, well, young men who like to play sports. Constant slurs and taunts flew between them as they played on opposite sides. I learned, for example, that "Jamook" is a taunt against people of Italian heritage. Also, I saw the plight of the athletic but not exceptionally talented female when playing in this crowd; every time one of the three girls who showed up over the three weeks would make a solid play, the bullhorn of this group would cheer for her: the intention was good, the result a little patronizing.

That said, this group, especially the louder fellows, consisted of mostly nice people. By my third (final) game, they knew who I was and were happy to see me. There was rarely if ever malice in their voices or taunts, just that constant veneer of shit-talking and easy joking that defines behavior and relationships among young males, in America at the very least.

What football, or any group activity, can provide to the traveler, the visitor, the new implant in a city, is a chance to tap into a new network, to find a way to connect to a new population in a new place, through doing something familiar, old. A friend of mine always said that the best way to meet people (I think she and I were talking about potential romantic partners at the time) is by doing the things you like to do in ways that allow you to meet other people. Fortunately, I stumbled on a romantic partner through a job, saving me from the dating scene. But when it comes to the occasional need that I feel, a need most people probably feel more often, to spend time with fellow humans, to interact, to laugh at dumb jokes about one another's physical incompetence, this strategy becomes valuable. Football as a way to make friends, I'm saying.

***

I didn't join the game in Israel because I wanted to make friends. I'm only in Israel for a total of 9 weeks this time around, and have plenty of friends who are still here. I'm a short-timer through and through, and don't need very many friends anyway. No, that didn't interest me very much. I was just seeking a way to workout, a way to run, to expend physical energy in a way not allowed by standing in front of children for 3+ hours a day.

Shortly after my return in late March, I met with my friend Yehuda, and my exercising desire came up. He, no football player, mentioned that he had a group of friends that played at the Sportek in Herzliya every Monday night. The group was a set of Israeli Arabs, at least a few of them students at the university Yehuda and I had just earned our M.A. from. This certainly intrigued me further, and a couple Mondays later, I was on my way to meet with the gang.

Political discourse in Israel finds itself in an interesting, if troubling place in 2011. On the one hand, the distance between politics and life is much narrower here than anywhere else I've been, closer than the occasionally energized U.S.A. in the last decade, closer than the easy benevolence of Western Europe, the unapproachable abyss sundering citizens from their leaders in Rwanda or Guatemala, or the laughable remove at which Putin and co. operate in Russia. The country is small, meaning that people are more likely to know their leaders or meet with their leaders, but more significantly, the issues are more important, matters not of just getting a job or paying an excessive amount of taxes, but of what the country is to become, of peace and war, of, in a reductive phrasing, life and death.

At the same time, Israelis that I encounter appear to be worn out from caring, eager to submerge political discourse underneath the easy calm of everyday life, an everyday life that, when removed from the question of the territories, the fact that most young people serve in the army, and so on, is pretty nice. The weather is great, the economy has done as well as almost any western economy in the post-crisis climate, and cultural life here is unique, a mix of European heights and Middle Eastern zest. Why bother with the difficult issues that affect the country, especially when they're not going to be solved either way?

I don't mean to simplify the situation, nor to judge, at least not as harshly as the above question might appear to do. Humans do not have the capacity to take on constant complexity and moral ambiguity over a period of 10 years, 20 years, 63 years, thousands of years, depending on how you define the situation. Politics are still talked about, still essential, but there's also less reason to talk; most citizens have made up their minds one way or the other, and either the status quo will hold on for the coming years or the logjam will break and the floods of change will reach Israel as well, for better or worse.

That digression takes me away from the story though, and I apologize. I meant to say all this as an introduction to the fact, unfamiliar to many who haven't visited Israel, that there is a large Arab population within the country itself. About 20-25% of the citizens of Israel are Arabs. They vote, they live in mixed communities as well as their own, and they are a part of the daily fabric of life here (for some obvious examples, often Arabs work as gas station attendants, and not coincidentally many gas stations feature good Arab restaurants). Definitely, there is discrimination for the minority, but from what I can tell over my time here, the best historical analogy of the Arab situation in Israel itself would be to African-Americans' place in the U.S. before the Civil Rights movement. Arabs in Israel have more rights, I would say, but there is more intensity to the feelings between majority and minority.

That further digression is to explain that while I had no intention to bring up politics with these Arabs in either an explicit or implicit sense, I thought it would be very interesting to spend some time with the group. I knew Israeli Arabs, either through school or through frequent encounters, but I wouldn't number any as acquaintances even. This was an opportunity to open a window on a different part of Israel. And to run around and kick a ball.

***

I ran to the Sportek just after 9:00pm on that Monday night. The main organizer, Nabil, had mentioned the possibility that the courts would be full in Herzliya (we would play on a basketball court, basically), and that we might have to drive to the next town over, Raanana. For that reason I couldn't bike over either. I ran to make sure I wasn't late.

I got there, didn't see anybody, and called. Nabil and co. had made the decision to drive over to Raanana and somebody would take me in a car. I gave the description of what I was wearing and where I was, and after a while, a cat named Weill (that's how the name sounded, anyway) found me. He called the driver, who brought the car over, full of passengers already. The driver had a long black beard, the type we associate with religious Muslims named Omar (his name). Another car pulled up with Nabil, who shook my hand happily and said we were going to Raanana, so pile in. I squeezed into the first car, a compact, Weill sat next to me, and we drove with 5 passengers over to the next town, I trying to quiet my inner alarm bells.

As cultured and well-traveled and unfazed as I claim to be as a modern liberal citizen of the world, those bells persisted. My concerns numbered as follows:

1. I have just gotten into a car with five young Arab guys I don't know. The one friend who told me about them is a great guy but who knows if his judgment is always the sharpest? Again, for purposes of analogy, think about getting into a car with 5 locals in, say, East St. Louis.

2. Never mind what they might do to me, that's ridiculous - I had already brought very little money with me, I'm unimportant, they came recommended, that's fine. But what if the cops happen to see a heavily bearded Arab driving a car and notice that he is driving a car with five passengers for 4 seats? Wouldn't it figure that there would be trouble? That might not be good for my job security.

3. Did I remember to put on my Tom's of Maine brand woodspice-scented deodorant that night, or just in the morning, and if not, had that morning application worn off?

As usual, these fears were exaggerated and unrealized (well, except for #3, but then, we were men about to run around: bad smells were typical). Weill and I had a pleasant if mildly uncomfortable talk about our university, uncomfortable not only for the clown car conditions but because he wondered why an American would ever bother to study in Israel. I explained that I came to work here and then just studied while I stayed an extra year, but avoided the subject of the Jewish right of return and the identity Jews around the world feel with Israel, sensing that could get us into a drawn-out political conversation that while likely to be perfectly reasonable, would have perhaps been a little premature in our relationship.

We arrived at the court safely and found a couple guys shooting at a hoop on an otherwise vacant court; the adjacent court had a full football game with Israeli kids going, and so we would have to find a way to convince these guys to let us play. These two players, like many of the kids on the other court, wore kippas, denoting their religious beliefs as Jews: if Herzliya is one of the most liberal and secular places in the country, Raanana is a little bit more conservative and certainly more religious: I remember driving through their once and seeing an ad campaign for women's underwear, a series of ads on the median of the main road, crossed out with big white stripes.

This was the other big inner tension I felt during the game; the possibility of friction between our group and any other groups at the park. Again, any fear was unfounded, but as a dovish, grovelling, peace-loving American from a land where everything works (more or less), as a middle brother in all senses, I was eager to see no further tensions emerge. I imagined how Jewish Israelis might perceive the harsh foreign sounds of Arabic or the accent my fellow football players had when they spoke Hebrew (which they did better than me, of course), I imagined them (the Raanana Jews) finding them (the Herzliya Arabs) aggressive, pushy, rude, and them (the HAs) feeling the same way about them (the RJs), and me stuck in the middle, powerless and in between.

Again, nothing really happened. When balls were kicked from one court to the other, each group helped the other get the ball back, as marks typical football behavior. There was no anger spilled over from one group to the other, no signs of serious tension. Well, except for the anger and tension between the two guys on the other team of my game. And that is all well and good on the court in some measure.

The game then, was like many other football games, for me most reminiscent of the ones I played in Russia on a similar rubber court. 4 on 5 made it hard to play truly evenly, and there wasn't quite as much running as I'd like, but the energy was expended ne'ertheless. I was again about a mid-level player, good at running and hustling, not so great with my touch or shot, better than average when playing in net. The other players were in general better with the ball but not as quick or aggressive. It was just a football game, not much different from the one in New Orleans, and mostly different because of the numbers and the ground we played on.

The difference was all in the details. Like how every call or word the others spoke was in Arabic except when they spoke to me (in either Hebrew or English) and then maybe for a phrase or two afterward as they repeated what they said to me or stayed in the foreign tongue unconsciously. Like how Arabic became slowly more comprehensible to me, or at least the sounds became more distinguishable, rising from an initial bouillabaisse of, "ha-ra-wa-la-err-yuu-fa-ras" to words I could grasp, words I could ask about, like himsa ("five", if I remember right) and erjaa ("get back," yelled all too often for the team of four). Like the yelling I started this piece with.

There is little other profundity or humor that came out of that night. We had a good time, the guys dropped me off at my apartment after the game (only four in the car that time), I said I'd come and play after Passover break, I talked with Yehuda about the guys last night. We didn't achieve peace, we didn't become great friends, we didn't get into any fights. We just had a good game, and plan to do it again.

When moving from place to place, a traveler, me or any other, has to devise a balance between experiencing the new place and keeping a sense of self intact. That sense, that balance, is thrown off at times, which is one of the jarring effects of travel, opportunities to change for better or worse. But one cannot always be jarred, and so there emerges a need to straddle the divide between the world, new and foreign, between being with other people and being alone.

Just as doing things you like to do is a good way to meet people, so is it a way to find that balance abroad. The activity remains familiar, the people different, and the time spent more meaningful and amenable at the same time. And when it comes to finding common activities to do with strangers, there's little better than kicking a ball around and running after it.

The Art of Wearing Yourself Out as a Way to Feel Your Best (Really)

2011-05-07T09:42:00.000-04:00

I begin this post sitting at a gate in Ben Gurion Airport on my way to Chicago, via Warsaw. I mention it only to provide a setting, to allow the reader to picture me sitting with my oversized laptop on my lap frying my future children, beat up headphones resting over the ears in a general fashion, guitar curled up at my feet and ready to trip unsuspecting elderly folks who don't look down to notice and scold me in time, hypothetically of course. This setting finds the writer, me, weary but confident, cocky even, about the flight to come, about managing the jet lag and the long flight, strutting over a reasonably comfortable Israeli airport security experience, full of hubris over life and love and all the rest of it. Take what follows, then, aware of my comfortable perch, in a metaphysical if not literal sense.

To catch up with the plot, I returned to Israel to work as a long-term sub for the last quarter of the school year, a span of 2+ months. To be more specific, three weeks ago, I flew to Israel from Michigan. My return ticket is for June 11th. In the best case scenario, it takes two flights that involve about 14 hours of air time and roughly 20 hours of travel time when factoring in layovers, getting to the airport early, and travel to/from the airport. For this very flight (i.e. not the one that brought me to Israel three weeks ago or that will bring me back to Michigan in June), my total travel time, including the train to Michigan, is somewhere around 28 hours. On the return flight in two weeks, it'll be about 38 hours.

I will presume that for the few (two?) people who have waded through the previous paragraph, a few questions might occur. Allow me to suggest the following:

"What are you, nuts?"

"Why the hell are you flying back to the states in the middle of a 2 1/2 month assignment in Israel?"

"Do you keep talking about yourself because you're incredibly self-centered, or just extremely so?"

"How do you manage to travel all that way without feeling terrible?"

Let's stop there. Let's say that I can't really answer the 1st and 3rd questions except to say, "Yes," and "Incredibly" respectively. That leaves us with the why and how of this trip. The why is the most frequently asked, the how more interesting to me at the moment, even if I don't usually go into the mechanics of traveling. So allow me to address those questions, the former with a brief, seemingly unrelated anecdote, the later with the rest of the post to follow.

The Anecdote

Freshman year of college, I returned to school shortly after Christmas to be with the wrestling team. I wasn't competing then, taking a redshirt year at time (i.e. I didn't compete and just worked out with the team), but I wanted to be around the team when they traveled to dual meets in Columbus, Ohio (obviously, I just wanted to be at Ohio State; incidentally this took place just about when they won the Fiesta Bowl against Miami in a great game. But I digress). The whole story about that trip can be told another time, including the part about my pouting about the matches despite not wrestling, and the time we went snow tubing in West Virginia on the way back and our ailing 125-pounder, Mr. Tommy Hoang, miraculously recovered from the back ailments that kept him out of his last three matches the day before to not only ride on a snow tube, but to do so standing up and doing spins and so forth. For our belated purposes, one small moment from that trip will suffice.

On a drive that trip, I'm fairly certain this the night after the matches, we stopped at a gas station. As is my wont, owing to my sweet tooth, I went to the gas station store and bought a snack, almost assuredly a Reese's related product. Our coach, not being fond of poor eating habits, only let me pass because he wasn't watching when I bought it and got into the car. Instead, my triumph was aborted when, alerted by my backstabbing teammates of the possibility I had transgressed, coach's two middle kids, ages 7 and 8 roughly, climbed to the back of the van where I sat and inspected my possessions, successfully ferreting out my hoard of sweets.

Chagrined, I sat in the rump of the van as the butt of the jokes. I have served a long and distinguished career as butt of the jokes, but it does not come without its bad days. That day, annoyed about the totalitarian nature of the food inspection, I had to listen as one of my teammates, the aforementioned Hoang, decided to speculate on what I would be like in a relationship. Since I had only been in one dating situation of 1 month in high school, there was plenty to speculate about.

"Shortman is going to be so whipped," he said to quiet laughter and sleepy heads. "Can't you just see him running to his girl, doing what she commands, wearing what she tells him to wear, being just what she wants him to be?"

"Shut up, Tommy," I may have replied, thinking about how I would someday be a good partner, not a whipped one. Also that his back should have hurt too much to joke like this.

