On consecutive days,
she waits
For the tall, pocket-filled, bag-filled foreigners to escape
From the pristine chill of
The supermarket's icy grip
Hoping,
For five hundred,
Or
One thousand,
Riel
Or,
Possibly even
A dollar,
American,
Because two days
Without food
Is long
Enough.
Monday, January 31, 2005
"I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not."
Thank God for Chevy Chase.
And I'm not the only one who thinks that way, either. I've been meaning to write a blog about the need for more Chevy in American cinema, and then, lo and behold, the online edition of The New York Post today featured in interview with Chase at the Sundance Film Festival, where he plays a part in a new independent film that allows him to show a little more depth and emotion than in his past, comedic roles.
About time, I say.
Bill Murray was given a big-time career rejuvenation by filmmaker Wes Anderson in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Why has it taken so long for directors of my generation to latch on to Chevy Chase?
In the Fletch and Vacation films, we saw the Chevy persona in all its glory. He was either the rogue or the naif, the sly one or the clueless one. Not too many people could pull off one of those parts believably, let alone two.
Ah, but then again, few like Chevy have walked the face of this earth. If Chevy and Jesus had lived at the same time (and who's to say they didn't), Jesus would have said: "Dude, the water's all yours. Go walkin' on it, bro."
Like most comedians, you either get Chevy, or you don't. I know people that despise Mike Myers, who I love; the Canadian sketch show The Kids in the Hall is another one of those, well, acquired tastes. To all those who dislike Chevy, who haven't thought of him in years, who wonder what all the fuss is about, let me make it clear that I hear your voices, and I respect their worth. Dissent is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. (Even though you're wrong...)
Like Bill Murray, Chevy has an often pompous, arrogant self-confident exterior that hides a great, deep, boundless, endless, depthless inner pain. (A little dramatic, I know, but too much exposure to Mr.Chase has that effect on people.) The great mark of an actor, I think, is to be able to see that character thinking -- to believe that something unspoken is going on beneath the lines that actually are being spoken.
Chevy has that, in spades. (David Spade, despite his name, doesn't have it in spades. Go figure.) That kind of silent judgement. Works great in comedy, for those long, lingering deadpan looks. Works great in drama, too.
In the above-mentioned article, he sheepishly mentions being a bit of an arrogant s.o.b. in the past. (He's a legendary dick, in other words.) Who cares, say I. If we were to judge the worth of our actors by their real-life personalities, who among us would be innocent?
So I say: Now that Chevy Chase's back on the silver screen, let's keep him there. And give him some drama to play, alongside the comedic stylings that shaped my pre-pubescent mind.
He deserves another shot.
The world needs more Chevy.
And I'm not the only one who thinks that way, either. I've been meaning to write a blog about the need for more Chevy in American cinema, and then, lo and behold, the online edition of The New York Post today featured in interview with Chase at the Sundance Film Festival, where he plays a part in a new independent film that allows him to show a little more depth and emotion than in his past, comedic roles.
About time, I say.
Bill Murray was given a big-time career rejuvenation by filmmaker Wes Anderson in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Why has it taken so long for directors of my generation to latch on to Chevy Chase?
In the Fletch and Vacation films, we saw the Chevy persona in all its glory. He was either the rogue or the naif, the sly one or the clueless one. Not too many people could pull off one of those parts believably, let alone two.
Ah, but then again, few like Chevy have walked the face of this earth. If Chevy and Jesus had lived at the same time (and who's to say they didn't), Jesus would have said: "Dude, the water's all yours. Go walkin' on it, bro."
Like most comedians, you either get Chevy, or you don't. I know people that despise Mike Myers, who I love; the Canadian sketch show The Kids in the Hall is another one of those, well, acquired tastes. To all those who dislike Chevy, who haven't thought of him in years, who wonder what all the fuss is about, let me make it clear that I hear your voices, and I respect their worth. Dissent is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. (Even though you're wrong...)
Like Bill Murray, Chevy has an often pompous, arrogant self-confident exterior that hides a great, deep, boundless, endless, depthless inner pain. (A little dramatic, I know, but too much exposure to Mr.Chase has that effect on people.) The great mark of an actor, I think, is to be able to see that character thinking -- to believe that something unspoken is going on beneath the lines that actually are being spoken.
Chevy has that, in spades. (David Spade, despite his name, doesn't have it in spades. Go figure.) That kind of silent judgement. Works great in comedy, for those long, lingering deadpan looks. Works great in drama, too.
In the above-mentioned article, he sheepishly mentions being a bit of an arrogant s.o.b. in the past. (He's a legendary dick, in other words.) Who cares, say I. If we were to judge the worth of our actors by their real-life personalities, who among us would be innocent?
So I say: Now that Chevy Chase's back on the silver screen, let's keep him there. And give him some drama to play, alongside the comedic stylings that shaped my pre-pubescent mind.
He deserves another shot.
The world needs more Chevy.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE
Coming back to Cambodia after a short stint home in Canada last September, the first thing I noticed when walking out of Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh was the smell. It wasn't even the heat that struck me the most, after the pleasantly cool air of an Ontario autumn, because you get used to the heat, expect the heat, almost wait for the heat to begin its long and slow process of breaking you down, second by second.
The smell, though, is so strange and potent that its presence eventually, somehow, becomes an afterthought; its unique aura is in and of itself the very reason it sinks into those beautiful and hideous natural phenomenas that we take for granted, like sunsets, or rain, or Richard Simmons' hair.
This is the smell of life, intensified: gas and dust and roads and rice and grass and sweat and motos and people screaming and laughing, dirty and alive. It hovers in the air, this smell, following you around, clinging to your memories. It is not an altogether unpleasant smell, truth be told; after a few days, it simply is, a fact of life, a reality of Cambodia. It is earthy and real.
In Canada, there is a clean and freshly milked glow to the air, for lack of a better word. The air is good. The air is alive. The air, when you are in parts of nature that are pure and unspoiled, feels and smells and tastes like whatever air is supposed to be, in all its pristine glory, the apothesis of our hopes for our future selves, healthy beings at one with the world.
In Phnom Penh, the air is the way we actually are: unkempt, indifferent, intrusive, fundamentally the opposite of what we could and should be. It stinks of people and their efforts, mechanical and natural. It lays claim to our worst-kept secrets, and reveals them, constantly, effortlessly, as the day dies down to night. As we're left in the dust.
The smell, though, is so strange and potent that its presence eventually, somehow, becomes an afterthought; its unique aura is in and of itself the very reason it sinks into those beautiful and hideous natural phenomenas that we take for granted, like sunsets, or rain, or Richard Simmons' hair.
This is the smell of life, intensified: gas and dust and roads and rice and grass and sweat and motos and people screaming and laughing, dirty and alive. It hovers in the air, this smell, following you around, clinging to your memories. It is not an altogether unpleasant smell, truth be told; after a few days, it simply is, a fact of life, a reality of Cambodia. It is earthy and real.
In Canada, there is a clean and freshly milked glow to the air, for lack of a better word. The air is good. The air is alive. The air, when you are in parts of nature that are pure and unspoiled, feels and smells and tastes like whatever air is supposed to be, in all its pristine glory, the apothesis of our hopes for our future selves, healthy beings at one with the world.
In Phnom Penh, the air is the way we actually are: unkempt, indifferent, intrusive, fundamentally the opposite of what we could and should be. It stinks of people and their efforts, mechanical and natural. It lays claim to our worst-kept secrets, and reveals them, constantly, effortlessly, as the day dies down to night. As we're left in the dust.
WHERE'S PERRY MASON WHEN YOU NEED HIM?
The Phnom Penh Post reported the other day that prison authorities here in Cambodia are in a bit of a bind, given that there aren't, in fact, any laws on the books forbidding prisoners from breaking out of prison.
Kind of a Catch-22 thing, I guess. You're put into prison for doing something bad. You're not supposed to break out of prison, but if you do, well, there's not much we can do about that, because it's not against the law.
Sorta defeats the whole point of a prison, doesn't it? Having a sort of 'revolving door' policy and all.
Just one more example of how seriously twisted the Khmer justice system is.
Where I work, a lot of the, like, really smart and important and talented people are actually working on important and relevant stuff, a lot of which has to do badgering the Cambodian government, pleading with them, cajoling them, convincing them that, yes, laws are, contrary to what you might believe or have heard, important. (I've never used the word 'cajole' or any form of it in a sentence before. I swear. I don't know what got into me. I try not to use words that sound totally strange and ridiculous in everyday conversation, but I think I just violated my own oath.)
Case in point:
A lot of the tsunami coverage has focused on the fact that (gasp) orphaned children may, in fact, be sold into the sex trade.
Guess what? It happens all the time. Every day. Every hour.
And a lot of these kids that are kidnapped or coerced into working in Cambodia or Thailand or Vietnam eventually, for various reasons, find themselves trying to sneak back into their native lands any which way they can. (I also try not to use titles of Clint Eastwood movies in my writing, but I think that that last phrase was the title of a flick featuring Clint and an ape. And wasn't it a sequel, too? But I promise there'll be no 'pink cadillacs' or 'magnum force' phrases.)
You know what often happens when the authorities catch them? The kids are charged with being illegal immigrants! (As if they had any say in being, I don't know, sold.)
Back home, if you're a kid, and if you do something bad, no matter what it is, they can charge you with something. Here, there's no, I repeat no, laws for young offenders. They receive the same sentences as adults, and, not only that, they're put in the same prisons.
Scary stuff. As functional and seemingly thriving as Phnom Penh is, it's little details like that that can make you shiver, if you think about them too long, if you ponder them too much.
Lots of work remains to be done here. Lots of rules to be written up. In the meantime, lots of boys and girls wait. Crossing borders, passing through hands, travelling over unfamiliar roads to destinations they'd rather not think about, as the indifferent machinations of government continue their creaky ways.
Kind of a Catch-22 thing, I guess. You're put into prison for doing something bad. You're not supposed to break out of prison, but if you do, well, there's not much we can do about that, because it's not against the law.
Sorta defeats the whole point of a prison, doesn't it? Having a sort of 'revolving door' policy and all.
Just one more example of how seriously twisted the Khmer justice system is.
Where I work, a lot of the, like, really smart and important and talented people are actually working on important and relevant stuff, a lot of which has to do badgering the Cambodian government, pleading with them, cajoling them, convincing them that, yes, laws are, contrary to what you might believe or have heard, important. (I've never used the word 'cajole' or any form of it in a sentence before. I swear. I don't know what got into me. I try not to use words that sound totally strange and ridiculous in everyday conversation, but I think I just violated my own oath.)
Case in point:
A lot of the tsunami coverage has focused on the fact that (gasp) orphaned children may, in fact, be sold into the sex trade.
Guess what? It happens all the time. Every day. Every hour.
And a lot of these kids that are kidnapped or coerced into working in Cambodia or Thailand or Vietnam eventually, for various reasons, find themselves trying to sneak back into their native lands any which way they can. (I also try not to use titles of Clint Eastwood movies in my writing, but I think that that last phrase was the title of a flick featuring Clint and an ape. And wasn't it a sequel, too? But I promise there'll be no 'pink cadillacs' or 'magnum force' phrases.)
You know what often happens when the authorities catch them? The kids are charged with being illegal immigrants! (As if they had any say in being, I don't know, sold.)
Back home, if you're a kid, and if you do something bad, no matter what it is, they can charge you with something. Here, there's no, I repeat no, laws for young offenders. They receive the same sentences as adults, and, not only that, they're put in the same prisons.
Scary stuff. As functional and seemingly thriving as Phnom Penh is, it's little details like that that can make you shiver, if you think about them too long, if you ponder them too much.
Lots of work remains to be done here. Lots of rules to be written up. In the meantime, lots of boys and girls wait. Crossing borders, passing through hands, travelling over unfamiliar roads to destinations they'd rather not think about, as the indifferent machinations of government continue their creaky ways.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
DIFFERENT SPEEDS
He was there again last night, Tom, the Khmer kid who hangs around the Galaxy Web Internet cafe, hoping to sell some newspapers.
I'd already read what he was selling, so I just chatted with him for a moment or two, his English broken and hesitant, but good, all things considered. Great, in fact.
He's a short kid, like most Cambodians. Guessing their ages is always tricky. My first instinct said: He's twelve.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Fifteen," he said.
Me, half-surprised, half-not: "fifteen?"
"In Cambodia, people small," he said.
True, but that's not only Cambodia. In Japan, too, people are short, and hell, I'm not that big myself. Here, though, it ain't necessarily genetics, though that plays a part. Most Cambodian kids and teenagers have stunted growth.
I did some teaching for awhile at an orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (www.futurelight.net). A lot of the kids were from the countryside, where their meals mostly consist of rice, rice, more rice, and rice. You have kids that are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old that look nine and ten. It's unnerving at first, but like anything here (or anything in life), you get used to it.
They grow at their own speed, that's all. Then they stop. Simple.
We all do. Some people are tall at eleven years old, towering over the hopscotch courts. (Do kids still play hopscotch anymore?) Some are short until nineteen, then bam, it's Kareem Abdul-Jabar time.
I would like to think it's the same thing in life, too. I'm not sure about that; it's just one of those strange theories of mine that refuse to go away, like the mosquitoes in my room at night. Things I've learned in Japan and Cambodia over the last five years are things that some kids, kids whose parents are aid workers, or missionaries, or just really-rich-and-powerful-embassy-type-people, would have learned by age seven. The allure of foreign lands, the confusion that results when you are immersed in them, the gradual unfolding of peoples and cultures that can envelop or smother you -- it too me by surprise at age twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five (and still does, at twenty-nine), but maybe embassy kids go through all that before adolescence. (Me, before adolescence, I was mostly going through Spider-Man.)
We all move through life at different speeds. Where you are now -- in your job, your family, your (hopefully) life -- is not where I'm at. We started at different places. We rested at alternative points. You got a bit of a lead, and I'm still catching up, and vice versa.
Tom, the Cambodian boy who sells the papers, he's hustling out of bed at five a.m., going to make some bucks. He's fifteen and too poor for school and chasing down foreigners for the 500 riel cut he makes from each and every sale. (That's about twelve cents, U.S.).
He started at a place far different from me, in time and space, and, let's face it, plain old luck. My position's better than Tom's, and Tom's is better than the kids around the corner, the ones you see with their mothers, rummaging through the garbage at night. I'm a bit ahead of him -- in terms of comfort, occupation, sustainability.
I still have some bumps (craters?) in the road ahead of me. I can't see the next time I'll be knocked to the canvas.
I hope Tom somehow, in the face of all rational logic and plausibility, catches up to me, if only for a moment, a second, an instant. I really, really do.
I'd already read what he was selling, so I just chatted with him for a moment or two, his English broken and hesitant, but good, all things considered. Great, in fact.
He's a short kid, like most Cambodians. Guessing their ages is always tricky. My first instinct said: He's twelve.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Fifteen," he said.
Me, half-surprised, half-not: "fifteen?"
"In Cambodia, people small," he said.
True, but that's not only Cambodia. In Japan, too, people are short, and hell, I'm not that big myself. Here, though, it ain't necessarily genetics, though that plays a part. Most Cambodian kids and teenagers have stunted growth.
I did some teaching for awhile at an orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (www.futurelight.net). A lot of the kids were from the countryside, where their meals mostly consist of rice, rice, more rice, and rice. You have kids that are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old that look nine and ten. It's unnerving at first, but like anything here (or anything in life), you get used to it.
They grow at their own speed, that's all. Then they stop. Simple.
We all do. Some people are tall at eleven years old, towering over the hopscotch courts. (Do kids still play hopscotch anymore?) Some are short until nineteen, then bam, it's Kareem Abdul-Jabar time.
I would like to think it's the same thing in life, too. I'm not sure about that; it's just one of those strange theories of mine that refuse to go away, like the mosquitoes in my room at night. Things I've learned in Japan and Cambodia over the last five years are things that some kids, kids whose parents are aid workers, or missionaries, or just really-rich-and-powerful-embassy-type-people, would have learned by age seven. The allure of foreign lands, the confusion that results when you are immersed in them, the gradual unfolding of peoples and cultures that can envelop or smother you -- it too me by surprise at age twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five (and still does, at twenty-nine), but maybe embassy kids go through all that before adolescence. (Me, before adolescence, I was mostly going through Spider-Man.)