"Shortman, what are you going to do when she starts taking away the things you like?" Tommy continued on this bent for a while, all mostly in good fun, but based as all good humor on reasonably accurate observations. "What are you going to do when she takes away your sweets?" he said finally.

Chagrined, tired, riding the balance between playing along and getting annoyed, I buckled, replying in a somewhat unreasonable though hardly offensive fashion, throwing out a last, pleading rejoinder.
"She'll never take my sweets," I muttered, as most of the van passengers settled into the somber silence of a bumpy nighttime ride, Tommy cackling as he picked up on this feeble response.

I end the scene there, resuming my writing from the cozy casa violeta in small town Michigan, a day and a half removed from a 29 hour in total trip back to the states, to this home. I write hopefully that you will have caught the reason for the insertion of that anecdote, that you will grasp why I have gone from Ben Gurion to la CV, that some of this will make sense. The next step is to explain how I've managed to get up at Amy's silly early hours of 8:30 and 7 am, respectively over the past two days.

(And we will pass over the incident a few weeks ago where a mild dispute between the two of us led to me stomping on a Reese's Big Cup, and what that implies for "my sweets". Quickly.)

The Strategy - How to stay standing after a 6-8 time zone flight

(The reader is advised to consider that my age is 26. I.e., as much as I'd like to tout my strategy and experience and know-how and whatnot, youth may be the key ingredient.)

The westbound trip across 7 time zones is the easier one. If you have control over your itinerary, the best move is to fly in the morning, sometime around 10. Factoring in a stopover or two, you should be able to get to any destination Chicago or eastwards by 6 in the evening, on the late side. Factor in being at the airport 2-3 hours early, taking an hour or two to get through the airport and home if you live a reasonable distance from the airport, and you're looking at a, on the high end, door-to-door time of 21-22 hours. (My trip was longer because I finished it with a train ride and didn't have the ideal times, as will be explained).

Dealing with this travel and the jet lag, then, is fairly straightforward. Sleep a slightly less than full night's sleep, owing to waking up early and staying up late packing and being nervous about the trip. Get to the airport full of adrenaline, which wears off by the first meal on the plane. Then doze for a couple hours. Endure the rest of the day, with maybe one more short nap, arrive at your destination feeling like it's 4 in the morning and you've been up all day, go to bed shortly thereafter, and eccola!, you feel a little weary but more or less in gear.

As an example, on this last trip west to the states (I resume my writing already returned to Israel), I didn't get as much sleep as I'd like on the night before, due to going to bed later than necessary. I didn't sleep as well as I'd like on my first flight, a 4-hour flight to Warsaw, due to the two Russian Israelis behind me who were having a lovely but loud conversation about everything under the sun (they were strangers). I stayed awake for most of the flight from Warsaw to Chicago correcting tests and watching Bolek i Lolek, a Polish cartoon from the 50's (at least, I hope it's that old). The adrenaline rush from my only having an hour and a half to get from plane seat to train seat in Chicago reinvigorated me - and was also needless, as the train was delayed by an hour - and then I finally succumbed and dozed a little on the train ride to Holland, Michigan. That said, I lasted through a door-to-door trek of some 28 hours and had only one really sluggish day to follow, and no nights where my body thought it was 9 in the morning. Success.

(I can add here that while I am young enough to endure days like this, I have never been a natural sleeper, one of those who can nod off at any moment, on a bench, in a car, on a plane, etc. I've trained myself to be a better sleeper (i.e. I've aged?), but it's not an automatic process for me.)

Go Eastward, young man! (See, even the phrase is harder)

Indeed, going east is in its way more difficult. I find as a strategy, staying awake for a 30 hour day easier to adapt than what one has to do going east. To travel east further than a direct overnight to Europe, you have to go through a combo platter: not only does success ride on staying up for long hours on low sleep, but you're best off sleeping on the plane too. If you can't manage that, it's trouble. And if it's a direct flight to your destination, even then it can be tricky.

That is to say, take a typical transatlantic flight. Flying from an East Coast destination, NYC or Boston for example, to Paris is tough because the flight leaves in the early evening, so the traveler is coming off a partly abbreviated day. Still, travel adrenaline makes it hard to nod off right away. The flight will only end up being 7-8 hours. Not feeling like it is time to sleep until the plane is somewhere over the Titanic wreck, the traveler will get a mere 3 hours sleep, piled on top of the fatigue of the travel process. They will arrive to a bright morning, getting to their hotel/friend's home/apartment around 10:00 am. Exhausted, this person will decide they need to take a nap. I will watch this person (you?). I will scream, internally of course, "NOOOO!!!!"

The problem with this scenario, which is just as likely in the longer trips from deeper in the states or to deeper locations in Europe or the east, is that the type of person who thinks taking a nap immediately after a trip, when it's 10:00 am (or just 10:00, since we're in Paris now and there's not necessarily am/pm), is also the type of person who will say, "I'm just going to take a nap, wake me up at 11:30," and not budge until 3 or 4 pm. At that point, feeling almost completely refreshed, that person will stay up at least until midnight if not later. A typical rhythm, a workday rhythm at least, will be hard to find for a few days yet.

So, as Lenin and Chernishevsky both posed, Что Делать?, or in other words, what to do? Revolt against capitalism? Anger Vladimir Nabokov?

No, the solution is not so drastic. I propose two different approaches to handling an eastbound plane, if no help for a downbound train.

1. Mess up with your rhythm a little before the trip. Namely, don't sleep very much the night before. I've long believed something told to me when I was a wrestler, that the sleep you get two nights before is what affects your energy more than the sleep you get the night before. Adrenaline, grit, and determination can carry you through the day after. Two days later, your body has to pay the check, and is out of energy currency in its savings account (earned through sleep) to pay it, leaving you to suffer.

When traveling, sleeping little the night before shouldn't ruin your day. If you're traveling from burbs like, say, Grand Rapids, and you need to fly twice just to get to the NYC flight that will take you transatlantic, that might ruin your day, but one bad night's sleep shouldn't. It should allow you to fall asleep after the first meal served on the plane, though, which will allow for the necessary six or so hours of sleep to get through the next day, if groggily. Again, one long day to endure and then another to adjust the other body rhythms, and the traveler is back in gear.

2. As the clever reader might guess, the other trick is to just suck it up after the fact and endure through that desire to take a nap, then go to bed as early as reasonable. 19:00? 20:00? Whatever.

Again, an example, though one filled with mistakes or exceptions. For my return to Israel, I again went via Chicago and Warsaw. I didn't go to bed early enough the night before (largely Don Draper's fault) and only got six hours. While this looks like a strategy #1 prescription, it left me with a mild headache. I didn't sleep on the train at all, and then was active for a 6-hour layover in Chicago. Next, the flight to Warsaw, on which I got adequate sleep. I arrived in the airport a little fatigued, further exhausted by the long line to go through passport control, and found myself with 12 hours in Warsaw and a fading interest to go into the city as I had planned.

Instead, I dozed on an airport floor for about a half hour, hung out in the airport cafes and worked, pushing through my day as if a warm bed and normalcy awaited me. They didn't exactly await me. I still had a four hour flight that night. For which, though tired and blessed with a whole row of seats to myself (as was the case going the other way from Tel Aviv to Warsaw), I couldn't quite sleep enough. I only got maybe 90 minutes instead of 3 hours like I would have liked. Though I did have my last Lot Airlines meal, complete with a "salad" of one piece of lettuce, one slice of tomato, one of pepper, and two of ham.

All the same, I had no choice but to splice strategy #1 (the short sleep while still in Michigan) with strategy #2 (pushing through short sleep once on the ground in the eastern clime), as I had to go to work about an hour and a half after I arrived home in a cab (door-to-door travel on this trip ended up being 39 hours, give or take a few minutes). Youth and providence won out one more time, however, as I had a light load at work, and so by the time I got home at 4 pm, relatively relaxed, all I had to do was stay awake until 7 before I could have a full night's sleep. That was Monday; Tuesday was fine and by Wednesday I was more or less back to normal.

To summarize the message in this post, which is meant to share one of the few concrete skills I have certainly acquired over the past few years, traveling well, I say the following: sleep less before you go on a trip that spans 6-7 time zones, sleep little on the trip if you're going west and as much as you can if going east, and then do everything you can to stay awake for a full day before you go to bed in your new location at local night time.

Or be young. Either one.

One Ski to the Sky - Fallen on the Trail in Small Town Michigan

2011-03-12T19:11:00.031-05:00

(Note: I guess my New Orleans writing really fizzled out, huh? Ah well, on to more fertile plains...)

The temperature hung just above freezing. The sun lit up the woods in a blessed winter scene, a still snow globe of trees and untouched white ground and silence. Little could disturb the Currier & Ives setting, a state park full of deer and American Beech trees and less so of intruding humans, of skiers like me. There was nothing that could disturb the cozy feeling of walking through, of skiing through a Robert Frost poem. Nothing that could ruin a first winter in three years, a first winter month spent in the solitude of a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan, one so pristine, so idyllic.

Nothing except me lying on my right side, left knee pulsing with pain, voice uncontrollably emitting curses. Nothing except my hubris and surety regarding the safety of cross country skiing and my growing skills on the long sticks. Nothing except the forever fear of the uninsured, the fear of a serious injury with nothing to pay for it. For a few seconds, a minute, it appeared that somehow this beauty would receive its first major blemish, one wholly my fault and, let's be fair, apparent only to me, beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

And even then, rendered horizontal from my point of view and somehow responsible for my woes, the picture remained pretty.

***

A Trail Sometimes Taken, Though Unclear If More or Less Often

When I tell people that I'm spending a month in Michigan cat-sitting my girlfriend Amy's cat while she is not here, people, after laughing at me for a few seconds and trying out their lamest jokes about cats, pussies, being whipped, and so on, ask me, "What the hell do you do there?"

Wait, let me rephrase. Were I to actually talk to people, I imagine that the conversation above is close to what we'd have. What with phone connections and bad internet and cold weather and snow and my anti-social inclinations and all, I don't talk to many people out here.

But if I were to answer that question, the what the hell do I do here, in Ludington, Michigan, a small town on the coast of Lake Michigan known for being a summer vacation spot and for having a ferry that runs over to Wisconsin (the venerable S.S. Badger, bringing you into Manitowoc, about an hour south of Green Bay! That's Baahadger, with the flat Midwestern "a". And no, it doesn't sail in winter), I would say: "Oh, you know, about the same thing I do anywhere - use the computer, cook myself food, read a lot, write a bit, look for work, work out every now and then, listen to music, play guitar, and so on." Such is the glory of the Internet age, after all. It doesn't matter where you live, because there you are, wired and well-connected! And I'm a pretty self-contained person besides, easily lured into the labyrinth of infinite information available online that makes me know way more about way too many things than I need to know about.

I might add, "The only difference between being here and anywhere else is that I here spend time feeding, petting, playing with, and catering to a fat pussy. A fat pussy cat." I tell lame jokes too, sometimes.

The pussy cat in question.

I could, however come up with a list of a few things I'm doing here that I don't normally do. For example:

- Cooking soups. Hearty hot winter soups. Like french onion soup, sweet potato soup, or borscht, the famed Eastern European beet soup.

- Eating those soups. And when I eat the borscht especially, I take off my shirt, so as to not stain my shirt, which would only lead to Amy buying more shirts, offending my anti-materialistic sensibilities. Beets, as I discover when cooking them, are very messy. They easily mess up the counter, the sink, the dishwasher, the floor, the wall, and, eventually, the toilet. The beet tinge washes out of all of those places, but who knows if it washes out of clothes. So shirtless borscht eating.

- Studying French. Though that has nothing to do with Michigan, really, unless I decide to dig up Pere Jacques Marquette's diary and study it for good tips on where the best hot springs and cherry trees are in Michigan. But still.

- Cross-country skiing. Which brings me to this story.

***

Cross-country skiing is a very low-key, quotidian sort of activity. Best done in a relatively flat area with short hills to climb and, one always hopes, slightly longer ones to ride down, XC skiing is a lower thrilled, higher energy workout than downhill skiing. I believe the better one gets at XC skiing, the more of a workout it probably is; my level involved a lot of huffing and puffing, but felt more like hiking than running, say.

Including these past two days of skiing, I have strapped skis on 3 times since I was 14. Up until the winter I turned 14, skiing was an annual activity, mostly of the downhill variety. Some of my earliest memories involve family vacations in the Catskill Mountains - for whatever reason, the steam room they had at the resort remains embedded in my mind as some holy room of warmth and comfort. I could downhill satisfactorily from the age of, say, 8 or so, and enjoyed trying to keep up with my younger brother who was inevitably a faster, more reckless, and better skier than I. Good thing he switched to snowboarding before too long.

When I was 14 and a freshman in high school, I went with my family on a ski trip to the North Conway area in New Hampshire. Between Attitash and Bear Mountain, I had some of the best, most challenging skiing of my young life. We also went cross-country skiing at some trails nearby, my first time on the flatter trails. I remember my mother being fond of it from her Moscow childhood, I remember it being hard, and I remember liking it. That could be a false memory, the last bit, but it stuck with me.

After that winter, I didn't ski again for 8 years. The intersection between skiing season and wrestling season prevented me from skiing for two reasons - more legitimately, that I had no time to go skiing; more spoken though less importantly, the risk of injury from skiing. Not that there's no risk of injury when skiing (I'm pretty sure the Michael Kennedy death happened around the time I was 13 or 14, as an exaggerated and morbid example), but I never really had any good chances to go skiing in the winter, so why bother with the threat? And, as I thought of it last week, cross-country skiing probably would have been a good way to cut weight and a low injury risk anyway. You can't get hurt if you're not going very fast or very much downhill, I figured.

This abstinence ended in a rather ironic way, then: my college coach Clar insisted the team go skiing on our trip to Reno my last season at Duke. My last being, as the final one, my most important season, and this trip marking my return to competition after my time in Russia. As Clar always says, good athletes don't get injured, so I guess I was to prove my athleticism.