We all move through life at different speeds. Where you are now -- in your job, your family, your (hopefully) life -- is not where I'm at. We started at different places. We rested at alternative points. You got a bit of a lead, and I'm still catching up, and vice versa.
Tom, the Cambodian boy who sells the papers, he's hustling out of bed at five a.m., going to make some bucks. He's fifteen and too poor for school and chasing down foreigners for the 500 riel cut he makes from each and every sale. (That's about twelve cents, U.S.).
He started at a place far different from me, in time and space, and, let's face it, plain old luck. My position's better than Tom's, and Tom's is better than the kids around the corner, the ones you see with their mothers, rummaging through the garbage at night. I'm a bit ahead of him -- in terms of comfort, occupation, sustainability.
I still have some bumps (craters?) in the road ahead of me. I can't see the next time I'll be knocked to the canvas.
I hope Tom somehow, in the face of all rational logic and plausibility, catches up to me, if only for a moment, a second, an instant. I really, really do.
Friday, January 28, 2005
ONLY YOU
Quick question:
If you had grown up on the streets of Phnom Penh, or in Canada's verison of America's projects in the Jane and Finch section of Toronto, would you be where you are right now? Working in the same job? Living in the same house?
I'm betting no.
The other night on DVD I watched the new Samuel L. Jackson film Coach Carter, about a California high school basketball coach who locked his team out of the gym, banned practice, and forfeited games until the students improved their academic standing and fulfilled the contracts they had signed with him at the beginning of the season. At one point in the flick he says: "The system has failed these kids."
The line resonates.
There will always be the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Oprah Winfreys of the world, people who, though uncommon will and focus, manage to transcend their roots and plant themselves firmly on the foundation of their dreams.
For the rest of us, we need help.
It's scandalous to even consider, but it's true -- the systems are sometimes purposefully designed to hold people back. Or sometimes there's no systems in the first place.
In Cambodia, you usually can't go to school unless you have enough money to pay the teachers alittle bit every day. Why do you have to pay the teachers? Because the teachers ask for bribe money? Why do the teachers ask for bribe money? Because the government pays them twenty American dollars a month. They can't live on that much; nobody can live on that much. The government doesn't care -- not when they're living the high life, driving Benzes and raising children who tend to scream through town on their motorbikes and ram into civilians.
It's funny. On TV yesterday there was a live panel debate from the Davos conference in Switzerland, that yearly gathering that assembles the best and the brightest from the world of finance and politics, technology and business. The members of the panel? Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bono, Tony Blair, the Prime Ministers of three or four African nations. Not bad. Their concern? How do we help Africa? Their solution? Well, we're not sure, they said. Yes, they had many options, but implementing them, actualizing them, remains fuzzy.
The biggest problem is the most obvious problem: corruption. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has a much applauded new report stating that the way to end poverty in the next few decades is through a massive influx of cash; the only way to help the poor is to give them more money.
I agree.
It's that simple.
It's that difficult.
How do you get the money to the people? Therein lies the difficulty. How do you get past the endless levels of bribery and payoff these nations' governments demand, expect, require? You can throw all the money in the world into these countries, but if nobody's able to track it, seeing that it goes where it's actually supposed to go, then the cycle will continue.
Clinton made a point that I could relate to, because much of where I work is related to capacity building, moving away from aiding a community, city or nation, and shifting towards enabling them to build things on their own. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?
It's the hardest thing in the world. Think how long it took you to figure out how the world works -- how to tie your shoes, take a test, do a job interview, learn new software. It takes years and years and years. (I'm just realizing, after almost thirty years, that I have no idea how the world works. If anyone knows, please let me know.)
The same thing is true for countries. But there's no other choice, is there? If we just give money and feel satisfied, then nobody learns anything, nothing gets done, and in twenty years the poverty, coups and deterioration will continue, if not escalate.
It all comes down to capacity building -- having people on the ground, with the people, telling them: You do it like this and like and like this. And you do that for a whole generation, in all fields: health, education, entertainment, finance -- the list goes on and on.
There's no other way.
You have to show people how to build a system.
The system may be corrupt, and illogical, and faulty, but it has to be there to work.
If you're a kid in Cambodia, the system is barely hanging together. If you're a kid from the streets of Jane and Finch in Toronto, there's a system, yes, but what real hope is there? How good are your schools? How good are your teachers? What kind of support system is in place? Who's giving kids the self-confidence and tools that will enable them to get beyond Jane and Finch to at least the Harvey's burger restaurant at Yonge and Bloor?
The system is failing a lot of people all over the world.
And, in the end of course, the big slap in the face comes when you realize that there is no system.
Watch the movie Spartan, with Val Kilmer. It's a crafty political thriller that also kind of encapsulates everything you need to know about life. As Kilmer learns at a crucial point in the film: There is no 'they'; there is only him, and what he said he was going to do, and whether or not he will do it. That's all.
There is only you.
If you had grown up on the streets of Phnom Penh, or in Canada's verison of America's projects in the Jane and Finch section of Toronto, would you be where you are right now? Working in the same job? Living in the same house?
I'm betting no.
The other night on DVD I watched the new Samuel L. Jackson film Coach Carter, about a California high school basketball coach who locked his team out of the gym, banned practice, and forfeited games until the students improved their academic standing and fulfilled the contracts they had signed with him at the beginning of the season. At one point in the flick he says: "The system has failed these kids."
The line resonates.
There will always be the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Oprah Winfreys of the world, people who, though uncommon will and focus, manage to transcend their roots and plant themselves firmly on the foundation of their dreams.
For the rest of us, we need help.
It's scandalous to even consider, but it's true -- the systems are sometimes purposefully designed to hold people back. Or sometimes there's no systems in the first place.
In Cambodia, you usually can't go to school unless you have enough money to pay the teachers alittle bit every day. Why do you have to pay the teachers? Because the teachers ask for bribe money? Why do the teachers ask for bribe money? Because the government pays them twenty American dollars a month. They can't live on that much; nobody can live on that much. The government doesn't care -- not when they're living the high life, driving Benzes and raising children who tend to scream through town on their motorbikes and ram into civilians.
It's funny. On TV yesterday there was a live panel debate from the Davos conference in Switzerland, that yearly gathering that assembles the best and the brightest from the world of finance and politics, technology and business. The members of the panel? Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bono, Tony Blair, the Prime Ministers of three or four African nations. Not bad. Their concern? How do we help Africa? Their solution? Well, we're not sure, they said. Yes, they had many options, but implementing them, actualizing them, remains fuzzy.
The biggest problem is the most obvious problem: corruption. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has a much applauded new report stating that the way to end poverty in the next few decades is through a massive influx of cash; the only way to help the poor is to give them more money.
I agree.
It's that simple.
It's that difficult.
How do you get the money to the people? Therein lies the difficulty. How do you get past the endless levels of bribery and payoff these nations' governments demand, expect, require? You can throw all the money in the world into these countries, but if nobody's able to track it, seeing that it goes where it's actually supposed to go, then the cycle will continue.
Clinton made a point that I could relate to, because much of where I work is related to capacity building, moving away from aiding a community, city or nation, and shifting towards enabling them to build things on their own. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?
It's the hardest thing in the world. Think how long it took you to figure out how the world works -- how to tie your shoes, take a test, do a job interview, learn new software. It takes years and years and years. (I'm just realizing, after almost thirty years, that I have no idea how the world works. If anyone knows, please let me know.)
The same thing is true for countries. But there's no other choice, is there? If we just give money and feel satisfied, then nobody learns anything, nothing gets done, and in twenty years the poverty, coups and deterioration will continue, if not escalate.
It all comes down to capacity building -- having people on the ground, with the people, telling them: You do it like this and like and like this. And you do that for a whole generation, in all fields: health, education, entertainment, finance -- the list goes on and on.
There's no other way.
You have to show people how to build a system.
The system may be corrupt, and illogical, and faulty, but it has to be there to work.
If you're a kid in Cambodia, the system is barely hanging together. If you're a kid from the streets of Jane and Finch in Toronto, there's a system, yes, but what real hope is there? How good are your schools? How good are your teachers? What kind of support system is in place? Who's giving kids the self-confidence and tools that will enable them to get beyond Jane and Finch to at least the Harvey's burger restaurant at Yonge and Bloor?
The system is failing a lot of people all over the world.
And, in the end of course, the big slap in the face comes when you realize that there is no system.
Watch the movie Spartan, with Val Kilmer. It's a crafty political thriller that also kind of encapsulates everything you need to know about life. As Kilmer learns at a crucial point in the film: There is no 'they'; there is only him, and what he said he was going to do, and whether or not he will do it. That's all.
There is only you.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
DREAMS OF SNOW (A short short story...)
A 4.5 kg meteorite landed in a Banteay Mancheay province rice field on Monday morning, astonishing farmers who were harvesting the field...
-- The Cambodia Daily,
January 27, 2005
Chhaya is a farmer. He has a simple life. His wife takes care of their four children, two girls and two boys, while he minds the fields. The day is hot and the day is long, but after lunch there is always a nap, a sweet chance to rest, possibly dream, if only for an hour.
Sometimes he dreams about snow. He has never seen snow, but he has heard of it, from the foreigners that came many years ago to help de-mine the fields he called home. He has heard that it is soft and cool, and in his dreams he is sometimes buried in the snow, up to his neck. He cannot move his neck to the left or to the right, but that's fine; that's logical. He can tilt his head, though, enough to see the falling snow land on his brow, gentle and silent. He has never heard the expression 'no two snowflakes are alike', but if he ever does, he will will think about it for a moment, nod, agree. Before the snow covers his eyes and his sight, he notices that the flakes are falling on him and him alone; just up ahead, in the middle of his emerald green fields, the sun shines bright. His wife and children are watching him, laughing, which makes him laugh, too.
At this point in his dream, he always wakes up, slick with sweat, a smile on his face.
He tells no one of his dream; it is for him and him alone.
******
The air was hot and thick as he worked the fields, but that was fine, because he knew that rainy season was coming. Soon enough there would be wetness and coolness, each and every afternoon. He could wait. He liked to wait, to revel in the heat, to imagine how refreshing that first, initial drop would be. He would savor it.
Later, he told anyone who would listen -- his wife, children, even the commune chief, Samnang, who he usually didn't get along with --that he had been the first one in the whole village to see the object in the sky. He couldn't prove that, no, but he had sensed it before anyone else. Don't ask me how, he'd say. I am the one who dreams of snow, not you.
Others claimed to hear it, a steady, whirring shwoosh, but they were fools. Anyone can hear such a thing. To sense it, though, was special.
Chhaya paused. He stood up from the rice fields, his knees cracking. His heart started to beat. At first he thought one of his children was in trouble, hurt, or even dead; he often had physical sensations, even tremors, when his boys or girls were in pain.
But no, this was different. This feeling, this drumbeat inside of his chest, had not started from within; its origin was elsewhere, up.
It is going to snow, Chhaya thought, knowing such a feeling was ludicrous, and knowing that it was true, nevertheless.
He remembered his dream. He remembered the snow piling on top of him, and how difficult it was to move.
This was not a dream, and he felt free, perhaps for the first time ever. He felt fluid.
It was then his eyes saw it.
A speeding round orb racing through the sky, trailing orange and grey fire, ramming to the ground and exploding, its great and mighty boom larger than any mine Chhya had ever heard. The first thing he did was clutch the stump of his right arm, the bottom portion of which had been torn apart by a mine seven years ago, in this very same field. He rubbed it and held it and rubbed it some more.
In the days and weeks and months and years to come, stories would be told. Offerings would be made. It was a gift from the gods, many would say. Others would say no, no, it is a curse, it is a threat, it is an omen of bad things to come. There would be battles over who got to keep it, this strange and useless rock, this harbinger of unknown ills. It would be taken away, locked away, in a room somewhere in Phnom Penh. The sound of its landing, the ferocity of its fires, would be a memory, a picture in people's minds, a tale to be passed down throughout the village for thirty, forty years. (And so nice it was, to be able to recall an event that did not involve death, and blood, and children whacked against trees! So unbelievably liberating, this enigma that did not involve wailing children and unseeing, lifeless eyes, and the cold, black grip of a gun.)
All of that came later.
Chhaya came first, and he would remember that moment, so clearly and effortlessly, that slow and steady walk of his, towards this fallen gift from the gods. Already he could hear the cries and shrieks and confused conversation of farms two, three fields over. They would be here soon.
A deep, ragged pit lay just up ahead. Long tendrils of smoke weaved their way out from beneath the flames, reaching higher and higher before vanishing into the indifferent blue sky.
He watched it all, not noticing the tears that slowly made their down his sunken cheeks. He was not hungry, not thirsty, not tired. He had never believed what so many others did, that dreams were visions, that they told the future, that they could bring you fortune and happiness, if you followed them carefully. He had always thought this was nonsense.
He walked slowly, like a child, towards the crater. There were no longer any mines in this field, hadn't been any for years, but he still walked gingerly; old habits lingered. Soon, only moments from now, he knew he would have to look inside its depth. View its true shape and form. Confront the miracle, before it became common.
Still, he paused. He stopped. He closed his eyes, liking the feel of his moist tears; he had not cried for a long, long time. The day was hot, and the sun was full, and there was much more to do today, much more rice to harvest. But he wanted to listen a little longer to the sound of the flames. He wanted to smell the smoke. He wanted only to believe in this moment, the reality of it, the possibility that snow had come, finally, for him.
-- The Cambodia Daily,
January 27, 2005
Chhaya is a farmer. He has a simple life. His wife takes care of their four children, two girls and two boys, while he minds the fields. The day is hot and the day is long, but after lunch there is always a nap, a sweet chance to rest, possibly dream, if only for an hour.
Sometimes he dreams about snow. He has never seen snow, but he has heard of it, from the foreigners that came many years ago to help de-mine the fields he called home. He has heard that it is soft and cool, and in his dreams he is sometimes buried in the snow, up to his neck. He cannot move his neck to the left or to the right, but that's fine; that's logical. He can tilt his head, though, enough to see the falling snow land on his brow, gentle and silent. He has never heard the expression 'no two snowflakes are alike', but if he ever does, he will will think about it for a moment, nod, agree. Before the snow covers his eyes and his sight, he notices that the flakes are falling on him and him alone; just up ahead, in the middle of his emerald green fields, the sun shines bright. His wife and children are watching him, laughing, which makes him laugh, too.
At this point in his dream, he always wakes up, slick with sweat, a smile on his face.
He tells no one of his dream; it is for him and him alone.
******
The air was hot and thick as he worked the fields, but that was fine, because he knew that rainy season was coming. Soon enough there would be wetness and coolness, each and every afternoon. He could wait. He liked to wait, to revel in the heat, to imagine how refreshing that first, initial drop would be. He would savor it.
Later, he told anyone who would listen -- his wife, children, even the commune chief, Samnang, who he usually didn't get along with --that he had been the first one in the whole village to see the object in the sky. He couldn't prove that, no, but he had sensed it before anyone else. Don't ask me how, he'd say. I am the one who dreams of snow, not you.
Others claimed to hear it, a steady, whirring shwoosh, but they were fools. Anyone can hear such a thing. To sense it, though, was special.
Chhaya paused. He stood up from the rice fields, his knees cracking. His heart started to beat. At first he thought one of his children was in trouble, hurt, or even dead; he often had physical sensations, even tremors, when his boys or girls were in pain.
But no, this was different. This feeling, this drumbeat inside of his chest, had not started from within; its origin was elsewhere, up.
It is going to snow, Chhaya thought, knowing such a feeling was ludicrous, and knowing that it was true, nevertheless.
He remembered his dream. He remembered the snow piling on top of him, and how difficult it was to move.
This was not a dream, and he felt free, perhaps for the first time ever. He felt fluid.
It was then his eyes saw it.
A speeding round orb racing through the sky, trailing orange and grey fire, ramming to the ground and exploding, its great and mighty boom larger than any mine Chhya had ever heard. The first thing he did was clutch the stump of his right arm, the bottom portion of which had been torn apart by a mine seven years ago, in this very same field. He rubbed it and held it and rubbed it some more.
In the days and weeks and months and years to come, stories would be told. Offerings would be made. It was a gift from the gods, many would say. Others would say no, no, it is a curse, it is a threat, it is an omen of bad things to come. There would be battles over who got to keep it, this strange and useless rock, this harbinger of unknown ills. It would be taken away, locked away, in a room somewhere in Phnom Penh. The sound of its landing, the ferocity of its fires, would be a memory, a picture in people's minds, a tale to be passed down throughout the village for thirty, forty years. (And so nice it was, to be able to recall an event that did not involve death, and blood, and children whacked against trees! So unbelievably liberating, this enigma that did not involve wailing children and unseeing, lifeless eyes, and the cold, black grip of a gun.)
All of that came later.
Chhaya came first, and he would remember that moment, so clearly and effortlessly, that slow and steady walk of his, towards this fallen gift from the gods. Already he could hear the cries and shrieks and confused conversation of farms two, three fields over. They would be here soon.
A deep, ragged pit lay just up ahead. Long tendrils of smoke weaved their way out from beneath the flames, reaching higher and higher before vanishing into the indifferent blue sky.
He watched it all, not noticing the tears that slowly made their down his sunken cheeks. He was not hungry, not thirsty, not tired. He had never believed what so many others did, that dreams were visions, that they told the future, that they could bring you fortune and happiness, if you followed them carefully. He had always thought this was nonsense.
He walked slowly, like a child, towards the crater. There were no longer any mines in this field, hadn't been any for years, but he still walked gingerly; old habits lingered. Soon, only moments from now, he knew he would have to look inside its depth. View its true shape and form. Confront the miracle, before it became common.
Still, he paused. He stopped. He closed his eyes, liking the feel of his moist tears; he had not cried for a long, long time. The day was hot, and the sun was full, and there was much more to do today, much more rice to harvest. But he wanted to listen a little longer to the sound of the flames. He wanted to smell the smoke. He wanted only to believe in this moment, the reality of it, the possibility that snow had come, finally, for him.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
THE (CRIMINALLY) UNDERRATED STEVE GUTTENBERG, THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF LITERATURE AND THE AUTHORS OF OUR LIVES
My fouth year Creative Writing instructor informed us on the first day that by the end of the year we should be producing material that was written at a professional level, ready to be published.
(Strange, considering this was a man who had never published anything, and the one time that the topic of real-world publishing advice was even broached, he went into a twenty minute rage about how his own academic purity and the sanctity of art would not be violated by anything as crass as reality. I'm so glad to be out of school, but I'm less glad that I used the word 'broached' in the previous sentence, 'cause I'm not sure I used it correctly, given that it's the thing you pin on your date's dress for the prom, right, so how can it be a verb, too?)
And yes, there actually are degrees in Creative Writing. I swear. Most people look at it on a c.v. and get a kind of puzzled expression, as if I majored in Paper Airplane Design or something. (That's so patently ridiculous;I only minored in Paper Airplane Design, alright? And I still can't make one of the damn things...)
This was all back in 1997. I was not on-line. I didn't know what that term even meant. To be a writer was a worthy, back-breaking calling; it took years and years of precise honing, discipline and dedication. After killing yourself day after day for decades on end, you might be able to get something published by the time you were, say, forty.
Cut to now:
How difficult is it to publish this post?
Um, not so difficult. I write; I push a button; voila.
In essence, the entire notion of 'writing' and 'publishing' has been turned upside down, shaken upside the head the way I used to shake my little cousin as a newborn. (That's a joke. I swear.)
Recently, Stephen King was given a lifetime achievement award by the group that hands out the National Book Awards. His speech centred upon the divisions between 'popular' fiction and 'literature' -- and how those chasms are largely elitist, self-imposed and arbitrary, since the overflow between the two realms is now constant and abundant.
There's another, even greater gap that is being filled, and it has to do with writing itself, the notion of writing, the point of writing.
You have kids ten, eleven years old that have blogs far more sophisticated (and probably more entertaining) than mine. They have their own code, some kind of linguistic shorthand that is impenetrable to my twenty-nine year old eyes but perfectly clear, I'm sure, to those under fifteen.
At first I thought e-mail was somewhat troubling, because notions of grammar and spelling were no longer, um, necessary. Now we have websites and blogs written by everyone and anyone in the world, available for all to see at a moment's notice, and words and concepts can be spelled and expressed any way at all.
Is this good or bad?
I dunno.
I still think it's mindblowing that you can write something, push a button, and have it (potentially) read by millions within a second or two.
You have kids in orphanges in Cambodia (www.futurelight.net) who are able to shoot the breeze with the CEOs of major corporations -- theoretically, true, but everything begins theoretically, right?
If you want to write a novel, you can now have it published with the push of a button. (True, this doesn't mean you'll make any money off of it, no, but it can be out there, in the world, ready and waiting for all to see.)
If you want to write a manifesto proclaiming that the later Police Academy films, the ones without Steve Guttenberg in the lead (Assignment Miami Beach, City Under Siege and Mission to Moscow) as the height of cinematic artistry, surpassing The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda and even, believe it or not, Cannonball Run II, then bang, it's out there in the cybersphere, ready for argument.
(I would disagree, because Guttenberg added so much more than he is ever given credit for to the series, especially the third and fourth ones, Back in Training and Citizens on Patrol, where the quality started to drop but were saved, if not redeemed, by Guttenberg's mere presence. Ditto with Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run sequel. )
The future Faulkner or Barker or Grisham or Atwood or Mailer or Mishima doesn't have to wait; they can post their stuff now, get feedback, make adjustments. I'm not saying that this is how the publishing world should work now, or how it will work in the future, but the point is, there are so many permutations that pop up even when you think about this issue for a moment or two. What's going to happen in five years, ten years? How can we hold authors in esteem when everyone's an author, if only online?
It's a wildly democratizing process, to be sure. No more snootiness. No more condescension or insecurity because one's own, deeply personal ramblings were rejected by the misunderstanding publishing elite.
No more excuses, either.
At its best, what this process means is that you can hard-wire your thoughts to another's within the space of moments. You can see something on the street or in the sky that makes you pause, or reminds you of something you once believed in, but have now rejected, and you can then transform these erractic musings into poetry, instantly, and let it fly.
Your vision of poetry, untouched by others hands and invisible editorial adjustments.
It's a brave new world we're in, shifting second-by-second, and the true authors of our lives are now ourselves.
Which, paradoxically enough, is how it's always been.
(Strange, considering this was a man who had never published anything, and the one time that the topic of real-world publishing advice was even broached, he went into a twenty minute rage about how his own academic purity and the sanctity of art would not be violated by anything as crass as reality. I'm so glad to be out of school, but I'm less glad that I used the word 'broached' in the previous sentence, 'cause I'm not sure I used it correctly, given that it's the thing you pin on your date's dress for the prom, right, so how can it be a verb, too?)
And yes, there actually are degrees in Creative Writing. I swear. Most people look at it on a c.v. and get a kind of puzzled expression, as if I majored in Paper Airplane Design or something. (That's so patently ridiculous;I only minored in Paper Airplane Design, alright? And I still can't make one of the damn things...)
This was all back in 1997. I was not on-line. I didn't know what that term even meant. To be a writer was a worthy, back-breaking calling; it took years and years of precise honing, discipline and dedication. After killing yourself day after day for decades on end, you might be able to get something published by the time you were, say, forty.
Cut to now:
How difficult is it to publish this post?
Um, not so difficult. I write; I push a button; voila.
In essence, the entire notion of 'writing' and 'publishing' has been turned upside down, shaken upside the head the way I used to shake my little cousin as a newborn. (That's a joke. I swear.)
Recently, Stephen King was given a lifetime achievement award by the group that hands out the National Book Awards. His speech centred upon the divisions between 'popular' fiction and 'literature' -- and how those chasms are largely elitist, self-imposed and arbitrary, since the overflow between the two realms is now constant and abundant.
There's another, even greater gap that is being filled, and it has to do with writing itself, the notion of writing, the point of writing.
You have kids ten, eleven years old that have blogs far more sophisticated (and probably more entertaining) than mine. They have their own code, some kind of linguistic shorthand that is impenetrable to my twenty-nine year old eyes but perfectly clear, I'm sure, to those under fifteen.
At first I thought e-mail was somewhat troubling, because notions of grammar and spelling were no longer, um, necessary. Now we have websites and blogs written by everyone and anyone in the world, available for all to see at a moment's notice, and words and concepts can be spelled and expressed any way at all.
Is this good or bad?
I dunno.
I still think it's mindblowing that you can write something, push a button, and have it (potentially) read by millions within a second or two.
You have kids in orphanges in Cambodia (www.futurelight.net) who are able to shoot the breeze with the CEOs of major corporations -- theoretically, true, but everything begins theoretically, right?
If you want to write a novel, you can now have it published with the push of a button. (True, this doesn't mean you'll make any money off of it, no, but it can be out there, in the world, ready and waiting for all to see.)
If you want to write a manifesto proclaiming that the later Police Academy films, the ones without Steve Guttenberg in the lead (Assignment Miami Beach, City Under Siege and Mission to Moscow) as the height of cinematic artistry, surpassing The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda and even, believe it or not, Cannonball Run II, then bang, it's out there in the cybersphere, ready for argument.
(I would disagree, because Guttenberg added so much more than he is ever given credit for to the series, especially the third and fourth ones, Back in Training and Citizens on Patrol, where the quality started to drop but were saved, if not redeemed, by Guttenberg's mere presence. Ditto with Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run sequel. )
The future Faulkner or Barker or Grisham or Atwood or Mailer or Mishima doesn't have to wait; they can post their stuff now, get feedback, make adjustments. I'm not saying that this is how the publishing world should work now, or how it will work in the future, but the point is, there are so many permutations that pop up even when you think about this issue for a moment or two. What's going to happen in five years, ten years? How can we hold authors in esteem when everyone's an author, if only online?
It's a wildly democratizing process, to be sure. No more snootiness. No more condescension or insecurity because one's own, deeply personal ramblings were rejected by the misunderstanding publishing elite.
No more excuses, either.
At its best, what this process means is that you can hard-wire your thoughts to another's within the space of moments. You can see something on the street or in the sky that makes you pause, or reminds you of something you once believed in, but have now rejected, and you can then transform these erractic musings into poetry, instantly, and let it fly.
Your vision of poetry, untouched by others hands and invisible editorial adjustments.
It's a brave new world we're in, shifting second-by-second, and the true authors of our lives are now ourselves.
Which, paradoxically enough, is how it's always been.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
WHAT DID YOU KNOW AND WHEN DID YOU KNOW IT? (Or, The place where lost things congregate...)
If you don't have time to read actual books, you can always check out the 'Books' section at www.newyorktimes.com and pretend that you do. (It works for me.) The other day there were reviews of two new books, one about Shakespeare and his times called Will in the World, and another about the recent prisoner abuse scandals perpetrated by the Americans and Brits over in Iraq. One book is about the modern-day military and what it does and does not do, what it should and shouldn't do, while the other is set in Victorian England and concerns itself with a playwright's life and its impact on his work. (Or is Shakespeare pre-Victorian. I should probably know that, right? I saw Shakespeare and Love and everything, but I still get all these eras-named-after-queens mixed up. And who decided that they were going to name an entire time period after prominent and successful women, anyways? Nothing wrong with that, but if it were to happen today I guess we'd all be living in the Oprah era. I guess that's better than the Sally Jess Raphael era...)
Not much correlation between these two books, true, but I will find illogical connections even if none exist, damnit, because that's what I'm built to do.
Dealing with historical and literary works like Shakespeare is a guessing game, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify --
Wait.
I'm getting carried away.
When people write about Shakespeare, there's so much that's speculation, right? His intentions, his jobs, his influences, and even if Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written by the historical-person-known-as-Shakespeare. (Kind of like 'The Artist Formerly Known as Elmo'.) When you start going back four, five hundred years, you're in the 'pre-Welcome Back Kotter era', as I like to call it, and primary sources are rare, if not non-existent. (Is 'not non-existent' a double negative? Oh, and this reminds me of a great anecdote about this famous teacher that died a month or so ago, a real philosophical dude, I forget his name, but he was always a wise-ass with his teachers. One day in college his philosophy teacher stated that it was lexically impossible to create a negative statement from two positive ones. To which the smartass in the front row rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, yeah."
Get it? I think that's pretty funny, personally.
Anyway...
On the other hand, you can't more contemporary than the here and the now, and the military's actions in Iraq, and the abuse scandals that really shouldn't be all that scandalous. I'm not condoning these things by any means; I'm glad that that dude last week got sent to prison, but it's a freakin' obscenity that Bush didn't penalize anyone involved at the higher level -- Rumsfeld keeps his job, Gonzalez, who authorized the tricky memos basically validating the torture, gets promoted. Sweeeeet.
But it seems a little schizophrenic to me, this view of warfare and what constitutes shameful, despicable acts. War itself is a good thing, in this particular case; torturing the prisoners is not. Okay. Got it. So if you kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, you get the accolades of your peers and your country; if you shove them in a cell and beat 'em around a little bit, you get ten years in the military clink. Aren't both of these acts, like, the kind of things that you don't necessarily want to talk about over your morning juice? Aren't both of these things the kind of things that give you the cold sweats well into the morning hours? Maybe this should be the definition of a fundamentally wrong act: If you have nightmares about it, and it keeps you up at night, and you wake from your dreams screaming, then that act which precipitated these symptoms is not worthy of a medal, or promotion. Period.
But I digress...
My point is (or was) that we still really don't know the full extent of what went down. That old line from the Nixon years haunts us: "What did you know, and when did you know it?"
The eternal question of this time, and all time.
What did Shakespeare know? At what point in time? What did Bush know? When?
We can pinpoint events, dates, people and places. We can create the scenarios. The great works of art, the great wars, are impervious to inspection. They emerge, exist, are. We do our best to sort all of this stuff, but when you involve organisms as fundamentally fragile as humans, well, things get lost. There are always those shadowy corners where the lost things congregate, where light doesn't penetrate, and those are the places where history is made and our lives are shaped, for better or for worse.
Not much correlation between these two books, true, but I will find illogical connections even if none exist, damnit, because that's what I'm built to do.
Dealing with historical and literary works like Shakespeare is a guessing game, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signify --
Wait.
I'm getting carried away.
When people write about Shakespeare, there's so much that's speculation, right? His intentions, his jobs, his influences, and even if Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written by the historical-person-known-as-Shakespeare. (Kind of like 'The Artist Formerly Known as Elmo'.) When you start going back four, five hundred years, you're in the 'pre-Welcome Back Kotter era', as I like to call it, and primary sources are rare, if not non-existent. (Is 'not non-existent' a double negative? Oh, and this reminds me of a great anecdote about this famous teacher that died a month or so ago, a real philosophical dude, I forget his name, but he was always a wise-ass with his teachers. One day in college his philosophy teacher stated that it was lexically impossible to create a negative statement from two positive ones. To which the smartass in the front row rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah, yeah."
Get it? I think that's pretty funny, personally.
Anyway...
On the other hand, you can't more contemporary than the here and the now, and the military's actions in Iraq, and the abuse scandals that really shouldn't be all that scandalous. I'm not condoning these things by any means; I'm glad that that dude last week got sent to prison, but it's a freakin' obscenity that Bush didn't penalize anyone involved at the higher level -- Rumsfeld keeps his job, Gonzalez, who authorized the tricky memos basically validating the torture, gets promoted. Sweeeeet.
But it seems a little schizophrenic to me, this view of warfare and what constitutes shameful, despicable acts. War itself is a good thing, in this particular case; torturing the prisoners is not. Okay. Got it. So if you kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, you get the accolades of your peers and your country; if you shove them in a cell and beat 'em around a little bit, you get ten years in the military clink. Aren't both of these acts, like, the kind of things that you don't necessarily want to talk about over your morning juice? Aren't both of these things the kind of things that give you the cold sweats well into the morning hours? Maybe this should be the definition of a fundamentally wrong act: If you have nightmares about it, and it keeps you up at night, and you wake from your dreams screaming, then that act which precipitated these symptoms is not worthy of a medal, or promotion. Period.