Even then, ever cautious, I suggested that maybe I go XC skiing instead of downhill. This didn't fly with the relentless abandon we were supposed to display, and I headed out for the downhill slopes. After a bunny run or two, I realized the enormous intelligence of the body (and believe you me, my body is dumb as rocks as far as bodies go): my muscles remembered how to make it down a mountain upright, even if I had no idea what they were doing. Naturally, I quickly advanced from blue square intermediate hills to following a teammate, who had spent some time as a kid in the Swiss Alps, weaving down off-trail paths and past short trees, rocks, and other natural obstacles. I came out of this with a few falls, at least one instance of splitting a tree (i.e. straddling it with my skis; I'm not sure if there's a technical term for it, but splitting it makes sense - fortunately, the tree was not waist height, or rather, not slightly less than waist height), and a new appreciation for the process of finding a path, of going fast for two seconds downhill and then stopping to consider the next turn, and of earning a route. Blitzing downhill for a sustained time is fun once or twice, but the rush gets old; this sort of bit-by-bit downhill skiing really appealed to me. I hope to do it again.

In the meantime, there was at last the option of XC skiing again. Michigan, and the Midwest in general, is not known for its hills or mountains. Stranded here by the water in the middle of winter, with little to do and time on my hands as ever, I was free to try this old hobby out and see if it still suits.

After a day where I didn't leave the house or dress in anything sturdier than pajamas, I took the long walk of three blocks through Ludington's downtown and dropped in on the local sports equipment shop. I inquired as to whether one could rent cross country skis, and if so, how much it would cost. "You certainly can," the woman working there told me. The price was reasonable. I left the store and trudged another giant block to the local fresh foods store (this was the day I cooked my borscht).The next day, I saved my energy and drove to the ol' sports shop. The same woman helped me along in picking out my skis, my boots, and my poles (all for one low price), and within ten minutes I was back in my car and on my way out to the park.

Ludington State Park, home of sand dunes and ranked #1 state park in the Midwest, lies near the Lake Michigan shore, in between the great lake and a more local one, Lake Hamlin. Driving there, an 8-mile trip or so from the center of town, involves taking Lakeshore Drive, a.k.a. Michigan Route 116. The first half mile the driver can see the lake, then the shore juts out and the road runs over a bridge traversing Lincoln Lake, a lake now frozen; looking to the left, the driver will see a beautiful home perched upon a hill overlooking the bridge, and on the left just past that is a golf course, suggesting this is the more affluent part of town. Past the golf course, one takes a left as Rt. 116 splits off from Lakeshore Drive and goes more coastal again, and this is where things get interesting.

Lake Michigan's Wintry Shore.

On the right, dunes of eight to ten-feet height vary with a little outpost home and flat territory. On the left, an eight-foot tall or so sand dune covered with snow and patches of sand sticking out like missed shaving spots stands as the only barrier between the eye and the lake. Dunes of course undulate, and so the careful eye can spot Lake Michigan in all its glory. Its winter glory is an interesting brand, with a six to ten foot layer of ice stretching from the coast outwards; six to ten feet from the coast I mean, a width measurement, the length stretching as far as the coastline goes, and I can't tell you the depth. Then there's the steady water, clean and chilly even in summer's peak, when the savvier beachgoers get out of town and drive these extra ten minutes for relative seclusion compared to the downtown beach, surely hypothermia-inducing at the end of February. But the shoreline is beautiful, and one looks out due west to watch any number of technicolor sunsets, with a bluff sticking out to the south to add to the picture.

I visited Ludington State Park to ski four times in the past two weekends; rentals go for 24 hours at said local shop, convenient enough to ski immediately after taking the skis and immediately before returning them. My first trip involved a lot of blundering around to find the trail and, in the end, about an hour and a half of skiing. The next day I lasted about 3 hours, skiing on the trail, getting lost and losing track of the trail, and then finding it again at the mystical #6 checkpoint that I had sought so desperately while being lost. A week later, after a new, light snowfall, I went back out to the same trail, the LSP South Ski Trail, and blazed my own ski tracks on the trail, mostly without getting lost.

The accursed signpost #6.

By the end of three days, I learned not to follow cloven hoof footprints in lieu of the trail; not to expect deer to stand still long enough for me to reach into my backpack, pull out my camera, and take a picture of them; and not to discount the reliability of the following survival pack: the aforementioned camera, notebook, two stubby pencils, two Reese's peanut butter eggs, an apple, and a bottle of water - that can keep the energy going and the body safe and sound for a while. I fell every which way possible - dramatic one ski to the sky losses of balance, mundane stumbles forward while going uphill, self-induced crumples for safety when concerned about veering off trail on the occasional downhill, falls where my ski got caught in a low-hanging branch or stump, and laughable series of falls from getting up the wrong way after falling one of the other ways previously, climaxing in a four-falls-in-two-minutes stretch. I also witnessed a large family barbecue (i.e. 50-60 folks grilling in the snow on a Sunday afternoon); the utter silence of the woods on two of the days especially, with no sound except for broken branches creaking, wind blowing, and my clumsy tromping through the snow; that silence observed and disturbed by a woman who walked along the trail and talked to herself, saying, "You're a crazy woman, you're a real trailblazer," moments she lifted her head and noticed me approaching from the opposite direction - the red in her face, I imagine, was equal parts embarrassment and physical exertion in the cold; and, of course, the beauty of my surroundings when sprawled flat on my back after many of those falls.

A Split Stump Fall, the Aftermath Of.

My skiing had improved too, despite the falls. I progressed from arrhythmic strides, terrible downhill-to-straightaway transitions, and overall slow movement that was more akin to hiking with really long shoes (the ski coming off the ground much to often as I tromped through the snow) to occasionally on rhythm strides, the ability to maintain downhill momentum some of the time, and more frequent ski to ground coverage. In other words, a slight improvement; by my fourth day, I knew just enough to be dangerous to myself.

On a fine Sunday, cold enough to preserve the snow but with a surplus of sun and a surfeit of wind that makes for ideal winter sports conditions, I trekked out for the fourth day. I decided to seek out the North Ski Trails, employing the unfailing logic that if the trails I took the first three times were known as the LSP "South Ski Trails", there must be a North Ski Trails set (I learned this from Encyclopedia Brown books). After an initial trip along the roads, I found my hypothesis to be correct and landed upon those North Ski Trails.

The North trails were simpler, a little shorter, and less exciting to observe on a map. Where the South Ski Trails had three or four loops over 11 checkpoints, the North Ski Trails featured a straight shot from checkpoints 1-4, then a loop around a 5th checkpoint, #9; hiking trails intertwined with the ski trails, adding many checkpoints for paths not groomed for skiers.

Despite its limits, the trail offered plenty of its own beauty, with a wooded forest that felt both more dense and more open, somehow, maybe due to the presence of the sun falling on my head. In addition, my legs' energy and general enthusiasm both ebbed a bit; I had skied about three hours the day before and didn't feel much of a need to repeat that feat as I cruised along, again alone and surrounded by nature's low volume. The trail ran at least an hour and a half without interruptions, especially at my slower than usual pace. There was no need, I'm saying, for me to branch off trail.

And yet, there I broke off from #3 to try the Lighthouse trail, plenty long and most certainly a hikers' trail and not a skiers' one. I figured that out when the trail led me to the top of a dune, and then gave no indication where to go on the other side of the dune. Later, after backtracking, backtrack being one of the most defeatist verbs there is for the masculine mind, I saw on the map that I was indeed meant to continue across the dunes to get to the Lighthouse. I conceded that my backtracking was not only practical but the only realistic option.

I skied around the trail dutifully, musing about creating sports blogs and European rail systems. The trail was unspectacular only in comparison to the South Ski Trails - the North held even more of the understated, low-frill thrills that make up XC skiing; easy downhill glides, a laid out path to follow, and less than too difficult climbs, with the woods all around. All I seek, all I sought from my skiing is the space to think, to sink into a reality divorced from my computer and the technological needs of the modern world, to allow my body's natural desires for movement and exercise to express themselves, and I sought for all of this in a palatable, entertaining, and occasionally challenging setting. So far on that day, I had received all of this. I had had enough.

And yet again, when I got back to checkpoint #3, I decided to go a different way back to my car. I decided to take a hiking trail again, the "Coast Guard" trail, thinking it wouldn't be much longer, and would offer fresh territory. I noticed that somebody had skied there before me, as there were grooves to follow. I presumed that I would be fine.

The trail ran fairly narrow; wide enough for one person, but hardly a lot of room for error. Scattered trees lined the trail. I began going up, and anybody knows that what goes up must come down. I came to a bluff as it were, a peak in the trail before a short downhill, a little left-breaking curve of about twenty meters. Nothing special about this curve except perhaps the combination of the elements mentioned in this paragraph, combined with my dangerous knowledge and my wearied attention.

In any case, I started down the short slope, hesitated as I didn't have great control, feared hitting a tree, leaned to my right either to fall or to stabilize myself, fell, and left my left ski behind, catching either snow, ground, or a root and wrenching my knee and ankle. Which brought me to the cursing.

My first thought as the pain shot through my knee was that a ligament had gone. My second was that I needed to take off the skis and straighten my legs to assess. I poked the buttons on the skis off and began feeling around the damaged area. I found all three ligaments known to me to be in place. Relief washed over my uninsured joints. I had dodged a bullet, considering.

The next step was to get up, test the knee, and get moving. I stood and found that I could bear weight. My initial reaction turned out to be my most overdramatic response to pain since I thought I needed arthroscopic surgery on my knee in 5th grade when I woke up and couldn't bend it; I had been reading about Mary Lou Retton and her similar injury, which explains my fears over missing out the LA Olympics (the solution to this "injury" was to take a few pills and wait a few days; it's something of a mystery to me when I think about it). All in all, it looked like I would live without need of helicopter rescue.

After a more mundane fall, the only pain to the ego.

There was still the matter of finding my way back, and how to do it. On the one hand, walking was probably hardly easier on my knee than skiing, and slower for sure. On the other hand, another hesitant ride on a narrow turn might not be so good. The head said walk back to the previous trail and then ski on known paths. The ego said get back on the skis, tough it out, don't hesitate, and get home. Naturally, after walking through that first bit where I had fallen, it was on with the ego's decision.

I plunged forward, first on boots, then on skis slowly down a stupidly placed downhill trail (seriously nature, what gives?), and then trudging along through the hiking trail. The trail dragged on. I wondered why it was so much longer than it looked like on the map. I wondered whether eating an apple instead of candy helped or hurt my energy levels as the trail kept going. I wondered how I ended up in the campground cabin area and whether that man walking out of his truck was going to follow me and abduct me for reasons unknown and best not speculated about. At last, much to my wonder, I came back to the initial, roadside trail that would lead to my car, the trail where earlier I had seen someone riding on a sled pulled by three dogs. Ahh, Michigan. I limped on in.

So ends my overdrawn, not quite as dramatic as 127 Hours story about skiing. A week later, I still ice my knee and ankle and take aspirins and wait to see if the weather and my body will cooperate for me to go out on the trails for one more two-day stretch. I promise to myself that I'll stay on the trails. Or at least, I won't hesitate when I veer off.

At least, if I don't get any more skiing this winter, I hear Luxembourg has a few trails, so it won't have to be a 12-year wait till next time around.

Couple o' Cafe Reviews (and a bookstore to Boot)

2011-01-18T21:48:00.000-05:00

Introduction: I'm not sure if I'm going to do this kind of thing a lot. I can't say I'm an aficionado of "travel writing" as a genre, but I know that the stuff published in most newspapers, namely stories about where the writer ate, stayed, and visited specifically, with recommendations for travelers who want to follow their footsteps exactly, is not very good, to put it lightly. Nor do I desire to be a restaurant reviewer, though I always have a soft spot for a good review.

After eating at the two places to be covered yesterday, I got the idea of writing about them. I think I've rationalized it in this way: I would like to share experiences at specific places that I found to be positive. I thought it would be fun to write about this. But mostly, in figuring out why people are in New Orleans and what they do, and why I'm in New Orleans and what I do, and also what and how I write, I thought this might be part of that exploration, in a helpful way. And so, on come the reviews of New Orleans establishments, maybe for the only time, maybe as a series.

Of course, I'm not sure why I bothered to write this self-justifying introduction. Between the fact that this is my blog and I do what I want, and the fact that I have about, if I flatter myself, 4 readers, all of whom will be supportive, I don't think it really matters what I write about. A writer is a writer is a navel-gazing solipsist is a writer, I guess.

Eco Cafe -

On Monday morning I went for a walk eastward. I sought not the morning sun but a bicycle shop I deemed to be closest to my hotel; I needed a lock for my newly purchased used bike. I wanted to find a place to have breakfast, or at least to have tea and a pastry. I strolled through Mid-City thinking I would probably have to go past the bicycle shop and over towards Esplanade Avenue, which held, I had read, a few eating establishments. I crossed Canal Street, began walking past this main road, and then noticed the Eco Cafe.

If we continue the theme of first impressions that I so ponderously introduced in the previous post, we can explore why this cafe interested me, impressed me enough for me to stop in my tracks, retrace my steps, and tread curiously on the stone steps leading into the cafe. People, two men of a distinguished age if I recall, ate inside, which caught my attention - the place wasn't deserted. The place advertised that it served coffee, breakfast, and lunch. In the end, I helped myself to none of those things, but this still seemed significant. The pleasant red vinyled-building and the confusing existence of three sets of stairs that could serve as entrances to the cafe (I believe only two actually did) also attracted my attention. Ultimately, the fact that the place was on my way also played a major role.

In any case I entered. I met with a kindly New Orleans dame, also of distinguished age (both servers fit into this description, actually). I asked for tea, and then if they had any pastries: they didn't, only bagels. But there in front of my face, protected by a plastic cover, stood a most tantalizing piece of chocolate cake, the type of chocolate cake that is so luscious there's no place for asking about the price. I said I'd take that and she warned that if I didn't, she would, and we laughed as she offered to bring the tea and cake to my table. "I'm going to put the tea bag in the water first," she said, "I had an Englishman come in who showed me how to do it right." Reassured, I sat down by the window.

That's most of what there is to say about the Eco Cafe. Coffeehouse or cafe tea, 95% of the time, is straight from a bag and no better than what I can make at home when I don't have any infusers or tea pots, and worse than what I can make when I do have the tools. I fully acknowledge that when I order a tea in a cafe, I am spending $2 or whatever to enjoy the atmosphere and feel ok about it, like I'm not gypping anybody because I sit at their otherwise unoccupied table and read or write or judge others or what have you. The atmosphere at Eco Cafe was nice on a sunny MLK day morning, with sunlight streaming in through the windows, a sparse crowd, the kind servers, and unobtrusive music on the speakers (if any at all - I can't remember, proof of how unobtrusive it was). Eco Cafe filled the bill, in other words, despite being in a quiet area.