But I digress...
My point is (or was) that we still really don't know the full extent of what went down. That old line from the Nixon years haunts us: "What did you know, and when did you know it?"
The eternal question of this time, and all time.
What did Shakespeare know? At what point in time? What did Bush know? When?
We can pinpoint events, dates, people and places. We can create the scenarios. The great works of art, the great wars, are impervious to inspection. They emerge, exist, are. We do our best to sort all of this stuff, but when you involve organisms as fundamentally fragile as humans, well, things get lost. There are always those shadowy corners where the lost things congregate, where light doesn't penetrate, and those are the places where history is made and our lives are shaped, for better or for worse.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Heeeeere's Johnny: AN INVITATION TO ADULTHOOD
The first time that Michael Jordan unretired and came back to play basketball, he said that the reaction of the crowd during his initial game back was unlike anything he had ever heard before. It was the sound of people cheering for someone that they never thought they would see again. It was as if they were clapping and screaming for a dead man come back to life.
About ten years ago, Johnny Carson did a brief appearance on David Letterman's Late Show, and the effect was about the same. I know because I found a tape of that show when I was back home a little while ago, taped ten years ago when Dave did a week of shows in Los Angeles. I can't remember who the guests were, but every night for a week Dave would say 'Presenting tonight's Top Ten List, Mr.Magic Johnson!', and out would walk that pudgy wunderkind Larry 'Bud' Melman. The gag was still funny the third or fourth time; Dave would announce a famous name, and instead the audience would get Melman. The final night, Dave announced that Johnny Carson would be reading the list, and this time, lo and behold, Carson walked out. (This was two or three years after his run on The Tonight Show had ended.)
The applause was miraculous. It went on and on and on. At one point Carson sat behind the desk, looked as if he was about to say something, then smiled and shook his head and shook Letterman's hand and exited stage left as the audience screamed.
For me, Carson represented grown-up land. If you were old enough to actually be able to watch The Tonight Show on a regular basis, then you were an adult. You had all the rights that that implied. (Which, to a seven year old, basically meant, um, unlimited supplies of cookies and ginger ale and Johnny Carson before bed.) On those rare occasions and Friday nights when I did catch Carson, the jokes always went over my head, but I remember that he was always polite, and the audience always laughed. (It's hard to believe, but back then you never actually saw the audience. Remember that? Carson stood in front of the curtain, and he told his jokes, and you heard laughter, yes, but it seemed to emanate from some other, nearby realm. It kind of freaked me out a bit, actually, but I knew that they were there, those adults, and that was what mattered; I knew that somebody I'd be there, too. I knew that someday, maybe not soon, no, but someday, I'd be able to catch those jokes, and be part of that unseen fan club.)
And I did. By the time I was a teenager, Carson was still on the air, withstanding the assault of Arsenio. There was an old-fashionedness about Johnny that was slowly disappearing in the culture at that point in time. There was a class and a dignity to his humor, somehow. It invited you in on the joke, allowed you to become a co-conspirator in his priceless reaction-shots, enabled you to experience a sense of timing and style and class that hasn't been seen since, and will never be seen again.
About ten years ago, Johnny Carson did a brief appearance on David Letterman's Late Show, and the effect was about the same. I know because I found a tape of that show when I was back home a little while ago, taped ten years ago when Dave did a week of shows in Los Angeles. I can't remember who the guests were, but every night for a week Dave would say 'Presenting tonight's Top Ten List, Mr.Magic Johnson!', and out would walk that pudgy wunderkind Larry 'Bud' Melman. The gag was still funny the third or fourth time; Dave would announce a famous name, and instead the audience would get Melman. The final night, Dave announced that Johnny Carson would be reading the list, and this time, lo and behold, Carson walked out. (This was two or three years after his run on The Tonight Show had ended.)
The applause was miraculous. It went on and on and on. At one point Carson sat behind the desk, looked as if he was about to say something, then smiled and shook his head and shook Letterman's hand and exited stage left as the audience screamed.
For me, Carson represented grown-up land. If you were old enough to actually be able to watch The Tonight Show on a regular basis, then you were an adult. You had all the rights that that implied. (Which, to a seven year old, basically meant, um, unlimited supplies of cookies and ginger ale and Johnny Carson before bed.) On those rare occasions and Friday nights when I did catch Carson, the jokes always went over my head, but I remember that he was always polite, and the audience always laughed. (It's hard to believe, but back then you never actually saw the audience. Remember that? Carson stood in front of the curtain, and he told his jokes, and you heard laughter, yes, but it seemed to emanate from some other, nearby realm. It kind of freaked me out a bit, actually, but I knew that they were there, those adults, and that was what mattered; I knew that somebody I'd be there, too. I knew that someday, maybe not soon, no, but someday, I'd be able to catch those jokes, and be part of that unseen fan club.)
And I did. By the time I was a teenager, Carson was still on the air, withstanding the assault of Arsenio. There was an old-fashionedness about Johnny that was slowly disappearing in the culture at that point in time. There was a class and a dignity to his humor, somehow. It invited you in on the joke, allowed you to become a co-conspirator in his priceless reaction-shots, enabled you to experience a sense of timing and style and class that hasn't been seen since, and will never be seen again.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
MONKS ARE PEOPLE TOO
If you are a young and able male in modern day Cambodia, there is the very real possibility that you will become a monk-- if not forever, till death do you part, at least for a few years.
Why?
Monks are respected here. People listen to them, seek advice from them, and, on a daily basis, provide money for them. As HIV/AIDS remains a huge problem here, the monks have been enlisted by various groups to provide accurate information in the small towns and villages that line the countryside.
In Phnom Penh, too, monks are a daily sight, walking the streets with their orange robes, clutching umbrellas to shield themselves from the unforgiving heat. Often, books are tucked under their arms: schoolbooks, textbooks, copies of MAD magazine. (Okay, maybe they don't read MAD.)
Some of the best students I ever taught were monks. They are interested in learning. They are interested in acquiring truth. They are interested in concepts like democracy and justice and suffering. They shave their heads and live together in pagodas and instantly, almost miraculously, you could say, become respected citizens of their country, the pride of their families. They become elevated. This makes for a good scholar.
But what is it that the t-shirts they sell at Canada's Wonderland say: Monks are people too? (Okay, maybe there are no t-shirts that actually say that, let alone ones sold at Toronto's coolest theme park, but there should be, damnit...)
One day last year I sat in the computer lab of my old university. Next to me was a young monk, perhaps nineteen years old. I glanced over at his computer seen. He was busily filling out the registration form of match.com, a dating site.
I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that on-line matchmaking services are not part of most Cambodian monks enlightenment process. Call me crazy.
In fact, monks aren't even supposed to be near females. A female student in one of my classes came late into class one afternoon and slipped into a seat beside a monk. He promptly closed his books, stood up, and found a seat at the back of the room. (Did she not know this rule?)
Still, monks are people, too. Another of my students, probably twenty-one, twenty-two years old, seemed to embody the word 'monk' to me. He was polite and solemn and eager to address issues of religion and morality, about the meaning of Christianity, and how its principles shared and overlapped with those of Khmer buddhism. And then one day he came to class in a white dress shirt and black slacks, a shy grin on his face. His time as a monk was done. He came up to me in the cafeteria later that day and let me know that he was interested in his fellow female classmate, romantically interested, and he did he have any tips I could offer? Out the came the pen and the paper.
Each culture's young people head off into the world looking for the same fundamental things: a place to belong, a job that fulfills, a (somewhat) eternal truth that can found, nurtured, sustained. In Cambodia, an ancient land of simple needs, these truths are attained through moderation: You eat two meals a day, and you study Khmer texts, and you shave your head and slap on some orange and purple robes, and you wander the city, and you think about suffering, and you maintain respect for the poor.
Not every young person here becomes a monk, no, but it still seems to me that they're somehow on a kind of track that is nowhere near parallel to ones that run back home. Do the Internet chatrooms and racing video games and action flick DVDs lead teenagers to think about issues of enlightenment? Is shaving your head and studying ancient texts a better way to prepare you for the real world?
I dunno. It's culturally relative, I suppose.
But I've gotten used to the sights of the young monks as they stroll around Phnom Penh, with their gentle smiles and slow, shambling gait. They somehow seem, I don't know, like they consider things more than young people in other, more modern lands. It always feels like they're on to something, that they've figured out primal, fundamental things that I hadn't even contemplated, let alone assessed.
If so, they keep this knowledge to themselves.
Better that way, I think. It's somehow reassuring to view them as mystic, knowing sages, not confused kids groping for answers, as they probably are. Just trying to make their way in the world, tryig to put one foot in front of the other without falling down.
Under the blinding Cambodian sun, they wander the streets. I watch, and wonder.
Why?
Monks are respected here. People listen to them, seek advice from them, and, on a daily basis, provide money for them. As HIV/AIDS remains a huge problem here, the monks have been enlisted by various groups to provide accurate information in the small towns and villages that line the countryside.
In Phnom Penh, too, monks are a daily sight, walking the streets with their orange robes, clutching umbrellas to shield themselves from the unforgiving heat. Often, books are tucked under their arms: schoolbooks, textbooks, copies of MAD magazine. (Okay, maybe they don't read MAD.)
Some of the best students I ever taught were monks. They are interested in learning. They are interested in acquiring truth. They are interested in concepts like democracy and justice and suffering. They shave their heads and live together in pagodas and instantly, almost miraculously, you could say, become respected citizens of their country, the pride of their families. They become elevated. This makes for a good scholar.
But what is it that the t-shirts they sell at Canada's Wonderland say: Monks are people too? (Okay, maybe there are no t-shirts that actually say that, let alone ones sold at Toronto's coolest theme park, but there should be, damnit...)
One day last year I sat in the computer lab of my old university. Next to me was a young monk, perhaps nineteen years old. I glanced over at his computer seen. He was busily filling out the registration form of match.com, a dating site.
I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that on-line matchmaking services are not part of most Cambodian monks enlightenment process. Call me crazy.
In fact, monks aren't even supposed to be near females. A female student in one of my classes came late into class one afternoon and slipped into a seat beside a monk. He promptly closed his books, stood up, and found a seat at the back of the room. (Did she not know this rule?)
Still, monks are people, too. Another of my students, probably twenty-one, twenty-two years old, seemed to embody the word 'monk' to me. He was polite and solemn and eager to address issues of religion and morality, about the meaning of Christianity, and how its principles shared and overlapped with those of Khmer buddhism. And then one day he came to class in a white dress shirt and black slacks, a shy grin on his face. His time as a monk was done. He came up to me in the cafeteria later that day and let me know that he was interested in his fellow female classmate, romantically interested, and he did he have any tips I could offer? Out the came the pen and the paper.
Each culture's young people head off into the world looking for the same fundamental things: a place to belong, a job that fulfills, a (somewhat) eternal truth that can found, nurtured, sustained. In Cambodia, an ancient land of simple needs, these truths are attained through moderation: You eat two meals a day, and you study Khmer texts, and you shave your head and slap on some orange and purple robes, and you wander the city, and you think about suffering, and you maintain respect for the poor.
Not every young person here becomes a monk, no, but it still seems to me that they're somehow on a kind of track that is nowhere near parallel to ones that run back home. Do the Internet chatrooms and racing video games and action flick DVDs lead teenagers to think about issues of enlightenment? Is shaving your head and studying ancient texts a better way to prepare you for the real world?
I dunno. It's culturally relative, I suppose.
But I've gotten used to the sights of the young monks as they stroll around Phnom Penh, with their gentle smiles and slow, shambling gait. They somehow seem, I don't know, like they consider things more than young people in other, more modern lands. It always feels like they're on to something, that they've figured out primal, fundamental things that I hadn't even contemplated, let alone assessed.
If so, they keep this knowledge to themselves.
Better that way, I think. It's somehow reassuring to view them as mystic, knowing sages, not confused kids groping for answers, as they probably are. Just trying to make their way in the world, tryig to put one foot in front of the other without falling down.
Under the blinding Cambodian sun, they wander the streets. I watch, and wonder.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
A GIRL NAMED 'VICTORY'
Sitting on the table beside the computer monitor here at the Galaxy Web internet cafe in lovely, scenic Phnom Penh, Cambodia, are two things, a book and a newspaper: the book being the first volume of AlexsandrI.Solzhenitsyns' Gulag Archipelago, the newspaper being the weekend edition of The Cambodia Daily, whose cover features a story promising details on the one-year anniversary of Chea Vichea, a union leader assassinated a year ago for doing what a lot of union leaders do here, which is cause some trouble and make some noise.
Solzhenitsyn is the Soviet dissident who chronicled life in the Russian version of the concentration camps, the Gulags. I just started the book, but, to my relief, it's very readable and very involving; the translator did a good job of capturing, in straightforward, energetic English, the tone of Sozhenitsyn's original. (I'm assuming he did, anyways, because I don't speak Russian. Or read it. Or write it. But I have seen Rocky IV man, many times, and that flick features a Russian villian, so that's got to give me some brownie points, doesn't it?)
Two, three, four years ago I wouldn 't have thought of picking up either this book or this newspaper. The stories wouldn't have interested me. The concepts and ideaologies would have been over my head. (A lot of them still are, yes, thanks for pointing that out, but I'll choose to blame it on the Ontario education system, rather than my own thick skull.)
When you live in a foreign country, if you keep your eyes open, and you look around a little bit, you're presented with views of the world that rarely, if ever, mesh with the portrait of life that was painted for you while growing up back home. This can be dislocating, at first; you either examine the different ways that the strange-and-alien-world you're presently wandering through has chosen to express itself, or you put the tinted sunglasses back over your eyes and click back on the National Geographic channel, content to observe the world's oddities, landscapes and strange, backward cultures in between advertisements for hairspray and chewing gum. Just the other night I saw the most bizarre thing, this Discovery channel documentary show where Julia Roberts hung out in the middle of Mongolia for a little while, chilling with the local Mongols, marvelling at the size of the moon and how it loomed over the vast, endless plains.
There's nothing wrong with that view of the world, because guess what? Our globe is a marvellous, bizarre place filled with beautiful landscapes and oddly shaped people, both physically and mentally. It's nice to look at it and ponder it and see how it matches our take on things, how it compares to the streets and blocks that we call home.
But when you're in it, you're forced to look at things. You're forced to interact with people. You're obligated to understand the larger forces that are shaping and directing the little girl with no shoes and dirty cheeks who you buy your newspaper from.
When I taught at a university here, the students ranged in age from fifteen to fifty. I had a fifteen year old student who was super bright, a beaming young girl who always did her homework and once, good-naturedly (I hope), called me a liar because I had said I would give back an assignment the week before and I hadn't yet. (Being honest in this dishonest culture was a big thing for her; she could spot a fib a mile away.) The first time I met this outspoken youth, I read the names of the students in the class, and I stumbled over her name.
"How do you pronounce this?" I asked.
"It's 'Victory," she said.
"Like the English word?"
"It is the English word," she said. "My parents wanted me to succeed in life."
How old would her parents be? Thirty-five, forty, maybe fifty. They would have been young people during the Khmer Rouge era. They would have seen family members killed, or maybe they lived in the Thai border camps for years on end, wondering when their fair share of life's bounty would be made available to them.
I also taught a North Korean kid, whose father owns the North Korean restaurant in town. This kid grew up in Burkina Faso, Africa (one of the worst places to live on the planet), where his proud papa taught Tae Kwan Do to the communist leaders of that corrupt regime. Somebody just told me that he was taking pictures of his classmates last week because a return to good old North Korea was on the table in the next few days. Back to Pyongyang to fulfill his military duties, I'm assuming. Mama mia.
This is all heady stuff for a boy from St.Catharines. Issues of war and peace and genocidal regimes and pudgy dictators with super-freaky hair are personified, presto-changeo, right before my eyes. I'm in the thick of it, with the ever-present option of leaving, while everyone else has to stay. That's the difference, and a grand difference it is.
I imagine most Canadian kids are apolitical. They don't have reasons to be engaged with the forces of good and evil that are everyday occurrences elsewhere around the planet. With immigrants from places like Somalia and Sudan arriving daily in Canada, though, that white-bread, idyllic Canadian world, while still a reality in most parts of the country, will change. Kids will learn about their classmates previous lives. They will listen to stories of torture, and wonder why this has to be. The world will close in on Canada, little by little.
I hope.
This way, young people can at least be aware of what it means to be Canadian. It is not about a flag or a puck or natural beauty. It is about what we have that everyone wants.
You won't find too many kids named 'Victory' in Canada. We haven't felt the need to give our children a name that will inspire them to relentlessly remember the goal of liberation, personal and national, that you must always strive for, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds that threaten to grind you down, day by day.
No, not many kids have to be named 'Victory' back home.
I don't know whether this is something to celebrate or worry about.
Solzhenitsyn is the Soviet dissident who chronicled life in the Russian version of the concentration camps, the Gulags. I just started the book, but, to my relief, it's very readable and very involving; the translator did a good job of capturing, in straightforward, energetic English, the tone of Sozhenitsyn's original. (I'm assuming he did, anyways, because I don't speak Russian. Or read it. Or write it. But I have seen Rocky IV man, many times, and that flick features a Russian villian, so that's got to give me some brownie points, doesn't it?)
Two, three, four years ago I wouldn 't have thought of picking up either this book or this newspaper. The stories wouldn't have interested me. The concepts and ideaologies would have been over my head. (A lot of them still are, yes, thanks for pointing that out, but I'll choose to blame it on the Ontario education system, rather than my own thick skull.)
When you live in a foreign country, if you keep your eyes open, and you look around a little bit, you're presented with views of the world that rarely, if ever, mesh with the portrait of life that was painted for you while growing up back home. This can be dislocating, at first; you either examine the different ways that the strange-and-alien-world you're presently wandering through has chosen to express itself, or you put the tinted sunglasses back over your eyes and click back on the National Geographic channel, content to observe the world's oddities, landscapes and strange, backward cultures in between advertisements for hairspray and chewing gum. Just the other night I saw the most bizarre thing, this Discovery channel documentary show where Julia Roberts hung out in the middle of Mongolia for a little while, chilling with the local Mongols, marvelling at the size of the moon and how it loomed over the vast, endless plains.
There's nothing wrong with that view of the world, because guess what? Our globe is a marvellous, bizarre place filled with beautiful landscapes and oddly shaped people, both physically and mentally. It's nice to look at it and ponder it and see how it matches our take on things, how it compares to the streets and blocks that we call home.
But when you're in it, you're forced to look at things. You're forced to interact with people. You're obligated to understand the larger forces that are shaping and directing the little girl with no shoes and dirty cheeks who you buy your newspaper from.
When I taught at a university here, the students ranged in age from fifteen to fifty. I had a fifteen year old student who was super bright, a beaming young girl who always did her homework and once, good-naturedly (I hope), called me a liar because I had said I would give back an assignment the week before and I hadn't yet. (Being honest in this dishonest culture was a big thing for her; she could spot a fib a mile away.) The first time I met this outspoken youth, I read the names of the students in the class, and I stumbled over her name.
"How do you pronounce this?" I asked.
"It's 'Victory," she said.
"Like the English word?"
"It is the English word," she said. "My parents wanted me to succeed in life."
How old would her parents be? Thirty-five, forty, maybe fifty. They would have been young people during the Khmer Rouge era. They would have seen family members killed, or maybe they lived in the Thai border camps for years on end, wondering when their fair share of life's bounty would be made available to them.
I also taught a North Korean kid, whose father owns the North Korean restaurant in town. This kid grew up in Burkina Faso, Africa (one of the worst places to live on the planet), where his proud papa taught Tae Kwan Do to the communist leaders of that corrupt regime. Somebody just told me that he was taking pictures of his classmates last week because a return to good old North Korea was on the table in the next few days. Back to Pyongyang to fulfill his military duties, I'm assuming. Mama mia.
This is all heady stuff for a boy from St.Catharines. Issues of war and peace and genocidal regimes and pudgy dictators with super-freaky hair are personified, presto-changeo, right before my eyes. I'm in the thick of it, with the ever-present option of leaving, while everyone else has to stay. That's the difference, and a grand difference it is.
I imagine most Canadian kids are apolitical. They don't have reasons to be engaged with the forces of good and evil that are everyday occurrences elsewhere around the planet. With immigrants from places like Somalia and Sudan arriving daily in Canada, though, that white-bread, idyllic Canadian world, while still a reality in most parts of the country, will change. Kids will learn about their classmates previous lives. They will listen to stories of torture, and wonder why this has to be. The world will close in on Canada, little by little.
I hope.
This way, young people can at least be aware of what it means to be Canadian. It is not about a flag or a puck or natural beauty. It is about what we have that everyone wants.
You won't find too many kids named 'Victory' in Canada. We haven't felt the need to give our children a name that will inspire them to relentlessly remember the goal of liberation, personal and national, that you must always strive for, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds that threaten to grind you down, day by day.
No, not many kids have to be named 'Victory' back home.
I don't know whether this is something to celebrate or worry about.
TODAY'S FORECAST...
You sit down at twenty-five and stand up at sixty-five.
- Orson Welles on California
What was he talking about? He was talking about the weather, because it's always, eternally nice and sunny and oh so clear in the Land of Schwarzenegger. Blue skies, no clouds, t-shirt weather, shorts weather. Every day of the year.
The same is true of Cambodia. It is always, always, always hot, except when it's cool, which is rare, usually in the mornings, almost always between five and six. Officially, there are two seasons in this country, rainy and dry, each lasting six months. Don't let the classification fool you, though; during the rainy season, it it still bloody boiling -- it just means that on top of the ridiculous tropical heat, you are treated to ceaseless, relentless streams of water for an hour or two in the late afternoon. Right now, as I write, at this very moment, the dry season is, I think, coming to a close, no rain having touched Phnom Penh's streets in, God, I can't remember how long.
I wrote that I think the dry season is ending because it's hard to differentiate between the days and weeks and months here. It's bloody surreal. Back home (or even in Japan), there is rain and sleet and slow and windy days and cool days and brisk days and days when you have to wear a hat or a toque and days where you need a light coat and you have to check the weather reports before leaving the house, or, at the very least, you might want to stick your head out the window and test how things are, just to see which way the wind is blowing.
None of that stuff here.
Just put on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and you're good for the year. Good for your life.
A good thing and bad thing, I guess. I don't miss the Canadian winters much (or even the Japanese ones), but the seasons that we grow up with shape the barometer by which we measure the passage of time. Without those seasons, there's the danger of existing in this steady, monotonous limbo of life, where one day blends into the next, and the next, and the next, and time's passage begins to seem illusory and unimportant, today being all that matters.
Depending on how you look at it, that might not be a bad thing after all.
- Orson Welles on California
What was he talking about? He was talking about the weather, because it's always, eternally nice and sunny and oh so clear in the Land of Schwarzenegger. Blue skies, no clouds, t-shirt weather, shorts weather. Every day of the year.
The same is true of Cambodia. It is always, always, always hot, except when it's cool, which is rare, usually in the mornings, almost always between five and six. Officially, there are two seasons in this country, rainy and dry, each lasting six months. Don't let the classification fool you, though; during the rainy season, it it still bloody boiling -- it just means that on top of the ridiculous tropical heat, you are treated to ceaseless, relentless streams of water for an hour or two in the late afternoon. Right now, as I write, at this very moment, the dry season is, I think, coming to a close, no rain having touched Phnom Penh's streets in, God, I can't remember how long.
I wrote that I think the dry season is ending because it's hard to differentiate between the days and weeks and months here. It's bloody surreal. Back home (or even in Japan), there is rain and sleet and slow and windy days and cool days and brisk days and days when you have to wear a hat or a toque and days where you need a light coat and you have to check the weather reports before leaving the house, or, at the very least, you might want to stick your head out the window and test how things are, just to see which way the wind is blowing.
None of that stuff here.
Just put on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and you're good for the year. Good for your life.
A good thing and bad thing, I guess. I don't miss the Canadian winters much (or even the Japanese ones), but the seasons that we grow up with shape the barometer by which we measure the passage of time. Without those seasons, there's the danger of existing in this steady, monotonous limbo of life, where one day blends into the next, and the next, and the next, and time's passage begins to seem illusory and unimportant, today being all that matters.
Depending on how you look at it, that might not be a bad thing after all.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
A GOOD SIGN: CAMBODIAN STUDENTS, CONDOLEEZA RICE, THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AND BARBARA BUSH'S THANKSGIVING STUFFING
Walking home from work yesterday, I passed by just one of the many colleges, institutes, academic centres of learning, call-them-what-you-will, that populate Phnom Penh. Along with the backpackers, mosquitoes, English teachers and moto drivers, 'higher learning' places are now a common sight. Standing outside in her white shirt and blue skirt was a young girl waiting for her ride, holding her jet-black books and binders tightly to her chest.
That's quite a sight, in and of itself. Only fifteen years ago, I don't think too many girls in Phnom Penh were studying much of anything. I wondered: Exactly what was she studying? Where did she want to go in life? Was there even a chance in hell of her getting there, given the modern realities of Cambodia's political and social structures?
The personal and the political are always linked in my mind.
For the past two days, Condoleeza Rice has been grilled for hours on end in her Secretary of State confirmation hearings. Forty years ago, Ms.Rice would have been similar in status and possibility to that Khmer girl I saw. The America of 1964, the Alabama of 1964, did not hold much hope for a young black girl. Rice went to the same school as one of the girls killed in the infamous church bombings in Montgomery Alabama (a story chronicled in Spike Lee's documentary 4 Little Girls). At that time, Rice wouldn't have been able to grab a hamburger at Woolworth's if she wanted to. "Ah, but you can become president someday," her parents told her, and she believed them.
And so she might. (It's not as far fetched as it may sound.) First up, she has to succeed as Secretary of State. Second up, she has to link America's policies with the world's expectations. What a shining moment of pride and possibility for African-Americans.
Yet, she is doing this as part of an administration that is disliked, if not despised, by most black Americans (and a hell of a lot of other whites, Hispanics, Chinese, Mongolians...) What should be a crowning moment of pride for the 'Civil Rights generation' hasn't really felt like that at all. Everybody's pleased as punch that Condi's made it so far, and it certainly represents a magnificent achievement...but did it have to be for somebody like Bush, they wonder. Did it have to be an African-American woman who was largely responsible for the war in Iraq, they ask.
What's Rice thinking, in these final few days before she takes the reins from Colin Powell? Somewhere inside of her, beneath the overachieving Soviet expert and former Stanford provost, beats the heart of that little girl who came of age in a slowly desegregating America. A little girl who had be twice as better as the whites around her if she wanted to succeed. A little girl who has made it to the top of the top, only to find that most of her own people may respect her, yes, but not her agenda, or her boss, or what he stands for.
Her boss, too: What does he think?
I'm not talking about Bush the president. I'm talking about Bush the frat boy, Bush the practical joker, the eldest son of the family who kind of bumbled through his twenties and thirties looking for something to focus his energies on. I just read a book about the 'Bush family dynasty'; its central argument being that the Bush family has been at the centre of an almost century long vortex that lies at the heart of the military-industrial complex, that nebulous alliance of big business, big industry and big military that has fueled America's imperialist ambitions. Money, oil, the CIA, oil, Saudi Arabia, oil, the CIA, Texas money, oil -- Bush the elder, Bush the younger, and their family connections to the whole damn shebang, are all chronicled in exhaustive detail. (Oh, and did I mention their links to the oil industry?Or the CIA? Very scary stuff.)
The point is, at one point, Bush was a high school kid who liked to screw around and play baseball and try to cop a feel every now and then. While his dad was forging the international links that would eventually sustain his son's political career, Bush was daydreaming through Economics 101, waiting for the bell, watching the clock. He was a yahoo, in other words, as we all were, and as some of us still are (present company absolutely included.)
This kind of stuff fascinates me. Slowly, through the days and years that claim us all, somehow, Bush was brought into the family circle. He learned the ropes. The intricacies and complexities of global cartels and local, West Texas oil tycoons gradually became understanable, if not clear, resulting in a worldwide order and destiny that has been, without exaggeration, largely shaped and refined by a single family, by a father and his son.
It's fascinating, if you look at it this way. All of these complex, global-altering concepts of finance and theology and espionage and shady deals made in brightly lit rooms and shadowy hallways, and it all comes down (as all of our lives do) to a Thanksgiving dinner in Kennebunkport, and George Dubya walking into a room, and hugging his dad, and his dad asking how things are, and the son saying pretty good, pretty good, can't complain, and how's that turkey coming? The stuffing going to be like last year's? That was good stuff.
The personal and the political, linked, inseparate.
So back to the young Khmer girl. Let's not forget about her, shall we? She stands in front of the school, waiting for her ride. She's learning English, maybe computers, possibly a little accounting. Corruption and politics and money changing hands goes on all around her. A few blocks away, political parties and treaties and deaths are being planned. She's oblivious to it all, as she should be, as Rice and Bush before her were, as you were, too (and maybe still are).
Who knows? She could be a future leader in this country, twenty, thirty years from now. Stranger things have happened. Or she could be a housewife by the time she's twenty, a more likely scenario. (Ah, but this is Cambodia, and since when could the word 'likely' be applied to anything with certainty? So let's allow her her dreams; let's give her that much, at the very least.)
All around the country, big changes are happening, ideas are being discussed, senators are being bribed, coups being planned.
And it all comes back that girl, waiting for her ride. It all comes back to the ordinary lives we try to lead in the middle of swirling, indefinable political tornadoes that shake us up and lift us high.
As I walked down the street, I looked back to see if she was still standing there.
She was.
For some reason, I took that as a good sign.
That's quite a sight, in and of itself. Only fifteen years ago, I don't think too many girls in Phnom Penh were studying much of anything. I wondered: Exactly what was she studying? Where did she want to go in life? Was there even a chance in hell of her getting there, given the modern realities of Cambodia's political and social structures?
The personal and the political are always linked in my mind.
For the past two days, Condoleeza Rice has been grilled for hours on end in her Secretary of State confirmation hearings. Forty years ago, Ms.Rice would have been similar in status and possibility to that Khmer girl I saw. The America of 1964, the Alabama of 1964, did not hold much hope for a young black girl. Rice went to the same school as one of the girls killed in the infamous church bombings in Montgomery Alabama (a story chronicled in Spike Lee's documentary 4 Little Girls). At that time, Rice wouldn't have been able to grab a hamburger at Woolworth's if she wanted to. "Ah, but you can become president someday," her parents told her, and she believed them.
And so she might. (It's not as far fetched as it may sound.) First up, she has to succeed as Secretary of State. Second up, she has to link America's policies with the world's expectations. What a shining moment of pride and possibility for African-Americans.
Yet, she is doing this as part of an administration that is disliked, if not despised, by most black Americans (and a hell of a lot of other whites, Hispanics, Chinese, Mongolians...) What should be a crowning moment of pride for the 'Civil Rights generation' hasn't really felt like that at all. Everybody's pleased as punch that Condi's made it so far, and it certainly represents a magnificent achievement...but did it have to be for somebody like Bush, they wonder. Did it have to be an African-American woman who was largely responsible for the war in Iraq, they ask.
What's Rice thinking, in these final few days before she takes the reins from Colin Powell? Somewhere inside of her, beneath the overachieving Soviet expert and former Stanford provost, beats the heart of that little girl who came of age in a slowly desegregating America. A little girl who had be twice as better as the whites around her if she wanted to succeed. A little girl who has made it to the top of the top, only to find that most of her own people may respect her, yes, but not her agenda, or her boss, or what he stands for.
Her boss, too: What does he think?
I'm not talking about Bush the president. I'm talking about Bush the frat boy, Bush the practical joker, the eldest son of the family who kind of bumbled through his twenties and thirties looking for something to focus his energies on. I just read a book about the 'Bush family dynasty'; its central argument being that the Bush family has been at the centre of an almost century long vortex that lies at the heart of the military-industrial complex, that nebulous alliance of big business, big industry and big military that has fueled America's imperialist ambitions. Money, oil, the CIA, oil, Saudi Arabia, oil, the CIA, Texas money, oil -- Bush the elder, Bush the younger, and their family connections to the whole damn shebang, are all chronicled in exhaustive detail. (Oh, and did I mention their links to the oil industry?Or the CIA? Very scary stuff.)