But what has to be covered is the chocolate cake.


How can one not cover this cake (with saliva, forks, hands, teeth, etc.)?

I didn't expect the actual cake part to crumble in my mouth as it did; I thought I was going to get moist, almost juicy cake. Instead it crumbled, broke apart in neat cubist fashion but hardly stale - if I counted up all the great-looking cakes I've eaten that have broken my heart due to staleness, unexpected nuts or fruits embedded inside, or the horrible realization that it was a German chocolate cake, it would easily outnumber the number of fair maidens' once innocent hearts that I've broken. Easily. Karma I guess. This cake did not break mine heart.

It wasn't a perfect cake, though it was better than the purported best chocolate cake in the world I sampled in NYC. As you might guess, if the cake didn't disappoint but wasn't perfect, that probably means it was a little too much of a good thing. The frosting and the inner chocolate (the chocolate that splits the cake, you know what I mean) was stickily rich, just a little too much so. I'm not complaining; I loved the cake and would return. When a piece leaves me weary and not sure if I want to finish or throw in the fork, it's not a comment on the cake's lack of quality. The quality was there, and then some.

Oh, and despite being too luscious-looking for me to ask about the price, it weighed in at a dainty $2.50. In these modern times, one cannot complain about that.

Corner Muse -

Later on Monday, equipped with my new used bike and already moved into my room for the month, I cut through the Big Easy streets as if New Orleans was my oyster. A muddled metaphor, but in any case indicative of the surge in joy and freedom I feel when I'm on my own in a new city and blitzing through the streets on a bike, able to see the architecture and the people at a reasonable pace while still getting where I need to go when I need to (admittedly, I didn't really need to be anywhere at anytime), flouting the traffic rules with relentless abandon (something that used to drive me crazy as a car driver; in Israel I would justify it by saying I had little alternative, and everybody drives like that anyway, car bike or motorcycle; now, I just accept my role as rule-flouting traffic pest), able to get to all the parts of a bikable flat city like this one. Somebody told me Uptown was a good place to check out for young folks, which makes sense as it's near Tulane and a couple other universities besides. Magazine Street is the major shopping street in New Orleans from what I've read (though my investigation has found it to be more eclectic and bohemian than I thought, far closer to Durham's 9th street or Toronto's Kensington Market than LA's Rodeo Drive or Chicago's Michigan Avenue, and yes I'm showing off in ass-like fashion) and leads through the Garden District, home to many cool mansions, and Uptown, so I thought I'd take it. I didn't make it to Uptown until Tuesday, though, and finding the Corner Muse was a large reason for it.

Again, circumstance played a big part; the sun had already begun its westwards drift, I ready to eat had been on the lookout for a likely spot. While a part of me feels that it is better to explore as many options as possible in moments like this, another part of me senses that when a good option appears, one should take it. Corner Muse, with its purple and gold sign and its humble outdoor tables, appeared as that good option and I, a hungry young man of means as it were, took it.

The owner/server greeted me kindly and enthusiastically, breezing about the room as she waited on me and said hello to everybody in and near the coffee shop (I mentioned her in the previous post). I noticed at one point that a piano sat in the corner and that the cafe advertised live music; I naively thought to ask with my own amateur performance career in mind (I dance on my head while playing a bike horn in each foot, you gotta check it out) about the music. She gave me a genuine response, maybe knowingly, that served as the best possible response that didn't involve, "You play? We were just looking for someone for tomorrow night..." She told me that the music is geared towards kids who attend the school next door; Celtic music is on the bill in February, for example. I thought this was great. Unfortunately, I didn't think to ask, "So, do any of those kids like songs about minivans?"

The cafe was also sparsely populated and played pretty standard coffeehouse for the modern young person music; yes, that's right, they played Fleet Foxes, which I've definitely heard in cafes in at least two other cities, one in another country. The food they served was cheap and of high-quality: I ate a chicken salad sandwich that was actually a chicken curry salad sandwich, i.e. the chicken was curry sauced, which I found interesting and tasty if not extraordinary. Also, grapes on the sandwich, a nice touch. I also ordered an apple, a tea, and a very tasty cupcake that was essentially a Hostess chocolate cupcake, cream filling and all, if someone actually baked it. All this for just a shade over $11. Again, conceding that I paid a little bit for atmosphere and the right to sit somewhere besides in my room at my computer while I read and wrote, and that it's not quite nice enough to go lay in the park where it's free, it was a good deal. The Corner Muse is a new place, I think, but they're doing the job right.

Blue Cypress Books

My bike ride today took me to Uptown through the back way, the Northwest. It was again a high as a kite bike-riding day, at least until my bike chain snapped off (a story not for here, possibly for there). On my planned route, I stumbled on an interesting little street whose artisan signs drew my attention, drawing me away from my plan. The street was Oak street, a street home to a few cafes, the Maple Leaf Bar, and a bunch of other shops, apparently all local (i.e. not founded by carpetbagging Yankees, or at least newly carpetbagging Yankees, I infer). A nice community feel hung in the air over the street, even though it was mostly empty as it might well be on a January Tuesday about noon.

I detoured down the street, going until the signs stopped popping up, and then returning down the other side. Oak street is a little one, better compared to Durham's 9th Street in size and scope than Magazine Street, for example, so this detour didn't take me long. Didn't take me long, that is, until I decided that I just had to check out Blue Cypress Books.

It was just a used book store, not very big and not necessarily boasting anything unique except a few New Orleans themed shelves and a gray calico cat who, once she sniffed out my dropped backpack, was very upfront in getting to know me as well. Additionally, I am in a position where the last thing I need is more books; I brought 7-8 books with me, more than enough to make it through the month, and there are books at the house I'm staying in that I'll want to read if I get the chance. Buying books, no matter how cheap or interesting they are, is not what I need to be doing.

So consider it a mark of the quality of BCB's selection that I walked away with four books to stuff into my backpack, including one hardcover. My back and spine can justly complain to upper management about the wisdom of making them carry more weight for the rest of the day on my ride. I'm just afraid that upper management, while dutifully listening to their pleas, will do nothing about it, as they are the ones after all who benefit from the books.

Ok, that's enough for today. In case it hasn't come through yet, I am enjoying my time here. We'll see what's out there tomorrow.

New to N'awlins: Or a collection of Three Days

2011-01-17T22:59:00.001-05:00

Let's face it: first impressions matter. You are familiar with this tired refrain, yes? Well, it's true; there is no doubt that a given first opinion about a given person, place, food, et al. is significant. Lasting even.

Prejudices also matter, for that matter. We'd all like to believe we live unprejudiced, open-minded lives (well, not all of us, but you know what I mean), but we definitely have pre-first impressions about certain things, ideas that form our perceptions, which make up for half of the fateful first impression.

We should not linger on first impressions overlong, of course. First impressions, like prejudices, usually fail to ascertain the essence of a given object, as do in many cases second, third, and nth impressions. Allowing a first impression to define a view about someone or something is lazy and lame. This is one of the more frustrating things, for example, about applying for jobs or schools or anything else, the sense that all the applicant has is a fleeting window to make a positive, though superficial first impression, an impression that is his/her only chance to win the position or at least earn a longer window for making a deeper impression. There's no way around this in situations like open application processes, of course, but in our personal experience we should make sure to consider the pernicious effects of lazily allowing our first thought to stand unedited.

And with that, I dismount from my high horse and present to you the prejudices and first impressions that have guided me in my first three days visiting/living in New Orleans. I'm here for a month (at least), which reminds me of my two month visit to Madrid and allows me to test my new hypothesis that the 1-2 month stay is the best way to visit and get to know a city if you are not prepared to move there or anything crazy like that. Cheap room off craigslist, cheap used bike (also off craigslist), and a heavy dosage of Google Maps and online investigation to set up my activities for the month: this is how we get along in 2011, it seems.

Anyway, I present first the prejudices I have compiled about the Big Easy derived from popular culture and friends' reports, and then my initial impressions, sure to be laughable to me by the end of my month here, from the long weekend. Onwards with shallow thinking, yah!

Prejudices:

Live and Let Die, my favorite James Bond movie, was largely set in a decaying, brass band at a funeral New Orleans, good ol' N'awlins and all that thing. The movie pit, as my high school friend aptly and bluntly put it, Bond against just about every African-American (as well as African-Caribbeans from Haiti and/or Cuba if I recall correctly) in the world, excepting the one or two characters on his side. Hmm. At least this may prepare me for considering the actual racial tensions that I suspect are present in the Crescent City.

There are some cultural touchstones that among well-read people spanning from my age to maybe 15 years older have gained so much currency as to be cliche. Neutral Milk Hotel, great as they are/were, are a good example of this (also not completely irrelevant - Jeff Mangum is from Ruston, Louisiana if I'm not mistaken - sure that's all the way across the state and no doubt a completely different setting, but still). If A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole isn't, it should be. And I think it is a book that stands as something of a badge of pride for New Orleans; I found a statue dedicated to his famous character Ignatius J. Reilly on Canal Street, one of the main boulevards in the city.

For all the significance of the book, I can't remember a ton from it that influenced my view of New Orleans; the Reilly character overshadows much of the rest of the book, and my copy of the novel is currently indisposed, preventing me from brushing up. I remember the crazy feeling of the novel, the crowds and the pushing and what not, I remember (or remembered after hearing my shuttle driver say his accent was either New Orleans or South jersey) the preponderance of Jersey emigres in New Orleans, and I remember, well, again, Ignatius J. Reilly. Humph. I read another book last year, Tom Robbins's Jitterbug Perfume, that took place partly in NO and is quite a good book, but didn't tell much about New Orleans beyond the obvious.

Then there is of course that obvious: New Orleans as a birthplace of jazz, home to Satchmo Louis Armstrong, for example. The Creole and Cajun and French and Spanish roots of the place. Katrina and the flooding and the canals and the gulf spill and everything. Who Dat and Dem Saints winning last year's Super Bowl (I'm sure it would have been a crazy arrival if I entered New Orleans with the Saints still in the playoffs; I'm not sure whether their losing was a good thing or a bad one for my purposes). Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, and the French Quarter. Those are the pieces of information (represented here in trivial sentence fragment form) that helped me form my initial picture of New Orleans. A crazy, high energy, low prosperity, possibly disharmonious city that knows how to get down, more or less is the picture I formed.

First Impressions
Southern Hospitality - Most people I have come across have been pleasant. In every eating establishment except the most touristy (Cafe Du Monde on Decatur), the service has been kind and timely; at one place, one of the overseeing waitresses (managers?) kept making sure I was taken care of and calling me baby (she couldn't be much over 30); at another, the older staff joked and smiled with perfect kindness; at a third, the cafe owner occupied the energy center of her corner cafe, engaging with her few guests, waving and talking to any and all passers-by - all acquaintances of hers, and providing a good and cheap menu to boot. At one eatery, the hospitality was of the faux-hostile form, i.e. when I asked to get the order for here, the owner good-naturedly scolded me about how I was getting it to go because it was closing time and time for them to go home if not for me.

I also had an exchange with a bus driver that made me smile. The bus driver greeted me by saying something like "What's chirping with you, champ?" (I really didn't hear what he said, but I remember "ch" sounds). A woman stood next to him, so I thought maybe he was talking to her. Then I thought maybe he said it to me because she didn't respond. So I said, "What?"
"Hello, sir, how are you doing tonight?" he responded with exaggerated diction. I found this all charming.

Colors - I haven't wrapped my head around New Orleans's layout, housing design, or overall set up, but the architecture has general themes to them: there are columns and balconies or roof space on many of the buildings, which along with the frequent vacant lots lends an air of decadent decline (an impression definitely emerging from my prejudices, I should say). There are neighborhoods I'm not comfortable walking in after dark that look mildly dilapidated but also joyous and grinning in the daylight. And New Orleans seems like a place full of residents who exude pride in spite of it all.

Mostly, I would attribute that to the colors of the houses. Purple and gold are common colors (possibly official ones) down here, but houses also come in greens, pinks, yellows, blues, and reds. It makes me think that, if color is your thing, why would you ever to paint your house anything less than an exciting, bold color? Why miss the opportunity? Looking at some of these houses, I felt a sudden yen, I of all people who is the last in the world truly concerned about this sort of thing, I felt the desire to own a house, if just so I could paint it cool colors (I'd accept a brick house too, I guess, but cool colors are, well cool).

Why people come to New Orleans - I sense that, should I decide to do some serious exploring in New Orleans, and further to use this blog space as a platform to catalog said exploration, I will have to discuss the societal tensions that to me seem to be obvious in New Orleans. Again, first impressions are shit, so I'm sure I'll revise or deepen that observation if I choose to pursue it, but there are at least three different major populations that I've come across that could cause tension for one another, or that I've heard cause tensions for one another, or so on.

There are people who live in New Orleans because that's where they're from and they have little choice or consideration for leaving. I will not get ahead of myself any further than to say that I suspect that this is largely a poorer community, and that the ethnic makeup is significantly more African-American than the other groups.

Then there are the people who have arrived in New Orleans in the past five+ years to help revitalize the city in Katrina's aftermath, among other things. This would be a more affluent, white, young community consisting of today's relatively hip and open-minded 20 and 30-somethings, or tomorrow's yuppies. We'd like to think this group is wholly noble and selfless, and will blend effortlessly into the community and buoy all its members. Of course, while most people in this group are good people doing good things, that doesn't mean that the previous statement isn't rubbish. Even if well-meaning, these types can easily create some dissonance when contrasted with the first group. It reminds me of classes last year where we talked about how UN Peacekeeping forces, even when meaning well and following the rules, completely disrupted the economic system in the areas they worked, because the money and needs they brought with them distorted typical market calculations. I wonder if similar things happen here.

Lastly, there are the tourists. Tourists are usually easily ignored, laughed at and brushed aside. Here, where it seems to be a big part of the city's identity, and where the reason tourists visit is so in-your-face - my brother described to me how some people call San Francisco "Neverland" due to the prevalence of 30 and 40-somethings who refuse to settle down and continue to live in the city and party and live the wild life (I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, really, if that's what they want to do, but I digress); New Orleans seems to be, along with Vegas and probably a couple other places, the tourist's Neverland, a place where they can come to forget all morals and values and just have a fun time, because that's what people do here - it is probably harder to deal with that. Add in the large numbers of the young people in group two who do everything they can to show they "fit in" and are true locals, and it makes sense that group two might despise group three.

Before I mock group three too much, however, I should pass on what a native (though someone who doesn't fit into my neat categorization: drat!) told me when apprised of my plan to leave New Orleans in mid-February: that it was strange I was leaving before Mardi Gras, and that whether one parties or not, Mardi Gras is a good time to see the city put on its best face. There's no need, then, to say that partying is inauthentic or as make believe as Peter Pan or something.

Anyway, I'm going to watch out for the tension, among other things. You know, when I'm not face down drunk at the feet of a lady of the night just off of Bourbon Street So about once a week, in other words. That's the beauty of the 1-month stay, however; it's long enough to get over the first impressions but not so long as to make it feel too much like home or stale to me (not that it feeling like home would be bad, but I might not have the time).

I'll end this with a line from my friend JS, who told me much about New Orleans. Aware of my international leanings, he tried to convince me to move to New Orleans by saying it is like a completely different country. I plan to watch out for this too. As there are no Bank of America ATMs within 40 miles of the city, I am inclined to give this view a thorough consideration, at least.

2010 Travel Outtakes

2010-12-17T14:24:00.000-05:00

Among the countless stories that happen in life, especially on the road, and the many times I have been on the "road" this year, there are a few stories that inevitably don't get quite told. I thought I'd take some of my free time to tell some of those stories. At least two of them.

Trabzon Terror and Turkey's North Coast

Turkey is an interesting place, and I'd love to spend more time there. Their political situation is interesting (even if not always the most encouraging), their culture a strange blend underneath a constructed form of nationalism, and the role Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey who forged the nation to his desired form in the interwar period) played fascinating, especially as the current government shifts away from certain aspects of Ataturk's Turkey. Yes, I like Turkey, and hope to go back someday and either live or visit thoroughly.

That said, looking back on it nine months later, I'm not sure what I was doing in Trabzon.

Trabzon is a city on the north coast of Turkey, along the Black Sea. It is the capital of the province of Trabzon. There is a football team in Trabzon, Trabzonspor, that is generally in the top 5 of the Turkish Super Lig table every year; this year, they currently lead the table at the halfway mark. By virtue of being so far east, Trabzon, a few hours away from the Georgia border, apparently boasts a Russian-speaking minority, one I didn't come into contact with in my very brief stay. Either my guidebook or something on the internet also suggested that Trabzon might be a port involved with either human trafficking or with former Soviet women coming over on their way west; they were, apparently, derisively termed "Natashas." I didn't come into contact with this either, exactly, but I hope you'll see that this isn't a completely gratuitous pair of sentences.

Those who have talked with me over the past year, especially anyone who studied with me in Israel, would have figured out why I was actually in Trabzon, i.e. what my reason for being there was: I was going to Georgia. It was the Passover spring break, and I wanted to visit Georgia for reasons of personal and academic interest. Professionally, I had led a Model United Nations trip to Ankara, receiving a free ticket to Turkey, as it were. I put the pieces together and decided that the best way to get from Ankara to Georgia would be via Trabzon. And though I originally conceived of a plan to go to Trabzon by bus, an overnight deal that could be nothing but miserable, I was convinced by my hosts at the MUN conference to fly there. For $45 (59 Turkish Lira), I had a one-way ticket to Trabzon, from where I would catch a bus to the Georgia border. So that's why I was in Trabzon.

I arrived on my plane and caught a bus to the center. Having been in Turkey by then for about five days, I had picked up maybe 10 words or phrases - I'm one of those jerks who loves to learn a few words and then flaunt it, as seen in my Rwanda posts. That said, I was out of my depth here - "hello" and "thank you" doesn't get you on a bus to the center easily. I found that bus and got off at more or less the right spot. "Goodbye" and "Ataturk" doesn't get you a place in a hotel. I walked around, generally heading downward, in this case north, towards the water. It was already dark, about 7:00 pm, and I was dragging around a backpack on wheels while wearing another backpack on my shoulders, and a bit of paranoia came upon me as I walked the streets. I tried to stay on well-lit streets, of which there were several, and away from alleys. Unfortunately, nice hotels are the only ones on well-lit streets, and cheap hotels are generally only in alleys in Trabzon, from what I could tell, and so after not managing to score a room at a nice place for cheap, I ducked in to a short alley and walked into the Otel Ufuk.

The Ol' Ufuk was as much a dive as could be. Two guys eventually came down to the reception desk on the second floor to greet me. After some linguistic confusion and some problems putting in my passport number correctly, they accepted my money and showed me to my room on the floor above. My bed was covered in dingy blue sheets and had a scratchy blanket that looked like it just came out of a cat's throat. The light bulb flickered above and the dresser creaked more than was worth thinking about or testing. Outside of my room, there was no toilet but just a hole to relieve oneself in. There was no shower, either, really; on the floor above mine out of the sink came a longer water tube, but I had to just stand there and wash while hoping the run-off would go down the drain appropriately. The only saving grace was a very nice painting of a soft maiden outside my room.

Now, if she was the one knocking on my door, maybe I would have been a tad more agreeable...

But whatever. I was only passing through, I'm cheap, I'm tough, I can deal with it. Not everywhere is a 1st world 5-star experience (actually, that's just what I had in Ankara for the first few nights - it's nice traveling on "business"). I put my stuff down, went out to an internet cafe and to buy some chocolate, walked along the streets as roars came from various houses with groups of people, mostly men, gathered around TVs - Trabzonspor was playing that night and would go on to a 1-0 defeat. I felt better. I had heard good things about Trabzon from my Ankara hosts, descriptions of the more colorful head coverings I would see on the women there, demands that I should go see the nearby Sumela Monastery, and so on. I was open to the experience.

Then I went to bed.

I went to sleep around 10pm, more or less. Though the mattress was hard and the blanket scratchy, I fell asleep after not too much time. I must have slept for about an hour or two without any real problems. This sleep may have lasted had I not been woken by noise coming from the "common room" a room or two down the hall. There, somebody had the TV on too loud and there was also conversation going on between two voices, one male and one female. The conversation was episodic, interjecting and overshadowing the steady buzz of TV sound at unpredictable but frequent intervals. This woke me up.

As long as I was awake, I figured I might get up and go pee. So I did. I put on my jeans and a shirt so that I wouldn't be inviting any unwanted attention. Alas.

Coming out of the bathroom, I encountered a short woman. She had her black hair pulled back tight in a pony tail. She was not slim, and not especially attractive, especially at that time of hour. She was of undetermined nationality, presumably a Turk at some point, and not Russian or former Soviet by any means.

Anyway, she said something to me. "Sorry, no Turkish," I said back in Turkish. She repeated herself and made the gesture of putting her hand over her fist. I made the gesture of shrugging my shoulders, hoping that my gesture was more universally understood than hers. She repeated the gesture and pointed at my fly, which I had left unzipped. I, still groggy and confused, continued to try to express that confusion. She repeated it one more time with a broad, salacious smile. Ahh. I was being propositioned. I said no thanks, waved my arms in a no gesture - hand going over hand, akin to a declining gesture, or how wrestlers defer choice in the second period - smiled, and went back to my room. Hey, I'm a white male who probably looks like he has money to spend on those things. It happens.

I returned to my bed, hoping to fall asleep. The TV seems louder, if anything, and the interlocutors outside are laughing more frequently, and it appeared my hopes would go as fulfilled as all my high school date requests (or college date requests). Which is to say, I wasn't falling asleep.

I can get riled up, for sure, and demand things every now and then. But for the most part, I try to be pretty easygoing and to avoid confrontation. It's not in my interest, as I see it. I try to train myself to deal with just about anything. So my natural inclination is to just suck it up and wait it out. And again, from the vantage point of nine months later, I think that still might have been the most reasonable response. I was on vacation, I had nothing important to do until I arrived in Tbilisi two days later, I had no absolute need of rest. I could have just turned on the light, pulled out War and Peace, and kept plugging away.

But, for the eternal desire to rest and turn off, I got up, put on my jeans and t-shirt again, and walked over to the TV room. There, I said please and made the universal gestures of "turn it down, mofo," (right thumb and index finger held a centimeter apart and twisting counter-clockwise as if a volume knob were between my fingers) and "I'm sleeping, come on now, this noise is too much," (pointing to my ears, tilting my head sideways to the right, placing my hands under my head as if for angelic sleep). The guy there, by the way, was one of the guys from reception. Not a great sign for the ol' Ufuk. That said, he seemed amenable.

And nothing changed. I continued to toss and turn, and to not sleep. I got out a little later to pee again and, in lieu of my other gestures, held my arms up and made a beleaguered face - yes, that's right, I pulled out the flying dolphin. My man showed a touch of sympathy and reassurance on his face, but otherwise, the results went unchanged. I stayed awake. And then came the insult atop my injured nighttime.

A banging came on my door. Fortunately, my door was locked, and so it could not be opened. Unfortunately, this did nothing about the banging, which continued. After the first couple of phrases, presumably in Turkish, my friendly Turkish woman of the night started a conversation with me in guttural Russian, which I will present to you in Russian, transliterated Russian, and then translated English:

Проститутка - Ты спишь? Ты спишь?
Уставший мужщина - Я сплю.
Несимпатичная Проститутка - Зачем?
Сердитий человек - Поздно!
Проститутка которая не знает когда перестать - Ставай, на хуй! Ставай на хуй!

Her - Tii spish? Tii spish?
Me - Ya splyu.
Her - Zachem?
Me - Pozdno!
Her - Stavai, na khui! Stavai, na khui!

Lady of ill-repute - Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?
Embattled gentleman - I'm sleeping.
Not so nice prostitute - What for?
Angry person - It's late!
Prostitute who doesn't know when to stop - Stand up, fucker! Stand up, fucker!*

*Loose translation, as she literally said "on a cock", which can be translated in a number of ways, many of them unknown to me. If I had to guess, she knew the phrase "idi na khui", which means "go on a cock", or "go fuck yourself."

All this happened while she continued banging (on the door, I mean). After a few more knocks, she gave up and went away. Sometime after this, I gave up and turned on the light to read. I kept reading until I heard the muezzin's morning call, and shortly after that heard them leave.

So while I don't know what I was doing in Trabzon, I can reassure you that it certainly wasn't her.

*** Postscript to Trabzon:

After blundering around that morning, I found my way to the bus station. At the time, I was still keeping open the option of visiting the Sumela Monastery. Instead, when I got to the station, I got sort of railroaded into getting on the bus to Batumi (or more accurately, Sarp, the border crossing town for Turkey-Georgia). I didn't get any clear indication of how long any of these trips would take. In all likelihood, I wouldn't have been able to go to Sumela and then make it to Batumi in time to catch the overnight train to Tbilisi that would have had me there in time for an appointment I had scheduled the next day. Still, I would have liked to have made a better informed choice.

The bus trip itself was beautiful and strange. We went right along the Black Sea, the road winding in between the coast and hills to our right, not more than 50 meters from either most of the time (That morning I had dipped my toes into the water, touching for the first and only time the sea my family used to vacation to back in the old country). That part of the Turkish coastline, at least, holds that quality we often call "rugged beauty" - rocky cliffs to our right, the flat sea to our left, and houses or port towns of varying size and stature on both sides.

About midway through the journey, those continuing to Sarp were ushered off the bus. They then escorted us into a white van, cramming us in nice and tight. I sat next to a few jovial fellows in the back row, some with gold or missing teeth, all laughing and telling jokes eagerly that I couldn't understand but laughed along with as necessary. The van took something of a local route, taking stops to drop everyone in a preferred stop, leaving me in that location I continually find myself in, a state of confusion. At last they dropped us off at the border, the crossing its own state of chaos with line cuts, vague directions of where to go, and Georgian border officials who were very happy to see my American passport.

My Long Walk in Los Angeles

As you might have read, I took a long trip around the U.S. of A. a couple months ago. The trip concluded in California with a day and a half in San Diego, a day in LA, and a few days in San Francisco. I intended to write about all this on this blog, and didn't. At this point, I don't feel like digging up too much out of my memories and observations, as I don't think they were that unique, for the most part. I liked San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles were laid out weird and I didn't have enough time to grasp them, people are different, etc. Any East Coaster going out West can tell you these things. Instead, allow me a couple quick anecdotes I compiled and then a story about an LA feat that I think with reasonable confidence that only I am stupid enough to undertake. In many ways, this feat was a microcosm of my greater U.S. trip as a whole.

- First anecdote comes from my train ride from San Diego to Los Angeles. This was, as mentioned, my only intercity travel on something other than a bus. And without meaning to sound like one of those pompous, "trains are awesome and we should put them everywhere so as to be green and cool and European and keeping up with China" people, well, trains are awesome, and train travel is definitely the best way to travel. After all, I am one of those people.

So anyway, I get to the train station, show my necessary identification, get a ticket, and go down to the platform. As I stand there waiting, a woman starts talking. It's not clear if it's to me or to anybody else. She's talking about an issue she's having. At last she looks over to me, and I respond. We have a brief conversation. I found this indicative of California from my whopping 6 days there - people are very willing to share their conversations with you or to jump into your conversations. It comes from a collective personality trait somewhere between friendly and self-absorbed. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but it's different.

This train anecdote isn't about that. It's about being on the train, enjoying the view of seaside tombs and morning moons in a nearly empty coach (I guess San Diego to LA at 7:50 on a Sunday morning isn't a super busy time, huh). It's about our cheery conductor, who was all business whenever she walked into the cabin to check tickets or make sure things were in order, but was all chirpiness when on the mike announcing the stops. It's about what she said as we pulled into Anaheim:

"We are now arriving in Anaheim, for the Magic Kingdom, home of Disneyland, the Angels, and the Mighty Ducks. Welcome to Anaheim." Pause. "QUACK!"