The point is, at one point, Bush was a high school kid who liked to screw around and play baseball and try to cop a feel every now and then. While his dad was forging the international links that would eventually sustain his son's political career, Bush was daydreaming through Economics 101, waiting for the bell, watching the clock. He was a yahoo, in other words, as we all were, and as some of us still are (present company absolutely included.)
This kind of stuff fascinates me. Slowly, through the days and years that claim us all, somehow, Bush was brought into the family circle. He learned the ropes. The intricacies and complexities of global cartels and local, West Texas oil tycoons gradually became understanable, if not clear, resulting in a worldwide order and destiny that has been, without exaggeration, largely shaped and refined by a single family, by a father and his son.
It's fascinating, if you look at it this way. All of these complex, global-altering concepts of finance and theology and espionage and shady deals made in brightly lit rooms and shadowy hallways, and it all comes down (as all of our lives do) to a Thanksgiving dinner in Kennebunkport, and George Dubya walking into a room, and hugging his dad, and his dad asking how things are, and the son saying pretty good, pretty good, can't complain, and how's that turkey coming? The stuffing going to be like last year's? That was good stuff.
The personal and the political, linked, inseparate.
So back to the young Khmer girl. Let's not forget about her, shall we? She stands in front of the school, waiting for her ride. She's learning English, maybe computers, possibly a little accounting. Corruption and politics and money changing hands goes on all around her. A few blocks away, political parties and treaties and deaths are being planned. She's oblivious to it all, as she should be, as Rice and Bush before her were, as you were, too (and maybe still are).
Who knows? She could be a future leader in this country, twenty, thirty years from now. Stranger things have happened. Or she could be a housewife by the time she's twenty, a more likely scenario. (Ah, but this is Cambodia, and since when could the word 'likely' be applied to anything with certainty? So let's allow her her dreams; let's give her that much, at the very least.)
All around the country, big changes are happening, ideas are being discussed, senators are being bribed, coups being planned.
And it all comes back that girl, waiting for her ride. It all comes back to the ordinary lives we try to lead in the middle of swirling, indefinable political tornadoes that shake us up and lift us high.
As I walked down the street, I looked back to see if she was still standing there.
She was.
For some reason, I took that as a good sign.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
REMEMBERING TO PAUSE
Last night I watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou for a second time, enjoying all the things I missed the first time, those hidden jokes and layers of meaning that somehow passed me by. (Things have a habit of going over my head.)
Wouldn't it be wild to have that function in that everyday realm we call life -- that ability to see and live again what we missed the first time out?
Some people try to do that now, of course, videotaping weddings and hockey games, bar mitzvah's and baby showers, snapping photos meant for a lifetime of perusal. (Yes, I just used the word 'perusal' in a sentence. Please don't hold it against me.)
I'm not talking about that kind of (usually) harmless looking back.
But what if we could relive our lives the way we rewatch our favorite movies? What if we could inhabit ourselves once again as we moved through the days, weeks, months and years that led to our current, fluid moment in time. Knowing what lay ahead, we could spot the subtle glances and awkward pauses we missed the first time out, those clues that indicated change, upheaval, disruption. The good parts would be that much more poignant, the bad parts that much more...
There's the rub.
The scary parts you've seen in a movie become less and less frightening the second, third and fourth times you've watched them. Having to go back, view and endure those moments in life would be, well, counterproductive.
Best to look ahead. Best to glance, back yes, but not stay back. Better yet to somehow place yourself between the rewind and fast-forward button, remembering to pause every now and then, if only to savor the here and the now for a little while longer.
Wouldn't it be wild to have that function in that everyday realm we call life -- that ability to see and live again what we missed the first time out?
Some people try to do that now, of course, videotaping weddings and hockey games, bar mitzvah's and baby showers, snapping photos meant for a lifetime of perusal. (Yes, I just used the word 'perusal' in a sentence. Please don't hold it against me.)
I'm not talking about that kind of (usually) harmless looking back.
But what if we could relive our lives the way we rewatch our favorite movies? What if we could inhabit ourselves once again as we moved through the days, weeks, months and years that led to our current, fluid moment in time. Knowing what lay ahead, we could spot the subtle glances and awkward pauses we missed the first time out, those clues that indicated change, upheaval, disruption. The good parts would be that much more poignant, the bad parts that much more...
There's the rub.
The scary parts you've seen in a movie become less and less frightening the second, third and fourth times you've watched them. Having to go back, view and endure those moments in life would be, well, counterproductive.
Best to look ahead. Best to glance, back yes, but not stay back. Better yet to somehow place yourself between the rewind and fast-forward button, remembering to pause every now and then, if only to savor the here and the now for a little while longer.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
THE FIVE OR SIX GUYS IN THE ROOM
Last night, one of the Thai television channels rebroadcast the Tsunami telethon, the one that featured a slew of celebrities answering the phones while other, more musically inclined famous folks sang a tune or two to raise money for a worthy cause.
Anything that raises money for charity is, fundamentally, a good thing. Plain and simple, no questions asked. When I was a ten year old kid, during the whole 'We are the world' phase of western culture, that brief period when the powers-that-be decided to focus attention on Ethiopia for a month or two, Marvel (Spider-Man, X-Men) Comics put out a special edition comic related to the famine, the proceeds of which went to help the starving in Africa. Marvel's main competitor, DC (Superman, Batman) Comics, did the same thing a few months later. A classic case of jumping on the bandwagon while the wheels were still rollin'. When I pointed out to my father that DC was just copying Marvel, (which made sense, 'cuz Marvel was, is and shall always be cooler, though I like DC, too) my dad basically said: "Hey, if it's for a good cause, things like that don't matter."
He was right.
Yes, it seems kind off odd to tempt people into donating money by offering them the chance to chat one-on-one with Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or Meg Ryan. It's condescending and pandering. It treats us all like star-struck juveniles.
But, like the Buckley's cough syrups ads say, it works.
The money is going (hopefully) towards a good cause. It can help save lives and ease pain. If showbiz glitz does a bit of good, I'm all for it.
I can't help but think that there's something larger at play, though, something that ties into our belief about what we can and can't control about the world we live in.
When a god-given act like a tsunami occurs, we're reminded of our vulnerabilities. Our ultimate smallness in the world suddenly becomes immense in our hearts and thoughts. We have little, if any, possibility of defending ourselves when Mother Nature decides it's time to kick a little ass.
So what can we do?
We can hop on the Net and click the mouse and send some money. We've played our part. We've contributed something to the world. It gives us puny earthlings a feeling of autonomy and direction. Our efforts have an end-point, even if it's just a sack of rice on the back of a truck, partially payed for with our rainy-day funds, and having an end-point is always an affirming thing.
The Internet gives us this access. God bless it. (I'm not sure why He didn't bless Indonesia or Thailand or Somalia, but I'll take that up with the Big Guy some day on the other side. Assuming I'm going up, of course...) It allows us a touch and a reach that was unthinkable even a decade ago.
And if you sense a 'but' coming, you're right.
Ready for it?
But...
With charity, with aid, with most of our lives, come to think of it, we're still in the hands of someone else. We still have to rely on something else. That else may be the bank that accesses our donation, or the charity that turns our piggy-back coins into something tangible. We have a role, a vital role, but it's just that -- something we put on and play with for awhile. Then it's back to our kitchen, our jobs, our lives.
The big boys (and it's still mostly boys) are the companies and the governments that control the funding, the flow, the access. The World Banks of the world. The White Houses of the world. The ones who actually build the choppers that take the food to Banda Aceh. While we sit at home and scan the progress on the Net or the tube. Waiting for Springer.
I'm not talking about the failings of democracy, or the inadequacy's of our social systems, or anything large scale like that. (Well, I guess I kind of am, but not doing a very good job of it, I'm afraid.)
I'm trying to get at something more personal and intimate, which is the fact that the Internet, the World Wide Web, whatever you want to call it, allows us a place and a space to breathe, vent, invent, collaborate, collide. It allows to do almost anything we want.
To a degree.
Spike Lee once said that all the entertainment that America watches is basically controlled by the five or six guys that own the five or six studios that produce the t.v. shows and movies we entertain ourselves to death with. Yes, yes, there's a wider variety of options, sure, and more media companies, certainly, but they are usually pieces of the bigger pie. The ultimate decisions rest on the shoulders of five or six very powerful, very profit-oriented, men, who could very easily fit into the smallest of hobbit-sized rooms.
What am I saying, you ask? I'm saying this: That the Internet allows generations of people, the young and the old and the sick and the seriously weird, to create their own world for themselves, to extend their desires around the globe and back in a series of moments, to change their lives for the better, to grasp and catch hold of ideas and concepts and people that are otherwise elusive, shadowy wisps. As Anthony Hopkins says in Alexander, the great warrior allowed men, when they were near him, to be greater than themselves. At its best, the Internet can do that, too.
But the damn thing is, like it or not, at some point in time, it still always comes down to those five or six guys in the room. They control entertainment; they control politics; they control peacekeeping. The names change, the facelifts differ in quality and texture, the suits go from brown to blue and back again, but it's basically the same five or six well-dressed dudes, the same Ward-Cleaver-in-Leave-It-To-Beaver room.
The people elect Bush and Blair and Koizumi and Martin, and they can unelect them. But once the die's cast, if Bush wants to go to war, he's going. If Blair wants to side with Bush, it's his call. What are we left to do if we don't like it? Rouse the rabble and wait for the next election.
Horrific incidents like the tsunami bring out the best in technology and people. Our ability to give without expecting anything in return is what makes us human. A person can sit in their living room and eat Doritos and flip through the latest US Weekly, the latest one, with Brad and Jen on the cover (which is probably every week, I guess, so maybe that's a bad example), and they can watch Madonna sing 'Imagine' and decide to pick up the phone, chat with Tom Selleck, donate ten bucks. This a great and empowering thing; this is a necessary thing. You gather ten, fifteen million of these Dorito-eating people together (of which I am one) and you can do a lot of good. Villages and towns can be rebuilt; schools can be put back together again, along with Humpty Dumpty's wall.
But maybe, just maybe, it's good to think about those five or six guys in the room, the ones with the real power, the true reach, the ones who listen to our voices, and then do what they want to do, regardless.
That scares me, because we can't all fit in the room. We can't all shove our way through the door, though many of us try. We push them in, those five or six guys (at least in democracies) , and we take them out, but we can't hear what they're saying, once the blinds are drawn and the door is shut. All we can do is go back out into the world and do our best, regardless. We have our telethons, and we donate our time, and we do what we can to make the world keep ticking.
And it's up to us to prod that door open, when given the chance. Hoping, of course, in our naive and human way, that the next five or six guys that we push in the room are better than the last.
Anything that raises money for charity is, fundamentally, a good thing. Plain and simple, no questions asked. When I was a ten year old kid, during the whole 'We are the world' phase of western culture, that brief period when the powers-that-be decided to focus attention on Ethiopia for a month or two, Marvel (Spider-Man, X-Men) Comics put out a special edition comic related to the famine, the proceeds of which went to help the starving in Africa. Marvel's main competitor, DC (Superman, Batman) Comics, did the same thing a few months later. A classic case of jumping on the bandwagon while the wheels were still rollin'. When I pointed out to my father that DC was just copying Marvel, (which made sense, 'cuz Marvel was, is and shall always be cooler, though I like DC, too) my dad basically said: "Hey, if it's for a good cause, things like that don't matter."
He was right.
Yes, it seems kind off odd to tempt people into donating money by offering them the chance to chat one-on-one with Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or Meg Ryan. It's condescending and pandering. It treats us all like star-struck juveniles.
But, like the Buckley's cough syrups ads say, it works.
The money is going (hopefully) towards a good cause. It can help save lives and ease pain. If showbiz glitz does a bit of good, I'm all for it.
I can't help but think that there's something larger at play, though, something that ties into our belief about what we can and can't control about the world we live in.
When a god-given act like a tsunami occurs, we're reminded of our vulnerabilities. Our ultimate smallness in the world suddenly becomes immense in our hearts and thoughts. We have little, if any, possibility of defending ourselves when Mother Nature decides it's time to kick a little ass.
So what can we do?
We can hop on the Net and click the mouse and send some money. We've played our part. We've contributed something to the world. It gives us puny earthlings a feeling of autonomy and direction. Our efforts have an end-point, even if it's just a sack of rice on the back of a truck, partially payed for with our rainy-day funds, and having an end-point is always an affirming thing.
The Internet gives us this access. God bless it. (I'm not sure why He didn't bless Indonesia or Thailand or Somalia, but I'll take that up with the Big Guy some day on the other side. Assuming I'm going up, of course...) It allows us a touch and a reach that was unthinkable even a decade ago.
And if you sense a 'but' coming, you're right.
Ready for it?
But...
With charity, with aid, with most of our lives, come to think of it, we're still in the hands of someone else. We still have to rely on something else. That else may be the bank that accesses our donation, or the charity that turns our piggy-back coins into something tangible. We have a role, a vital role, but it's just that -- something we put on and play with for awhile. Then it's back to our kitchen, our jobs, our lives.
The big boys (and it's still mostly boys) are the companies and the governments that control the funding, the flow, the access. The World Banks of the world. The White Houses of the world. The ones who actually build the choppers that take the food to Banda Aceh. While we sit at home and scan the progress on the Net or the tube. Waiting for Springer.
I'm not talking about the failings of democracy, or the inadequacy's of our social systems, or anything large scale like that. (Well, I guess I kind of am, but not doing a very good job of it, I'm afraid.)
I'm trying to get at something more personal and intimate, which is the fact that the Internet, the World Wide Web, whatever you want to call it, allows us a place and a space to breathe, vent, invent, collaborate, collide. It allows to do almost anything we want.
To a degree.
Spike Lee once said that all the entertainment that America watches is basically controlled by the five or six guys that own the five or six studios that produce the t.v. shows and movies we entertain ourselves to death with. Yes, yes, there's a wider variety of options, sure, and more media companies, certainly, but they are usually pieces of the bigger pie. The ultimate decisions rest on the shoulders of five or six very powerful, very profit-oriented, men, who could very easily fit into the smallest of hobbit-sized rooms.
What am I saying, you ask? I'm saying this: That the Internet allows generations of people, the young and the old and the sick and the seriously weird, to create their own world for themselves, to extend their desires around the globe and back in a series of moments, to change their lives for the better, to grasp and catch hold of ideas and concepts and people that are otherwise elusive, shadowy wisps. As Anthony Hopkins says in Alexander, the great warrior allowed men, when they were near him, to be greater than themselves. At its best, the Internet can do that, too.
But the damn thing is, like it or not, at some point in time, it still always comes down to those five or six guys in the room. They control entertainment; they control politics; they control peacekeeping. The names change, the facelifts differ in quality and texture, the suits go from brown to blue and back again, but it's basically the same five or six well-dressed dudes, the same Ward-Cleaver-in-Leave-It-To-Beaver room.
The people elect Bush and Blair and Koizumi and Martin, and they can unelect them. But once the die's cast, if Bush wants to go to war, he's going. If Blair wants to side with Bush, it's his call. What are we left to do if we don't like it? Rouse the rabble and wait for the next election.
Horrific incidents like the tsunami bring out the best in technology and people. Our ability to give without expecting anything in return is what makes us human. A person can sit in their living room and eat Doritos and flip through the latest US Weekly, the latest one, with Brad and Jen on the cover (which is probably every week, I guess, so maybe that's a bad example), and they can watch Madonna sing 'Imagine' and decide to pick up the phone, chat with Tom Selleck, donate ten bucks. This a great and empowering thing; this is a necessary thing. You gather ten, fifteen million of these Dorito-eating people together (of which I am one) and you can do a lot of good. Villages and towns can be rebuilt; schools can be put back together again, along with Humpty Dumpty's wall.
But maybe, just maybe, it's good to think about those five or six guys in the room, the ones with the real power, the true reach, the ones who listen to our voices, and then do what they want to do, regardless.
That scares me, because we can't all fit in the room. We can't all shove our way through the door, though many of us try. We push them in, those five or six guys (at least in democracies) , and we take them out, but we can't hear what they're saying, once the blinds are drawn and the door is shut. All we can do is go back out into the world and do our best, regardless. We have our telethons, and we donate our time, and we do what we can to make the world keep ticking.