- As for the other anecdote, it was upon arrival in LA's Union Station. I mentioned in the last post the roundabout and wasteful way I went about getting the necessary change to make a pay phone call. Once I had the $2.00 needed, I purchased a 3-minute phone call. I was calling a friend who had just moved out to LA from the East Coast. Our conversation:

Me: Hey, how's it going? Where do you want to meet?
She: Dan, good to hear from you! Hold on a second, I'm just checking something, I just want to check where I'll be.
Me: Ok, I should be in wherever in about 20 minutes, I just have to take the subway.
She: I don't know where to meet, hmm...
Me: (counting the seconds) I can go wherever, just tell me which stop to go to and I can get off there.
She: Well, we could meet somewhere on Hollywood, somewhere on Vermont, let me check on my computer.
Me: You have a car, right?
She: (humming as she searches, presumably) Huh? Yeah, I have my car.
Me: Then just meet me somewhere, it doesn't matter.
She: I don't know where, though, hold on.
Me: WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME!!

Eventually, we settled on Vermont/Sunset. Where, while waiting for her, I walked around with my leather jacket over my shoulder, stroking my beard, waiting to be discovered. Anyway, the anecdote was more about how environment affects us: the same girl who was a high-powered hipster living in Brooklyn and an popped-collar douchebag when I saw her in Nantucket this summer (kidding!) was little Miss Languid Los Angeles after her move out west. There's a reason the airport abbreviation is LAX, I guess.

On the phone with my agent. What can I say, it worked.

- Now, to the big story.

The thing about Southern California (again, speaking from a whole two days of experience), is that there are hills everywhere, the ocean is right there, but the cities are more sprawled out than a tired USC student after their post-finals drinking binge. There is a downtown area for both San Diego and Los Angeles, but I spent time in neither of them; there's no action in the downtown areas, and yet the other areas don't feel like cities anymore than, say, my Boston suburb hometown of Burlington does. So not very.

I've been spoiled, I concede. I've lived in Tel Aviv for a year, a city of near perfect size; walkable, bikeable, and easily navigable, but not so tiny to feel unimportant. I do most of my traveling in Europe, where walking, bike-riding, and metro systems are the best ways to get around and sufficient to see a city. In the states, I have spent most of my time in the cities of Boston and New York, again two cities that one can walk or ride the rails around in attractive fashion. I love to go walking when I visit cities; on this trip, I uncorked a couple good walks before getting to California, including a trek from Union Square area to MOMA and back, and one from Vanderbilt's campus down to the river in Nashville and back.

In LA, though, nobody walks. "You can't walk to get around," I heard. "It's just how it is," they said. "Go back to cowtown, man!" they told me. (Ok, no they didn't). As evidenced on the whole of this trip and in many other ways in life, there's nothing I like more than doing something (stupid) when I'm told I can't. Something like taking a long walk in LA, for example...

My Israel wrestling teammate (and former UNC Tar Heel) Dusty dropped me off at Hollywood, right near all the attractions, the famous theaters and what not, within eyesight of the Hollywood sign. It was about 4:00 pm. I had scheduled to meet with someone at 8:30 down at Union Station, where I had left my things. I had time. It was a nice day out. I was relatively unburdened, carrying only the clothes on my back, my camera, a slim book (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction), and a slim notebook. I couldn't do it. I started walking downtown.

I started about 6900 Hollywood Boulevard. I quickly figured out that LA was gridded, and that I probably had to get down to somewhere near zero. Union Station's address is 800. So 61 blocks. What's 61 blocks? I only had to go one way.

I walked down Hollywood Boulevard until the glitz disappeared and I was back in post-urban suburbia. So I walked over Sunset Boulevard, right through Little Armenia. The blocks were longer than I had expected, even knowing how long this would take, and so when I returned to the familiar Vermont/Sunset intersection, I figured I should throw in the towel. They were right, I thought. You really can't walk in LA.

I went into a tea shop on Vermont just off that intersection. I drank tea, ate a cookie, and read the LA Times. I recuperated and refocused. I watched as a light drizzle began outside. I considered. I returned outside. I went to the subway station and looked at the map. I noticed the Red Line went right under Sunset Boulevard. I noticed Sunset Boulevard led straight into downtown and Union Station. I thought about how many sentences i could write consecutively that began with "I". I looked at the stairway down to the subway station with dismissive disdain, put my hands in my pockets, and kept walking.

The drizzle came on and off, not quite enough to threaten my jacket. I walked as it grew towards dusk. I quickly got confused at the intersection of Sunset and Hollywood, and ended up wandering in a residential neighborhood up on some hills (right around Sunset Drive - see the second point in the map below), and had to ask my way back to Sunset Boulevard.

View Larger Map Of One Man's Ridiculous Journey

Los Angeles has many facets to its wider reputation, the one that reaches a naive young man from the Boston 'burbs. I had already checked that my route wasn't going through any neighborhoods like "the Wood", Compton, Long Beach, or Snoop Dogg's house. Nevertheless, a new sense of paranoia crept into my mind as the dusk slid over me. I figured out a way to walk with my hands in my pocket and through my pocket holding my camera, so that no one could readily see that I was carrying a camera. I got concerned about my 500 shekel jacket. I kept my head up and my path in the light as much as possible, my pace brisk. I began muttering to myself about my stupidity.

Wouldn't this make you paranoid?

At the same time, I realized that I was walking through a lot of famous neighborhoods. Echo Park came and went like an Elliot Smith warble; Silver Lake showed up, the hip neighborhood that I had visited earlier that day with a friend to check out an apartment; Angelino Heights struck me as significant even as I cursed its poorly lit sidewalks; though I never saw Dodger Stadium, I knew that the signs pointing me to it meant I was reasonably close. There was something cool about all of this, even amidst my paranoia.

My first encounter came a little before Echo Park, as I ran into a group of dirty looking kids my age or a little younger walking a dog. They asked me for change to buy some dog food. I asked them if they could tell me how far away downtown was. They couldn't. I think I gave 'em a quarter.

Then I walked past a short, wide lady in her 40s or 50s. She had frizzy light brown hair, and freaked out a little when I walked by her. Understandable: she might have felt the same LA paranoia that I did, especially walking in the dark. But then she said something about a black beard. I stopped to scratch my beard.

"A very black beard, like the ultra orthodox."
"That's what I look like," I said. She kept rambling about the ultra Orthodox.
"I don't have a hat," I said with a smile.
"See this coat?" she said, showing me the white coat over her bag. "This coat and bag, I got it for $3.50, that's a very good price. The Jews like money, so if I got it from them, that's a good deal, I did good," and she kept ranting. I walked away, confused.

The Hollywood Sign is in there, somewhere.

Not long after that, wondering when if ever I would arrive downtown (I stopped in CVS, 7/11, and a gas station in hopes of finding a map to get a sense of how long it would be, I asked for directions at a Burger King and was just pointed to keep going), I popped into a record store. I had already visited the gigantic and famous Amoeba Music on this walk, shortly after I left Hollywood Boulevard, hours ago as it was. This time, I noticed there was a gig going on. I got to hear a couple songs from the electro-funk stylings of Globes On Remote (I can't say I dug it all that much, but it was still cool).

Digging the show (just not so much).

I continued along the road as it turned into Cesar E Chavez Avenue over the 110. I knew by this point that I was close. A little ease seeped into my soul. I spotted a touristy spot and decided to detour through it for a few minutes. I had stumbled on the famed Olvera Street, a little pedestrian alley of shops and food stands, mostly Mexican in nature. I can't say I saw too much of it, but I did notice it was going to get closed down sometime soon.

This Chinatown dragon was also a sign I was almost there.

That was basically the end of my journey, except for the laughter when I told my friends at dinner that night. As much fun as it is to do stupid things people say I can't do, the best part is when I tell them about it afterward. Even if they're laughing at me, it's a good time.

And by the way, you really can't walk in LA. I think my story is mere proof of that.

The Long, Hard, and Stupid of It

2010-11-09T08:03:00.002-05:00

A1: I'm a stubborn person.

Sure, I can be easy going. I don't seek conflict. I find it easier to agree with someone on topics that are not near and dear to my heart, or even topics that are, than to argue with them in situations where there's nothing to gain by arguing. I consider myself, all in all, kind of a softie. And a nice guy too, I hope.

That said, when somebody tells me I can't do something I don't want to do, or when someone tells me I'm an idiot for trying a certain path rather than another, easier path, or when I set my mind on a cool plan that is less than practical, well, it'll take a hell of a lot of persuasion, browbeating, and good logic to dissuade me from sticking to my plan. Actually, it will take clever, quiet diplomacy; the browbeating is only going to make me all the more likely to keep to my foolishness.

Qs: Dan, why did you decide to take the bus across the United States instead of flying? Why did you do this without a phone? Why do you make things so difficult? Why do we grow old? What's it all for?

Other possible answers:

A2: I was struck with a two week fear of cell phone signals and flying.

A3: My time in Rwanda inspired me to do more with less - this is also the reason I ate nothing but rice, beans, and potatoes (occasionally garnished with rabbit) on the trip and why I slept four to a room every night, which boy let me tell you created some weird situations.

A4: I did not have a bicycle, nor a unicycle suitable to such a journey.

A5: I thought it would be a good way to get a quick catch-up course on the country, the most practical way to visit the people I wanted to visit scattered across this great land, and an interesting story full of peculiar anachronistic circumstances that might say something about where I am in the 21st century, if not anybody else on a broader scale.

A6:

(As always, take Answer 6)

Whatever the case may be, I took the second half of October and traveled across the U.S.A., following the following likely route: Burlington MA-Boston MA-New York City-Washington D.C.-Durham N.C.- Nashville-San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco. The longest stop was a four day conclusion in San Francisco. I was blessed enough to have people to visit in all those cities (well, I guess I wouldn't have stopped by Nashville if I didn't), seeing 16 people in all from various phases of my life, not including assorted spouses, partners, friends, roommates and hangers on who welcomed me just as well as the people I visited. I traveled on this route without a phone (but with a Skype-equipped laptop), on a bus (except for a morning cruise up the California coast from San Diego to Los Angeles), and with no urgent priorities in my life except to get to the next place and to let the people who care know that I was still crazy.

As I hope you can imagine, there were interesting things that happened to me, and interesting things I noticed about our country and various people contained therein on the trip. I would like to share these things. Without further ado and no specific order, some of the notable occurrences:

- Arriving in downtown Washington, DC on a Saturday night in the middle of October is a cold experience, a collection of wide, empty streets deserted for the weekend, a surprising jolt after the bustle of New York. An ill omen perhaps for a city I may someday soon work in.

Cold D.C. Street.

- In Nashville, on Broadway downtown, on a warm Wednesday afternoon around 3, you can find almost every single bar, country-themed of course, hosting a musician hopeful of finding a career in music city, strumming out a tune on their acoustic guitar; some of the musicians had somebody else to accompany them, some of the musicians had nice voices: none of the musicians had an audience of more than three or four people, including the bartender. There was something about this that was both depressing and life-affirming.

- The Colorado River is dry at the border of Arizona and California. I believe I read about this before. I don't know that it's a good thing.

- Also in Arizona-related observations: in that fine state there exists a town called Gila Bend.

- One way to stand out as a weirdo in New York, no small feat, is to walk around the city with your towel wrapped around the handle of your suitcase. Even if this is a perfectly reasonable way to air out and dry your towel before putting it in your suitcase without it stinking up your suitcase, people will look at you strangely. Or at least, your NYC implanted cousin will.

- The bus system in Winston-Salem, NC carries ads for Rush Radio 94.5, featuring Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity.

- The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has free entrance on Fridays, sponsored by Target. The line stretched down 53rd, up 6th, and back up 54th. A bakery gave out free food, their girls dressed in a zebra-striped outfit with orphan Annie red hair. Also, Max Beckmann's Family Picture was the only painting name I wrote down in my notebook besides the classic, hallmark works (Picasso's Les Mademoiselles D'Avignon, Chagall's I and the Village, Van Gogh's Starry Night).

Here's a set of observations specifically tied to riding the bus. For those interested, I rode Fung Wah to NYC, Megabus to DC, then Greyhound the rest of the way (except, as mentioned above, the Amtrak train from SD to LA):

- The Fung Wah stopped after the exit leaving the Mass Pike. The driver pulled us over to the right side of the road. I read my book. He pulled us over to median. I continued reading my book. A din of confused voices rose around me as we sat on the median for two, three, four minutes. I looked up and noticed our driver running back to our bus from the other side of the highway, where there was another Fung Wah bus. He entered our bus, shook himself off and took off his jacket, and returned the bus to the road. The Fung Wah.

- I rode with this guy from Durham to Nashville. He was probably about 5'10'', and had a pretty solid frame with a little extra layering. He was probably about my age, wore his brown hair in a pony tail, and wore a wispy goatee to go with it. He wore just a wife beater most of the time, unless he went outside and it was on the colder side, in which case he added a sweatshirt. He offered me fish which he had brought for his three day journey from coast to coast. Boasted of the healthy nature of his fish, too, and how he used to bodybuild, but that these days he just lifted a few weights that were in his yard every day.

This is not the guy I'm talking about. Just a funny sign in Waynesville.

This guy was an interesting one, and very much displayed some of the common behaviors and attitudes of Greyhound customers. He kept his bag splayed out on the seat next to him in hopes of dissuading anybody from sitting next to him: they would have to ask him for the seat, and his imposing stature and affected scowl would prevent that. Except that somewhere between Asheville and Knoxville, the bus filled up, making it impossible for him to achieve his objective of no neighbor. When somebody did sit down with him at last, a young man, he was nothing less than courteous in conversation and in offering his treats to his new neighbor. In fact, for all his stature and intimidating looks, he was bursting to talk, looking around with his big brown eyes to find anybody he could open up to about his trip to Phoenix, or the fact that his half-brother died somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains, or about what he thought about things. To wit: "TV brainwashes people, it brainwashes you, I don't watch any of it."

He also told me, upon seeing me reading, that, "I read books. I got a stack of 'em."

You don't get that on the plane, I tell you what.

- You also don't get cologne on sale in the men's bathroom on the plane. You do get this in the men's bathroom of a rest stop gas station somewhere in eastern Oklahoma.

- On my first Greyhound leg, from D.C. to Durham, I paid $3 to a vending machine to get a Nestle Crunch bar. That is, I paid $1.50 for a bar, received no bar as the ring in front of the selection was empty, which I did not recognize beforehand, and so I paid another $1.50. Needless to say, the candy bar was worth it.

- On that same trip, we had a last stop before Durham in Raleigh. I needed to use a phone, so I got off the bus. My ticket suggested we might change buses, so I went to the driver to make sure that I didn't have to get my suitcase or anything, leading to this beatific statement: "It's going to Durham." He said it with a laugh, with an incredulous smile, as if he told me that I would be getting a Christmas turkey after all. "You don't have to change buses, it's going to Dur-ham." I thought I saw his wizened head bathed in light.

- On the leg from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, there at some point coalesced an earnest group of young men who had a serious discussion about just what the pot laws were in different states, and what implications those laws had for their lives.

- I also sat next to a guy from Flagstaff to Phoenix who told me quite a bit about his life as a pot farmer. He reported that, living in California and growing weed on six prescriptions, his life would not change either way with the coming referendum on marijuana laws in CA. He said that he had been a bricklayer in Arizona ("That place has ridiculous laws,") but that he lost his job after 7 years to illegal immigrants, and this was the best option left to him. "I don't like society too much," he said, "I try to keep to myself as much as I can." He was thoughtful and well-spoken.

- For one short stretch, I think from Knoxville to Nashville but I could be remembering wrong, I found myself without a seat and had to ask a guy if I could sit next to him.

"Shit, I was waiting for a pretty woman,"

Seeing as there were not really any other seats available, all I could think to say was, "Well, I can smile nice, if that helps." He ended up being nice enough to me, anyway.

- There was another afternoon stretch where I was sitting alone when a young mother joined me. Here four year old or so boy sat across the aisle from her. They were clearly a Hispanic family, so I stewed in my seat, thinking of how to ask her in Spanish whether or not she'd like to sit with her child. I finally stammer, "Quiere sedir...do you want to sit with your child?" She said yes, gladly.

Somehow, the burn I felt for my cultural patronization equaled out whatever good feelings I had for my deed for a while. It's strange to be back in a land where English is the language, I guess.

- One has to get used to waves of smells passing over one's breathing space. Most of these smells are unpleasant. Such is life in the bus.

- The Ft. Smith, Arkansas Greyhound station was probably the cutest I saw on the trip, adorned with paintings depicting the consequences of and reasons against drinking and driving.

- In the southwest (Texas and beyond), each state has a border office. It feels like you're entering a new country, to a degree. In response, I presume, to frequent drug trafficking and illegal immigration, these states set up inspection booths and have border guards on patrol. In California, two border guards actually got on our bus and checked passports; I said I was from the U.S. and they trusted me, meaning I didn't need to flash my passport. Little did they know...

An illegal immigrant in Calexico.

- The one incident that led to trouble on my long trip happened on the first day, before we entered Tennessee. One man of pickled complexion and wearing bad cowboy-style attire (a yellow button-down shirt with red lines and cactus tree designs that screamed the southwest, and big ol' boots) had a bottle of wine and a little stereo. He allegedly improperly touched the teenage girl he sat next to. A few other, bigger passengers stepped in to encourage him to sit at the front of the bus, alone. We stayed a little bit longer than planned at our next stop in Waynesville, and he found himself confronted by a police officer at the front of the bus.

He stayed in Waynesville.

Some 30 hours later, I saw the same man in the bus station in Memphis, holding the same stereo, dressed in the same clothes. He had caught the same bus schedule a day later. While he didn't necessarily look any more sober, he looked glummer, in the least.

- Speaking of the Southwest, apparently Albuquerque is a major depot for drug trafficking. Our merry bus driver warned everybody that the bus would be searched during our layover there. "If anybody has anything they don't want found, better give 'em to me!" he said. All joking aside, several of my companions on the bus were quite unnerved. We passed through Albuquerque without incident, however.

- The scariest thing I heard came right before Nashville. Sitting behind me were two kids who were in either high school or college and appeared reasonably intelligent.

They were discussing Microsoft Office 2010, and specifically some of the new features on Word.

"Yeah, when I write my papers on Word, now," one said, "I can just copy-paste into the document, and then you go and you right-click on it, and you can paraphrase!"

"Oh, dude, that's sweet!" the other replied.

I shed a couple tears in my seat for my educator friends and my student days.

- In my whole time on the bus, logging something like 80 hours total including the final leg to San Francisco, I only peed on a moving bus twice. The first time was in New York, where my cousin rushed me to the bus after deciding that we didn't have time to stop somewhere. The other time was a cheapie in Gallup, New Mexico; the bus driver had earlier announced a stop, scheduled for about 2:20 am, but at the station itself we made an in and out two-minute quickie stop, hardly enough time to pee legally.

I figured we weren't going to get a chance, so I lodged myself in the bathroom, did what I had to do, and ambled back out to my seat...just in time to get up as we stopped at a KFC/McDonalds gas station site. Ahh, sigh.

- Between Memphis and Little Rock overnight, one woman in her 30s or 40s, black, full-bodied, and pretty, spoke to a younger girl straddling the ages of 18 and 22, skinny, less pretty, also black, about finding God and getting out of her troubles. There was something in her speech about the various plagues of lesbians and homeless youth. Eventually, when either one got off the bus or when one of them decided to go to sleep, the older woman pledged to continue the conversation on Facebook.

- The one bit of funny business I had to pull was getting on the bus in Nashville. I arrived just 15 minutes before the scheduled departure, and waited in line behind a minor who needed permission to buy a ticket, its own mess, pushing me dangerously close to being late for my bus.

At last, he finished his business and the attendant at the counter was ready for me. After printing my boarding ticket, she insisted I weigh my bag to make sure it met the 50 lb. limit. Despite my efforts to play with the weight, ultimately it was 6 pounds over. With no time to make it go run laps, I took out a few books and put them in my backpack until I made the weight. She printed my info and I was on my way to San Diego.

Except that I had enough time to go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, and conveniently switch back all the books I had just added to my backpack. No problems for the rest of the trip.

- I was late for one bus all trip: the last one, from LA to San Francisco. No one's perfect.

- I should mention that Megabus has wi-fi on their buses. This felt like a big deal at the time.

View Directions to 797 Cole Street, San Francisco, CA in a larger map

- On that Megabus from NYC to DC, I was lucky enough to sit next to a one Miss Shania. Shania was probably about 4 years old, a cheery little girl who taught me how to draw. Specifically, she shared with me her technique for the Pollock-esque masterpieces she churned out page after page: grab the pen (in light blue, pink, or green for boys), and go like this (bring the pen up and down the page in varying thicknesses and no discernible pattern, just an endless sprawl of lines) and you can do it. She was considerably prouder of having taught me to draw that than she was to have learned to draw a heart from me.

- And as a subset of interesting bus events, here are all the things I had to do to make phone calls without a cell phone:

1. Buy a pretzel from a street vendor across the street from the New York Public Library to get the change needed to call my cousin from a pay phone.

2. Call from Skype numerous times, most memorably using the wi-fi of the Megabus.

3. As DC's streets were void of pay phones as well as people, I ended up having to ask my cab driver for a phone to call my friend. This turned out well, as my cab driver wasn't sure how to get to my friend's house.

4. Using pay phones along the road at various times, with mixed success. Many of the pay phones in Greyhound stations are a little bit more expensive. Many more do not offer a long-distance coin option; you can only call locally or collect. You cannot call cell phones collect. I was mostly calling cell phones. This caused problems.

5. In one of those tricky situations, I ended up borrowing a fellow traveler's phone, after asking a few other fellow travelers for phones who didn't happen to have one.

6. It goes without saying that I borrowed my friends' phones very frequently on the trip.

7. In LA's Union Station, I had the microcosmic phone experience that summed up my macrocosmic trip. I needed change, so instead of asking someone for change, I bought something. Since I needed at least 40 cents to make it to a dollar, I bought gum, even though I don't chew gum. I thought it would be an ok sacrifice. I went to the pay phone, now with about $1.10 of change.

The pay phone required $2.00. I only found this out after I tried the first two of four payphones, which did not have a dialtone, and the third payphone, which did not accept coins, and then at last put my dollar in the fourth payphone. The return didn't work.

I went to a ticket counter, where I received a polite $2.00 in change. Change I could have received at step 1. Not my best traveling moment.

- But despite the bumps, and despite the moments where I spent more than I might have - a flight purchased in advance between almost any of my destinations, and certainly for the long distance ones would have been cheaper than the bus fare - the trip had a sense to it, and a reason. Beyond seeing the soft dew hovering above the grass on the side of the road in the Arkansas morning, and beyond realizing that Texas's skinniest part is 170 miles across, and beyond having the time to read and write or not have to fly on a plane or have the freedom to eat just peanut butter sandwiches, bananas, and the occasional candy bar for two days on a bus.

I can't imagine doing this same trip eastwards. It could be that I am an easterner, and any journey that way would feel like going home, which one does not want to do on a bus. It could be that going west gave me a chance to open a new world, to experience new places in a way that going east would not have.

The trip, the bus trip, hit its logic after Texas. There was our descent into the sunset, a sense of oneness descending back onto me. After Phoenix, crossing through the desert in the morning, ripping through a new barren scenery that was not so distant from Jordan or Israel, for example, but still new; and then entering California and seeing how the landscape slowly grew gray and then green as the road emptied out to the valley before San Diego and the sun falling in front of us; there made itself felt every justification for taking the long way, the hard way, the stupid way.

Here's to the Long Way.

Here's to the Hard Way.

Here's to the Stupid Way.

Three Last Thoughts on Rwanda

2010-11-02T08:42:00.000-04:00

I don't pretend to be able to summarize in a few pithy words what my/our trip to Rwanda was like. Actually, I can easily pretend to be able to do it, I just don't feel like it. Enough internet ink has been spilled on this site about the trip to Rwanda, I think: this post will bring me over 14,000 words. So anybody who is reading this and cares about what my overall impressions on the trip were should be able to pull something together based on the seven (including this one) posts and all that is contained therein.

At the same time, I want to write one more post about Rwanda. Not only because I promised it in the first post on Rwanda (more to myself than to anyone else), but because there is more I can say. And more I want to tell. So in lieu of any grand conclusions about the trip or huge statements, I give to you three little snapshots, events from the trip that encapsulated much of what happened as a whole, while also providing some entertainment. These events are not in chronological order.

Live at Gisenyi

Lake Kivu the morning after the storm.

The trip was harrowing; twice I have mentioned the thundering rains that could have ended our trip prematurely. We rode 10 passengers in a van designed to carry 14 passengers max in theory, but a van with bulky but thin cushions that did little to hide the feel of the steel bars beneath, a van with seats too close together so that there was no leg room even for the midgets like me, a van that had a multi-colored lamp inside that could do the disco rotation as needed, and a van that came from Dubai, where it was apparently the van for a hair salon. Riding in the van for four hours already that day (with stops), we were worn out as it was, and in no condition to weather the storm peacefully. We were saved by the steady driving of our main man Pascal, a driver who switched on to our group with the new van and who, on his first day, wore a bowling shirt with the name "Baker Hughes" stitched on the back. Maybe a code name? Or his bowling nickname, ala The Jesus?

In any case, the trip was harrowing. It led to our only night out of Kigali, a small hotel on a hill overlooking Lake Kivu, a Great Lake (Africa style, obviously) on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. We arrived shortly after dusk and, after divvying up rooms and unpacking, a few of us went out on the porch and talked and watched the lightning storm. I brought my guitar out and provided quiet and (I hoped) non-intrusive background music to the more serious conversations around me.There was an uneasy beauty of the moment.

We went to a relatively lame hotel restaurant by the water, mosquitoes infiltrating the overpriced dining hall, but our bonds were tight and the chocolate mousse cake I ordered (for dinner) good. Indeed, though I was weary from the car ride and the trip in general, hitting its 11th and 12th days, and though this trip marked the final high water mark before travel and group fatigue wore on my experience, we were at a high water mark at that restaurant, and the glow of our mzingu bubble on Kivu preserved that positive feeling.

We returned to the hotel just shy of midnight. I was most interested in going to sleep, but there was a general clamor for some music. And so I pulled out my guitar and played some tunes, pulling from the back catalog of hits ("Barcelona," "Ain't No Minivan Mama"), the fruitful summer of 2010 writing I had done ("Cellulite", "Stuck at the Start"), and the two Rwandan-inspired tunes I had written ("Any Given Day," "Hey, Mzingu", and yes, I did just cite a bunch of my own songs that most people have never heard. It's my blog, roll with it). My lovely audience that I would have liked to take home supported and enjoyed cigars, waragi, tequila, and the company, as well as the scenic backdrop, one of the nicest I will ever play in front of in my amateur musician career. The beauty here was easier, more exhausted, but joyous, a true cap on the high water experience.

An hour and a half later, I woke up in my bed in the hotel room to the evil sound of a nearby buzzing mosquito. My roommate was not on anti-malaria pills and had avoided vaccinations and in general was doing things all naturally to protect his body (we enjoyed watching him put together his herbal cocktail each morning at breakfast). No problem; I had all the respect in the world. And when we roomed together in Gisenyi, with two beds but only one mosquito net, I said, "No problem, you take it. Mosquitoes don't like me much anyway." My macho stubbornness striking again, as you see.

So when the mosquito woke me, I lay still for a few minutes, thinking I could wait it out. I slapped at the air aimlessly as well, or not aimlessly since I could hear him, but with very poor accuracy. The quiet desperation of hearing a mosquito buzzing around you and knowing there is nothing you can do to stop her, and knowing that the noise (definitely the noise and not so much the fact that she will bite you) would not let you sleep, and that sleep is the thing you most need to preserve your calm, your patience, and your sanity, this quiet desperation set in for me.

My roommate, fortunately, is a good sleeper. Fortunate, because my solution was to turn on the lights, sit as still as possible in a poor lotus position, and kill as many mosquitoes as necessary to allow me to sleep. There is always the illusion, after all, that it's only one mosquito that is buzzing around your head; their buzzes sound the same. I killed one mosquito. A buzz returned. I was not fooled. I killed another mosquito. I swung and missed at a few more. Somehow, my roommate stirred but did not wake. I imagined myself to be a modern day Mr. Miyagi with a lower hit-rate. Much lower.

In the end, I killed about 10 mosquitoes over 20-30 minutes, turned out the lights, and pulled the sheet over my head. I slept soundly if incompletely until the morning.