And it's up to us to prod that door open, when given the chance. Hoping, of course, in our naive and human way, that the next five or six guys that we push in the room are better than the last.
Monday, January 17, 2005
SUNDAYS
I saw them down by the river yesterday, the familiar truckloads of men, women and children that are carted in from the countryside to enjoy a leisurely day by the river. They come in trucks and vans each and every Sunday, squashed together like cattle or pigs. Sometimes they even ride on top of the vans, when there's no more space for even one more person. Most of them are women, probably factory-workers, those pajama-clad ladies that eke out a living for their families in the garment industry. Sunday is their day to rest. Sunday is their day to head on down to the riverside and walk underneath the sun and smell the strong, pungent scent of the Tonle Sap. They can drift around the orange-robed monks, buy a balloon from the hopeful vendors, giggle at the occasional foreign tourists with their short shorts and big cameras.
Then the day drifts to night, the trucks start their indifferent growl, and the shy Khmer girls in their beige and blue hats hop back on the trucks. A nice day, true, and there is always next week! They scrunch together, standing in place. As the truck drives away they take a lingering last look at the river, the people, the cars, before turning their attention to the bumpy road ahead, the one that leads home.
Then the day drifts to night, the trucks start their indifferent growl, and the shy Khmer girls in their beige and blue hats hop back on the trucks. A nice day, true, and there is always next week! They scrunch together, standing in place. As the truck drives away they take a lingering last look at the river, the people, the cars, before turning their attention to the bumpy road ahead, the one that leads home.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
AL PACINO'S GRIP (OR, THE THINGS THAT YOUNG PEOPLE REMEMBER)
I have history of being condescended to by famous people in public forums. (Is that a word, 'condescended', or is it made-up? Then again, as I read somewhere recently, all words are made, up right? So what the hell.)
Three examples:
1) The Toronto Film Festival, fall, 1996. Kevin Spacey's directorial debut, Albino Alligator, plays to a packed house at the (recently deceased) Uptown Theatre in downtown Toronto. I watch the movie. I don't get the ending; I literally don't understand how what happened happened. One of those The Sting type deals. Everyone else is nodding their head in appreciation while I'm scratching my scalp in confusion. (I had the same sensation when I recently watched Ocean's Twelve. If anyone understands how the whole heist went down in this flick, can you let me know?) Kevin Spacey comes out for the q & a session and I ask him about the ending's, you know, meaning. He points out that he doesn't make simplistic movies for simplistic people -- he prefers pictures that make people think for themselves, rather than having everything spoon-fed to them. The audience erupts in applause. I sink down into my seat as if it were quicksand.
2) The National Arts Centre, Ottawa, 1998. Michael Ondaatje, the Canadian author of The English Patient, co-hosts a lecture-type thingee with Anthony Minghella, the director of its film adaptation (who went on to direct The Talented Mr.Ripley and Cold Mountain.) During the q & a I approach the mike and ask the two of them about the differences between creative writing and screenwriting, about their similarities, about the dangers of studying both at the same time, and how one of my professors warned that this was actually a bad thing. (I was trying to get them to talk about the mysterious, mystical, undefinable nature of fiction versus the more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts nature of screenwriting -- that kind of thing.) They just kind of look at each other, and shrug, and say something along the lines of "Teachers -- what are ya going to do?" The audience laughs. I return to my seat, cheeks turning red.
3) The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1995. Norman Mailer is presenting a presentation of Picasso's work to coincide with his recent biography of the legendary artist. During the q & a, I ask Mailer if he saw any similarities between Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald, since he had recently completed biographies of both. The crowd, filled with well-dressed, hoity-toity members of Toronto's artistic elite, laugh that laugh that is impossible to describe, but you sure as hell know it when you hear it -- a patronizing and bemused, chortle. I feel young and stupid.
Ah, but here's the thing. Mailer thinks about my question. He looks for answers; he makes an attempt at introspection. He doesn't blow me or my question off. And later, while I waited in line to get Mailer's signature on a copy of his book, somebody came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said: "I thought your question was the most interesting of the whole bunch."
Looking back, the thing that sticks in my craw wasn't necessarily the fact that famous people kept dissing me. It was the fact that I was snubbed in a public forum where two, three hundred people had a good laugh at my expense.
I remember that laugh.
But I also remember that man who said a few kind words to me. He didn't have to do that. But he saw a nineteen year old who had been embarassed by a bunch of pompous posers who should have known better. And he thought he'd say a few words to make me feel like less of a schmuck.
People remember the good stuff you say and the bad stuff you say (intentional or not, premeditated or not) more than you'd ever imagine.
It all echoes.
So here's the thing:
Young people are sensitive. Young people have weird ideas. You people say stupid things. Young people don't always get everything you tell them. Young people haven't been jaded or exposed to everything in life.
Not to be preachy, but I learned from five years of teaching that, when you look someone in the eye, you don't do it in a patronizing way. They see it, they know it, they feel it.
And they remember it.
Coming from St.Catharines to Toronto ten or so years ago, I wanted to see as many famous people as I could. And you know what? The truly great ones -- guys like Mailer, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee -- are often the most humane. I don't mean they treat you like a friend; I mean they treat you like a human. They answer your questions; they are polite; they give back what you give them.
I saw Al Pacino introduce his film Looking For Richard, and as he exited the stage, heading out the door, I leaned across two people who were sitting at the edge of the aisle and I asked: "Al, can I shake your hand?"
He looked up and without pausing and stretched out his hand and said: "You bet!"
The great ones react.
It may sound silly, or juvenile, and it is, but so are young people, and they remember what you say, or what you do; they remember when they are treated with respect, and dignity, and when they aren't. People in power talking to people beneath them have a weight and a force that reverberates.
Now, I don't look for famous people. (Most of the time, anyways.) But I try (and don't always succeed) to treat everyday young people and all people as if they are the centre of their universes.
And I remember when they treat me as if I'm just a constellation in theirs.
Three examples:
1) The Toronto Film Festival, fall, 1996. Kevin Spacey's directorial debut, Albino Alligator, plays to a packed house at the (recently deceased) Uptown Theatre in downtown Toronto. I watch the movie. I don't get the ending; I literally don't understand how what happened happened. One of those The Sting type deals. Everyone else is nodding their head in appreciation while I'm scratching my scalp in confusion. (I had the same sensation when I recently watched Ocean's Twelve. If anyone understands how the whole heist went down in this flick, can you let me know?) Kevin Spacey comes out for the q & a session and I ask him about the ending's, you know, meaning. He points out that he doesn't make simplistic movies for simplistic people -- he prefers pictures that make people think for themselves, rather than having everything spoon-fed to them. The audience erupts in applause. I sink down into my seat as if it were quicksand.
2) The National Arts Centre, Ottawa, 1998. Michael Ondaatje, the Canadian author of The English Patient, co-hosts a lecture-type thingee with Anthony Minghella, the director of its film adaptation (who went on to direct The Talented Mr.Ripley and Cold Mountain.) During the q & a I approach the mike and ask the two of them about the differences between creative writing and screenwriting, about their similarities, about the dangers of studying both at the same time, and how one of my professors warned that this was actually a bad thing. (I was trying to get them to talk about the mysterious, mystical, undefinable nature of fiction versus the more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts nature of screenwriting -- that kind of thing.) They just kind of look at each other, and shrug, and say something along the lines of "Teachers -- what are ya going to do?" The audience laughs. I return to my seat, cheeks turning red.
3) The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1995. Norman Mailer is presenting a presentation of Picasso's work to coincide with his recent biography of the legendary artist. During the q & a, I ask Mailer if he saw any similarities between Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald, since he had recently completed biographies of both. The crowd, filled with well-dressed, hoity-toity members of Toronto's artistic elite, laugh that laugh that is impossible to describe, but you sure as hell know it when you hear it -- a patronizing and bemused, chortle. I feel young and stupid.
Ah, but here's the thing. Mailer thinks about my question. He looks for answers; he makes an attempt at introspection. He doesn't blow me or my question off. And later, while I waited in line to get Mailer's signature on a copy of his book, somebody came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said: "I thought your question was the most interesting of the whole bunch."
Looking back, the thing that sticks in my craw wasn't necessarily the fact that famous people kept dissing me. It was the fact that I was snubbed in a public forum where two, three hundred people had a good laugh at my expense.
I remember that laugh.
But I also remember that man who said a few kind words to me. He didn't have to do that. But he saw a nineteen year old who had been embarassed by a bunch of pompous posers who should have known better. And he thought he'd say a few words to make me feel like less of a schmuck.
People remember the good stuff you say and the bad stuff you say (intentional or not, premeditated or not) more than you'd ever imagine.
It all echoes.
So here's the thing:
Young people are sensitive. Young people have weird ideas. You people say stupid things. Young people don't always get everything you tell them. Young people haven't been jaded or exposed to everything in life.
Not to be preachy, but I learned from five years of teaching that, when you look someone in the eye, you don't do it in a patronizing way. They see it, they know it, they feel it.
And they remember it.
Coming from St.Catharines to Toronto ten or so years ago, I wanted to see as many famous people as I could. And you know what? The truly great ones -- guys like Mailer, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee -- are often the most humane. I don't mean they treat you like a friend; I mean they treat you like a human. They answer your questions; they are polite; they give back what you give them.
I saw Al Pacino introduce his film Looking For Richard, and as he exited the stage, heading out the door, I leaned across two people who were sitting at the edge of the aisle and I asked: "Al, can I shake your hand?"
He looked up and without pausing and stretched out his hand and said: "You bet!"
The great ones react.
It may sound silly, or juvenile, and it is, but so are young people, and they remember what you say, or what you do; they remember when they are treated with respect, and dignity, and when they aren't. People in power talking to people beneath them have a weight and a force that reverberates.
Now, I don't look for famous people. (Most of the time, anyways.) But I try (and don't always succeed) to treat everyday young people and all people as if they are the centre of their universes.
And I remember when they treat me as if I'm just a constellation in theirs.
TOYS THAT WILL GUARANTEE A SPIRITUAL SMACKDOWN
Just in case you ever wanted an action figure of Jesus Christ or the Buddha or the Dalai Lama, rest assured, your quest is over:
www.jesuschristsuperstore.net
(It'd be a little weird having Jesus fight the Dalai Lama, though. Something morally wrong with that, I think. Not that I wouldn't give it a go...)
www.jesuschristsuperstore.net
(It'd be a little weird having Jesus fight the Dalai Lama, though. Something morally wrong with that, I think. Not that I wouldn't give it a go...)
I'M NOT CAMBODIAN
How would I feel if I were a Cambodian who read the latest biography of Pol Pot, in the which the author, a Brit, basically labels the Khmer race as lazy and lackluster workers, in addition to having the unfortunate luck of being stuck in a country that resembles a broken vase, ruled by a murderous thug, its future pale and uncertain?
I probably wouldn't be pleased. I would, most likely, be ticked off.
But I'm not Cambodian. I'm Canadian, which means I bring my own, western perspective to works of history and politics, culture and literature.
It's funny. I liked living in Japan, but I knew that I would never want to be Japanese; I enjoy Cambodia, too, but I can't imagine being a living and breather Khmer person, citizen, dude.
Is it even possible to think of ourselves as a race other than our own? Is it even relevant?
Yea to the first, nay to the second. Books on Japan by non-Japanese will always be from an outside perspective, one that may understand the culture, yes, but won't be of the culture.
This can be an asset; it can allow the author a distanced perspective that provides the possibility for clear-eyed, large-scale thinking, seeing the trends and patterns that natives of the country might miss.
There's a danger, however, in applying attitudes of certainty, no matter how well researched, to entire countries and races. I'm not saying the judgements shouldn't be made. (Maybe a definition of being human could be 'a creature that is able to judge others'.) They have to be viewed, however, with a certain discretion and skepticism.
So, by all means, if you're interested in a fascinating area of recent history that you might not know much about, pick up Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare by Philip Short. It's a very brisk, readable overview of the man and the era. I agree with most of what he says, and how he says it.
But as the author himself pointed out in a recent letter to the Phnom Penh Post, it's up to the Cambodian people themselves to judge his work -- it's their country, after all.
As I said, I agreed with Short's conclusions and general outlook on the country and its future.
But I'm not Cambodian.
I probably wouldn't be pleased. I would, most likely, be ticked off.
But I'm not Cambodian. I'm Canadian, which means I bring my own, western perspective to works of history and politics, culture and literature.
It's funny. I liked living in Japan, but I knew that I would never want to be Japanese; I enjoy Cambodia, too, but I can't imagine being a living and breather Khmer person, citizen, dude.
Is it even possible to think of ourselves as a race other than our own? Is it even relevant?
Yea to the first, nay to the second. Books on Japan by non-Japanese will always be from an outside perspective, one that may understand the culture, yes, but won't be of the culture.
This can be an asset; it can allow the author a distanced perspective that provides the possibility for clear-eyed, large-scale thinking, seeing the trends and patterns that natives of the country might miss.
There's a danger, however, in applying attitudes of certainty, no matter how well researched, to entire countries and races. I'm not saying the judgements shouldn't be made. (Maybe a definition of being human could be 'a creature that is able to judge others'.) They have to be viewed, however, with a certain discretion and skepticism.
So, by all means, if you're interested in a fascinating area of recent history that you might not know much about, pick up Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare by Philip Short. It's a very brisk, readable overview of the man and the era. I agree with most of what he says, and how he says it.
But as the author himself pointed out in a recent letter to the Phnom Penh Post, it's up to the Cambodian people themselves to judge his work -- it's their country, after all.
As I said, I agreed with Short's conclusions and general outlook on the country and its future.
But I'm not Cambodian.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
DANGLING, ANYWHERE AND EVERYWHERE
The first unbelievable thing I noticed when I initially came to Cambodia happened on the way into the city from the airport. I see this occurence literally everyday now, and I don't even think twice about it anymore, but at the time it was stunning; at the time it was frightening. It seemed to violate some unwritten rule of life. Now it just is, a part of life, a way of life for thousands of people, I supposed you'd say.
I'm talking about a bike. I'm talking about a moto, and a lady on the moto, and the tiny, fragile, living and breathing thing she was holding in her arms.
Said thing being a baby, of course.
So what's the big deal?
I don't know, call me crazy, but back in Ontario if you saw a lady riding shotgun in the rain on a little moto like the type Sweetchuck rode in Police Academy III with a kid clutched under her arm like a soggy paperback book you'd probably call the police.
I, on the other hand, being in a third-world country (and being without a phone), was not about to call the police. I was so shocked that I quickly whipped out my disposable camera and took a shot of the lady, and the baby, and the bike.
Odd, how flabbergasted I was. Natural, I guess; it would have been frightening if I hadn't have been floored, I guess.
It's weird how things juxtaposed can disarm you. A moto is no big deal, and neither is a lady riding on one. A moto with a lady with a baby riding on one -- now that's something that short-circuits your mental nerves. (The first few times you see it.)
Then you take the moto, and you multiply it by a hundred, then a thousand, and you have a picture of Phnom Penh's streets, a picture that started off bizarre and tilted and gradually became mundane, even ordinary. The saving grace here is that the population of Phnom Penh isn't really all that high -- maybe a million people. It doesn't even compare to Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh (or so I've heard.) So even though the streets are crammed tight with motos and bikes and the occasional elephant walking around (if you're down by the river), things are not
out of control.
What am I saying.
This is Phnom Penh, and it is chaos, I'll admit that. They treat traffic signals as, I don't know, recommendations. (You don't need a license to drive a moto, but even if you did, I don't think it would make that much of a difference.)
There's no chance in hell you'd catch me driving on these roads, on moto or in a car. Just today I saw a foreigner zooming down the street on his motorcycle. A traffic cop saw him coming, rushed out to the centre of the road, put on his angry, scowling face and ordered the foreigner, via a half-assed karate chop hand gesture and a sharp little bark, to stop. The foreigner, smart guy that he was, just kept on trucking.
You don't mess with Cambodian police.