The World's (or at least Rwanda's) finest football pitch (Or backdrop)

A group photo of the memorable pitch.

East Rwanda, on one of the rare spaces in the country flat enough and big enough for a football (i.e. soccer) pitch, with 25 some-odd (we played about 13 v 13) boys aged from 16-24 or so who were ostensibly sophomores in high school, all orphaned or made vulnerable by the genocide, in the sunny but fading late afternoon light, with a beautiful vista to the east that suffered not at all for the fact that we wouldn't be able to see the sunset over it.

That was the scene. We were visiting the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, and as part of our visit, we got to play football with the kids (or basketball, or volleyball, but I chose the footie). The village is an oasis, of sorts, for the aforementioned vulnerable and/or orphaned population of Rwanda, operating as a high school for these kids. So far they have 250 students, admitting a new freshman class of 125 students each year to hit a maximum of 500 students in two more years.

But enough about the technicalities. On the pitch, the kids are about what you would expect them to be: talented, able, but lacking savvy, teamwork, or foresight that comes with coaching and paying attention to sports. Understandable, of course, considering they have a lot more important things to deal with than being good at football; this isn't a factory or even a competitive high school. It's just a place for kids to play the game.

So a couple of us joined in the game, running up and down, making a couple plays here and there and getting frustrated from time to time. I learned the appropriate words to call for the ball, "Karibu" (meaning "welcome") and "he-he" (short e's; the word means "here"), and called for the ball plenty, but didn't really get many touches - there were a couple sweet crosses I made that didn't lead to goals, but ah well, I screwed up plenty times too. Meanwhile, the light grew hazier and the beauty rose to match it.

And then we had to leave. The game was still going, and we had to leave. My unfortunate response was to fall into "Cheese Fries or nothing" mode*. I ignored the first several calls. Then I turned in and gave up, gathering my t-shirt, walking sulkily off the field and probably spitting to the side a few times more than necessary. I entered the car and, making sure to voice my frustration, said, "Tha's some bullshit."

After a pause, somebody asked what this so-called "bullshit" was.

I hemmed and hawed as I got the words out, then said, "When will we ever get a chance to play on a field like that in a setting like that? We can eat in Mzingu restaurants for the rest of our life," in reference to our rush back to Kigali.

Well then.

Another lost temper. Another blown fuse. And though I won the battle this time - I got the cheese fries, so to speak - I lost the war, failing to make it two weeks without losing my cool. Haval, as we would say. Haval.

But it was a good line. And a pretty place.

Our Redemption From the Children

The scene as I first saw it.

I sat in Nyamata church, the second of two churches on the day. We had been to the Nyabarongo River earlier, where genocidal killers dumped their victims' bodies to "send them back to Ethiopia", via Lake Victoria. We had been to Ntarama church, of the bloodied Sunday school wall of the previous post. Whatever one might say about the reasons for our trip, the futile nature of it, the inability we faced in plumbing the depths of our or others' trauma, it can at least be conceded that we had not had the most pleasant day.

After writing a poem in my journal and sitting inside the church on my own for a few minutes, I heard a harmonica play. Evan was blowing out a tune; "Love Me Do" it sounded like. In an otherwise solitary and silent moment, it made for a pleasant break. I went outside to see where he was.

When I got outside, I found that Evan was not just playing on his harmonica, but playing on his harmonica for twenty or more schoolchildren. Others from our group were out there dancing and smiling and talking to the kids, taking pictures and then showing the kids their image on the camera. No better balm in this world did God invent than the smile and laughter of a curious child.

We spent the next hour walking around the village, chasing after different groups of schoolchildren and picking them out, spinning them around, hugging them, and laughing with them. We drank over-sugared Coke and broke into sprints after the over-cute kids. We alternately terrorized and brightened everyone's day. On my trip in Europe,

Ben made the point, in Hamburg, that no matter how unsuccessful we were in achieving our objectives, or how annoying our requests might have been, we certainly made everyone's day a little bit more unusual and, dare I say it while trying to avoid sounding arrogant, more special. Well, that was at least ten times as true in Rwanda, and even more true in Nyamata village.

But we, of course, were the bigger beneficiaries. I talked about the dissonance between visiting terrible sites and experiencing beautiful people and scenery: this was the greatest dissonance we felt, and the loveliest. It was the most special moment we had on the trip, I feel, and I doubt my companions would protest too much.

Ah hell, one more bonus note from Rwanda - the last night

Our going away party featured a long round of speeches from everybody we managed to rope into our goodbye circle from our friends in Rwanda - potential sugar daddies, sons of reggae stars, good friends we had met in Israel, our friendly hostel security guard, our guides, friends from our blog we weren't as close to - and from us. Then I played on my creaky guitar, loud enough over the roar of the fire to bother the other guests in the hostel and lead us to leave the hostel and go to a nearby traffic circle. Where, after waking up the guard on duty sleeping in the fountain itself (no running water), we proceeded to run through a few more songs. Then a few more goodbyes. Then a giddy, solemn march back to the hostel, I on an improvise-ready little riff with Evan accompanying on his harmonica to a little ditty while the others reveled in the beautiful possibility and sadness of Kigali's night sky, together for the last time. The trip was everything it was supposed to be, even when it wasn't. It was every happiness we could hope for even when we were sad, every calm realization we sought even when we (I) lost our cool. It was certainly a success, a victory, an experience, and something to remember. And, almost a month later, I can still say with certainty that I don't think it'll be a last time, either in Africa or Rwanda. No, one way or another, this was just a beginning.

The Chorus of the other Rwanda related song I wrote, by the bonfire.

Looking Where The Blood Once Flowed

2010-11-01T09:08:00.004-04:00

Trauma is a weird thing. Experienced, it leads to all sorts of repression, covering up, avoiding, or compensating, as well as growth, change, dealing with the experience, sharing, and recovering. Witnessed or observed, trauma can be both easier to understand and sympathize with and harder to grasp fully and empathize with; one can tell how awful an event is, but at the same time there is a distance, a barrier that prevents one from appreciating how deep that awful event goes.

I'm not sure what the difference is, exactly, between experiencing and observing trauma, having done both. I would suspect that when you experience it, you feel the depth of a trauma and then seek to paper it over and avoid it, hoping to get on with your life at whatever cost. When you observe it, you seek to get to that depth of the trauma as much as you can so as to appreciate the pain others felt and to help them whatever way you can. In both instances, the depth is lost, either under an inability to sink down and explore others' watery trenches or a struggle to steer away from one's own undertow.

There's no way for me to tell you that I now understand the Rwandan genocide or that I can relate to you what Rwandan survivors and normal people actually feel 16 years later. No more than there is a way for me to tell you that I understand my mother's death 6 years ago or how I actually feel about it 6 years later. In both cases there is a sad depth, and occasionally the tremors that those inner plates set off reach the surface - in grinding teeth at night or respectful silence as a survivor sheds tears when telling her story again - but a lack of the necessary knowledge, understanding, and even courage to get plumb that depth.

I can point out some of the interesting tremors I observed in Rwanda's memorial process and in the way people live with the legacy of genocide. So let's go to that.

As I hinted at in the previous post, the way the country preserves the memory of genocide is hitting a period of transition. The main effect of this change, it appears, will be to bury all or most of the bones and change the experience from one of evidence and thrusting the visitor's face in the horror to one of teaching the visitor of the genocide. We still got the evidentiary, horrific version, so let me tell you about it.

Nyamata church with 16 year old clothing deposits.

Having the horror of genocide thrust in our faces was both jarring and numbing. Jarring in the sense that we saw the skulls, saw the clothes, saw sites of genocide as they were 16 years ago. The clothes in the photo above, that is, were the clothes those who died in the genocide were wearing. The big dark stain you see in the corner of the building below is one of blood. The building is a Sunday school at Ntarama. Children were hiding in the Sunday school and children were the victims therein. I leave it to your minds to tie these sentences together as you wish. This was, for many of us, the most affecting memorial site.

But, as with so much of life's experiences, the subtle display was more effective than the over the top. We later went to Murambi, a memorial site closer to Butare, a major university city in the south of Rwanda. There the display was somehow more graphic than skulls or clothes. The history, in short, was that Murambi had a church that was the site of genocide - many Tutsis fled to church, which had been safe havens in previous times of violence, only often, too often, to be betrayed by either church officials or just the predictable nature of their actions, as militias and the army found their victims more easily - and then a base for French soldiers who came as part of Operation Turquoise, the UN sponsored "peacekeeping" mission I mentioned in the previous post that kept peace mostly for those who inflicted genocide and war. The French soldiers buried the victims and then set up volleyball courts and other activities of leisure over the graves, per the current Murambi memorial's info. After the war and RPF assumption of control throughout the country, the graves were exhumed and many of the skeletons were preserved in lime and placed on display in 20+ barracks-like rooms on the grounds.

This is really gross, both in numbers and in effect. And it could be viewed in two ways. I subjected myself to every room, to the lime smell, and to the relentless pace of genocide site-seeing, to at least witness what they wanted to show: child skeletons, baby skeletons, bodies on top of each other, children in parents' arms, tufts of hair on some skeletons, clothes still on the skeleton, a baby in the arms of an adult, and most of all the look of horror frozen on all the faces, and the defensive, helpless poses they ended their lives in. I thought I had no right as a foreigner, as a visitor who claimed to be interested in Rwanda and its past, and as a representative, unwitting or otherwise, of an international community and western world (and the U.S.) that failed to do anything productive to prevent this genocide, to look away.

Others in our group, coming from a Judeo-Western perspective, found the display disgraceful to the memories of those people and all sufferers, and felt that the preservation of the bodies was self-defeating: the bodies did not look authentic enough to serve as evidence against genocide deniers they thought, so what's the point? (No photos were allowed inside any of these sites largely to prevent more foreigners from sneaking photos of the sites and then claiming the photos served as proof of a fabricated genocide). I understood their point.

Ntarama Church.

Something else spurred me on at this site and others; the strange willfulness of the guides. In this case, I mean the guides representing each site, though it could include our young Rwandan guide - he claimed that anyone who didn't look at these things was showing weakness, though that stance was part of his own repression and recovery from his trauma, an incredible story that saw him and his polio-stricken mother tramp across Rwanda to Congo, a 3-week journey undertaken when he was only 4 years old. So his stance, considering his experience, is understandable.

And that stance and similar experiences may be what was behind the way our guide at Murambi kept pushing me and a couple others along the site. She, a cute woman in her 30's with a bright, toothy smile, walked a room ahead of us, waiting for us to advance, and barely concealing her disappointment when somebody else peeled off and stopped looking at the rooms. I sensed that she almost deliberately pushed us into this experience, as if to say, "Here, you silly Mzingu. You want to visit Rwanda? You want to understand the genocide? Keep looking then. Here it is. Welcome to the bed that everybody in the world helped us make. Sleep well." But she did all this, as everybody does, with a smile.

A chalkboard in the former outpost for Belgian soldiers killed at the beginning of the genocide in a ploy to get the UN to pull out their mission (which they did). The writings are angry notes left by the affected Belgian families for commanding general Romeo Dallaire, who is generally viewed as a noble man in his conduct regarding the genocide, hamstrung by the bureaucracy behind him.

This same sort of dissonance emerged in our meetings with survivors. We met with a couple kinds of survivors, in terms of mentality. When volunteering, we painted houses for young (20s and 30s), relatively cheerful and recovered men and women who were unlikely heads of households, orphaned 16 years ago and forced to lead their families. They were eager for our help and almost rehearsed in their thanks and happiness at our being there. Especially considering the narrow amount of time we had to help them, I felt that something was off; it could have been just me, but I wasn't sure that we were helping as much as receiving an opportunity to help, and while the side benefits of hanging out with these survivors were there for both us and them and us, there was a strangely unsatisfying, self-absorbed taste left in my mouth.

When we visited survivors who were not as well off, there was a stranger dynamic. One young woman in a survivors' village on the outskirts of Kigali broke into tears while recounting her story. We sat and listened sympathetically, eager to be as supportive as we could and to show our gratitude for her sharing our story. Our interpreters, young men who worked in an organization dedicated to helping survivors, were strangely nonchalant and even jovial as they listened to the survivor's testimony for the proverbial nth time. I suppose they didn't need to be shedding tears or donning dour looks, and the survivor didn't seem to care, and maybe they even cheered her up, but there was something slightly off about this scene.

The woman second from left is the one described below.

But in our visits to survivors we also saw incredible things about Rwanda as a land and as a country. We visited a widows' village (also on the outskirts of Kigali, a major flaw in Rwanda's survivor aid program), where we met one poor woman who couldn't leave her room from depression. The guide who brought us there, a woman in her 40s, was better about bringing us together in the appropriate tone, and perhaps we brightened the widow's 10:00 hour for a few minutes, but there was not much we could do.

We did marvel, however, at the cheery garb of the other widows in the village, and even more so at the workers in their village. You see, amongst a village of mostly women between the ages of 35-55, all survivors of the genocide, the people repairing a house that recently lost a roof in a storm were genocide perpetrators. Criminals, prisoners, in other words, who were from other areas but who nevertheless inflicted crimes on other people that these widows suffered from themselves. "The prisoners depend on the women," our guide told us. "They get their water from the widows, and so they have to work together." We all thought this would be a grave security risk and a frightening thing for the women, but apparently it works out.

Our man was also adorned in cheery garb, I might add.

There is one last major, stunning inconsistency in visiting genocide sites and survivors in Rwanda. Perhaps it is not an inconsistency, but the universe's way of leveling us out and reminding us of who we are and how life is never just one way or another. Each site we visited was set in natural beauty, in gorgeous vistas and amazing scenes. And beyond the natural beauty offering a stark background to the human horrors, there was also the human beauty: each place we visited had people around who either worked at the site, or lived near the site, or went to school near the site, and their kindness lifted us up out of whatever funk we fell into. Whether or not we had a right to feel that funk, whether or not we could appreciate the trauma of the country on any significant level, and whether or not any of this mattered, the beauty that came after each sad experience added a clear gloss over everything we did. We didn't forget what we saw, and the horror did not diminish, but we did at least feel a little bit better. Each little bit counts in dealing with trauma, one way or the other.

The view from Murambi.