People here don't have that choice. They can't afford cars, most of them, so they fit their whole families on their bikes and away they go. The most number of people I've seen on a bike (intended for two) is seven, I think. Two parents and five kids, laying on laps and standing on shoulders and tucked under various sweaty armpits, legs and arms dangling anywhere and everywhere.
Strange, what you can get used to: traffic chaos and humans scrunched together and the sight of wide-eyed little tykes clutching their fathers waist from behind as if their fingers are fastened by velcro.
Sobering, the small, everyday indignities that people can endure.
I'm talking about a bike. I'm talking about a moto, and a lady on the moto, and the tiny, fragile, living and breathing thing she was holding in her arms.
Said thing being a baby, of course.
So what's the big deal?
I don't know, call me crazy, but back in Ontario if you saw a lady riding shotgun in the rain on a little moto like the type Sweetchuck rode in Police Academy III with a kid clutched under her arm like a soggy paperback book you'd probably call the police.
I, on the other hand, being in a third-world country (and being without a phone), was not about to call the police. I was so shocked that I quickly whipped out my disposable camera and took a shot of the lady, and the baby, and the bike.
Odd, how flabbergasted I was. Natural, I guess; it would have been frightening if I hadn't have been floored, I guess.
It's weird how things juxtaposed can disarm you. A moto is no big deal, and neither is a lady riding on one. A moto with a lady with a baby riding on one -- now that's something that short-circuits your mental nerves. (The first few times you see it.)
Then you take the moto, and you multiply it by a hundred, then a thousand, and you have a picture of Phnom Penh's streets, a picture that started off bizarre and tilted and gradually became mundane, even ordinary. The saving grace here is that the population of Phnom Penh isn't really all that high -- maybe a million people. It doesn't even compare to Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh (or so I've heard.) So even though the streets are crammed tight with motos and bikes and the occasional elephant walking around (if you're down by the river), things are not
out of control.
What am I saying.
This is Phnom Penh, and it is chaos, I'll admit that. They treat traffic signals as, I don't know, recommendations. (You don't need a license to drive a moto, but even if you did, I don't think it would make that much of a difference.)
There's no chance in hell you'd catch me driving on these roads, on moto or in a car. Just today I saw a foreigner zooming down the street on his motorcycle. A traffic cop saw him coming, rushed out to the centre of the road, put on his angry, scowling face and ordered the foreigner, via a half-assed karate chop hand gesture and a sharp little bark, to stop. The foreigner, smart guy that he was, just kept on trucking.
You don't mess with Cambodian police.
People here don't have that choice. They can't afford cars, most of them, so they fit their whole families on their bikes and away they go. The most number of people I've seen on a bike (intended for two) is seven, I think. Two parents and five kids, laying on laps and standing on shoulders and tucked under various sweaty armpits, legs and arms dangling anywhere and everywhere.
Strange, what you can get used to: traffic chaos and humans scrunched together and the sight of wide-eyed little tykes clutching their fathers waist from behind as if their fingers are fastened by velcro.
Sobering, the small, everyday indignities that people can endure.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
UNANCHORED
They come out at night.
Not exclusively, no, but you can usually find them prowling the streets when the sun goes down, searching through the city's garbage, manhandling the refuse, hunting for utility.
Last night I walked down Sihanouk, fumbling around in my pocket, searching for my keys. The air was cool and the night was dark and I felt very far from home, liking and disliking that familiar feeling.
I heard a voice.
"Sir! Sir"
I turned behind me to see a young boy, how young impossible to tell, pointing at the ground. (All Cambodian kids look younger than they are, mostly due to stunted growth.) He was a typical street kid -- dirty and scruffy and smiling wide. A makeshift cart full of, well, junk sat on the street, waiting for him. He was one of those kids who help their parents (or themselves) out by patiently, expertly strolling the streets, looking for the gunk we throw away -- cans, food, bottles. Whatever.
I looked to where he was pointing. A five hundred riel note, crumpled and red, was on the ground. I must have dropped it.
He could have picked it up. I was a good little ways ahead of him; I'd have never known the difference. And it's only the equivalent of twelve cents -- I certainly wouldn't have missed it.
And yet this kid, who was scrounging for, well, for his life, didn't take the money and run. He could have used it. His family could have used it. But he chose to call out. To give it back.
We all form our own personal theories about the places we live in and the people who live there. We cling to them. Then somebody comes along and shows us why theories are just that, theoretical, and usually unanchored in anything solid or real.
I picked up the money. He smiled. I smiled.
Then I gave him a dollar, and I gave the wretched looking lady who was rummaging through the trash splayed on the sidewalk next to him a dollar, and while they smiled their thanks I turned away.
I went home to rest, feeling guilty and good, condescending and smug, while the boy behind me went back to his cart and back to work.
Not exclusively, no, but you can usually find them prowling the streets when the sun goes down, searching through the city's garbage, manhandling the refuse, hunting for utility.
Last night I walked down Sihanouk, fumbling around in my pocket, searching for my keys. The air was cool and the night was dark and I felt very far from home, liking and disliking that familiar feeling.
I heard a voice.
"Sir! Sir"
I turned behind me to see a young boy, how young impossible to tell, pointing at the ground. (All Cambodian kids look younger than they are, mostly due to stunted growth.) He was a typical street kid -- dirty and scruffy and smiling wide. A makeshift cart full of, well, junk sat on the street, waiting for him. He was one of those kids who help their parents (or themselves) out by patiently, expertly strolling the streets, looking for the gunk we throw away -- cans, food, bottles. Whatever.
I looked to where he was pointing. A five hundred riel note, crumpled and red, was on the ground. I must have dropped it.
He could have picked it up. I was a good little ways ahead of him; I'd have never known the difference. And it's only the equivalent of twelve cents -- I certainly wouldn't have missed it.
And yet this kid, who was scrounging for, well, for his life, didn't take the money and run. He could have used it. His family could have used it. But he chose to call out. To give it back.
We all form our own personal theories about the places we live in and the people who live there. We cling to them. Then somebody comes along and shows us why theories are just that, theoretical, and usually unanchored in anything solid or real.
I picked up the money. He smiled. I smiled.
Then I gave him a dollar, and I gave the wretched looking lady who was rummaging through the trash splayed on the sidewalk next to him a dollar, and while they smiled their thanks I turned away.
I went home to rest, feeling guilty and good, condescending and smug, while the boy behind me went back to his cart and back to work.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Leaning close,
To the T.V.,
To the Japanese cooking show,
I listen, straining:
For illumination, insight, understanding
But darkness falls, and I'm left with 'Oishii!'
Which is expected, anticipated, enough.
To the T.V.,
To the Japanese cooking show,
I listen, straining:
For illumination, insight, understanding
But darkness falls, and I'm left with 'Oishii!'
Which is expected, anticipated, enough.
HOME TRUTHS
Have you ever seen your hometown in a movie or book?
If you're from New York or Toronto or Tokyo I guess you see that all the time, but if you grow up in a small place, a plain place, there's an electric, almost perverse thrill in seeing or reading about the streets you know in a medium that transcends our own small and desperate lives.
Glimpses of St.Catharines, Ontario in the media were rare. When I was in Grade 2, the big book around town come Christmas time was The Welland Canal Monster meets Santa, by Frank Proctor, a local radio host. The Welland Canal is one of St.Catharines' (few) claims to fame, and the fact that it was featured in a book, and that the writer actually came to my school to read about it -- well, words fail me. There was also, of course, that Yuletide classic A Christmas Story, parts of which (including the legendary tongue-stuck-to-the-icy-pole scene) were shot at a school in St.Kitts.
Other than that, I can only think of a couple of others -- an early book by Terry 'Waiting to Exhale' Mcmillan, in which the characters drive through Niagara Falls and St.Catherines (a misspelling, but at least she mentioned us) and Canadian writer Howard Engleman, who has written a series of detective novels featuring Benny Cooperman that take place in the fictional town of Grantham, which is modelled directly after Engleman's hometown of St.Catharines -- right down to the street names and the local diner named Diana Sweets. (I remember slacking off one day when I was about sixteen during a lull in my job at the St.Catharines library, skimming through an Engleman book, only to have a weird sense of something-like-deja-vu-but-not-quite when the main character wandered into the Grantham Library, modelled quite clearly and recognizably after the very place I was reading the book in. He even remembered to mention the weird, metallic statues of Adam and Eve that perpetually loitered in the lobby.
Living just outside of Tokyo, I'd often purposely seek out books that were set in or around the nation's capital, or the multitude of towns nearby I'd visited, just so I could mentally picture precisely what the author was describing. And I remember watching a movie in a theatre in Shibuya (the downtown, teeny-bopper hub of central Tokyo and modern Japan), a movie in which the main characters walked around, well, Shibuya -- and right outside of the very theatre I was watching their adventures in...
Phnom Penh flicks are few and far between. There's a new documentary out on DVD that I have (but haven't watched yet) called S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (a nice, gentle title, eh?) which is about the infamous Tuol Sleng prison that is just down the road a ways from where I'm writing these words. I've been to the actual prison a couple of times; I'm interested in seeing how this flick portrays what went down there.
And then there's City of Ghosts, the Matt Dillon flick that I wrote about in my second blog entry a few months ago. It presents Phnom Penh as a dirty, sleazy place populated by low-life expats. Accurate? There's no argument from this corner...
It's fun and more than a little strange to watch films and read books about a place that was the very definition of foreign; it's fun to make a place your own, and then to compare another version of it to see if it matches your perception, your reality.
The thing is, novels and movies, when they work, can do two things: they can take us out of our everyday lives to some place extraordinary, fresh and pulsating, or they can reveal the hidden secrets and unknown alleyways that form and align the places we think we know so well. When I was younger, a place wasn't real, wasn't validated, unless I could see it on the silver screen, or reimagine it myself within the safe the pages of a novel, guided by the author's (hopefully) sure hand.
I don't know if I need a place to have that kind of imaginative affirmation anymore, but still, it's comforting and stimulating to see a place you know so well transformed by another's artistic intent. Strange and, if you're lucky, magical. You can nod your head with the sights and tone of place that you recognize, and throw popcorn at the screen at the obvious (to you anyways) oversights and omissions of your hometown (or the town you're now in.)
It's a tangible way to connect the gritty ground beneath your feet with that other, higher level of shimmering stability that the best art strives for, and sometimes even achieves.
If you're from New York or Toronto or Tokyo I guess you see that all the time, but if you grow up in a small place, a plain place, there's an electric, almost perverse thrill in seeing or reading about the streets you know in a medium that transcends our own small and desperate lives.
Glimpses of St.Catharines, Ontario in the media were rare. When I was in Grade 2, the big book around town come Christmas time was The Welland Canal Monster meets Santa, by Frank Proctor, a local radio host. The Welland Canal is one of St.Catharines' (few) claims to fame, and the fact that it was featured in a book, and that the writer actually came to my school to read about it -- well, words fail me. There was also, of course, that Yuletide classic A Christmas Story, parts of which (including the legendary tongue-stuck-to-the-icy-pole scene) were shot at a school in St.Kitts.
Other than that, I can only think of a couple of others -- an early book by Terry 'Waiting to Exhale' Mcmillan, in which the characters drive through Niagara Falls and St.Catherines (a misspelling, but at least she mentioned us) and Canadian writer Howard Engleman, who has written a series of detective novels featuring Benny Cooperman that take place in the fictional town of Grantham, which is modelled directly after Engleman's hometown of St.Catharines -- right down to the street names and the local diner named Diana Sweets. (I remember slacking off one day when I was about sixteen during a lull in my job at the St.Catharines library, skimming through an Engleman book, only to have a weird sense of something-like-deja-vu-but-not-quite when the main character wandered into the Grantham Library, modelled quite clearly and recognizably after the very place I was reading the book in. He even remembered to mention the weird, metallic statues of Adam and Eve that perpetually loitered in the lobby.
Living just outside of Tokyo, I'd often purposely seek out books that were set in or around the nation's capital, or the multitude of towns nearby I'd visited, just so I could mentally picture precisely what the author was describing. And I remember watching a movie in a theatre in Shibuya (the downtown, teeny-bopper hub of central Tokyo and modern Japan), a movie in which the main characters walked around, well, Shibuya -- and right outside of the very theatre I was watching their adventures in...
Phnom Penh flicks are few and far between. There's a new documentary out on DVD that I have (but haven't watched yet) called S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (a nice, gentle title, eh?) which is about the infamous Tuol Sleng prison that is just down the road a ways from where I'm writing these words. I've been to the actual prison a couple of times; I'm interested in seeing how this flick portrays what went down there.
And then there's City of Ghosts, the Matt Dillon flick that I wrote about in my second blog entry a few months ago. It presents Phnom Penh as a dirty, sleazy place populated by low-life expats. Accurate? There's no argument from this corner...
It's fun and more than a little strange to watch films and read books about a place that was the very definition of foreign; it's fun to make a place your own, and then to compare another version of it to see if it matches your perception, your reality.
The thing is, novels and movies, when they work, can do two things: they can take us out of our everyday lives to some place extraordinary, fresh and pulsating, or they can reveal the hidden secrets and unknown alleyways that form and align the places we think we know so well. When I was younger, a place wasn't real, wasn't validated, unless I could see it on the silver screen, or reimagine it myself within the safe the pages of a novel, guided by the author's (hopefully) sure hand.
I don't know if I need a place to have that kind of imaginative affirmation anymore, but still, it's comforting and stimulating to see a place you know so well transformed by another's artistic intent. Strange and, if you're lucky, magical. You can nod your head with the sights and tone of place that you recognize, and throw popcorn at the screen at the obvious (to you anyways) oversights and omissions of your hometown (or the town you're now in.)
It's a tangible way to connect the gritty ground beneath your feet with that other, higher level of shimmering stability that the best art strives for, and sometimes even achieves.
Monday, January 10, 2005
OPRAH, CRUISE, POL POT...
A few nights ago on t.v. I caught the end of the really fancy/schmancy concert that was held recently in Norway for this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a distinguished female African university professor whose name I've of course forgotten, but she did really important things for the environment in Kenya, so she deserves her props.
The weird thing was, the hosts of the show were Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise. Not exactly who first comes to mind when you here the word 'Nobel', is it.
Makes perfect sense to me, though. Both Oprah and Cruise represent the kind of innovative thinking that the Nobel spirit represents.
I'm serious.
Oh, and they can sing.
For the finale, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall did her version of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (with various other artists contributing a verse here and there), and so we were treated to the sort-of-weird sight of Winfrey and Cruise rocking and holding hands and squinting at a teleprompter as they did their best to sing in key.
Here you have the most prestigious, important prize in the history of the known universe, a concert hall filled with the super-elite of the world's hoitiest-toitiest intellectuals, all of it presided over by two people who, when they were growing up, were nobody's vote to succeed at much of anything.
Winfrey was a poor black girl in 1950's Mississipi; I don't need to say anything more than that. Cruise had a single mom who bopped around America with her three daughters and little boy looking for work (and ending up in Ottawa, Ontario, for a couple of years, where Cruise attended junior high, believe it or not. So let's consider him an honorary Canadian, alright?)
Neither is a university graduate. Neither was groomed for success. And yet they are, without question, two of the most powerful people on the planet, if power is measured in money. (It usually is.)
How does this happen?
They did their own thing, is what they did.
They went after what they wanted to go after.
All too often, the good things in life tend to go to those who follow the traditional path -- the university educated, play-it-safe scholars and businessmen who become part of the Establishment and reap its benefits.
But the true movers and shakers, innovators and inventors, are the ones who have created alternate pathways for themselves, or been able to emerge from circumstances that do not seem to necessarily lend themselves to lives of greatness. The Bill Clinton who was the son of a hairdresser in smalltown Arkansas; the Bill Gates who dropped out of university; the Einstein who was a patent clerk; the Quentin Tarantino who dropped out of junior high. These are the people who society neglects to consider, or who are deemed somewhat insignificant, and yet they are the very same people who, later in life, create the disruptions that truly revolutionize the worlds we live in. The middle-to-elite help run the world; the oddball who persists changes it.
There's a downside to this kind of fiercely independent thinking, of course. I'm reading a new biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short (which is very readable, because the guy's a journalist and not an academic) and in this book we discover that, by age twenty-seven, twenty-eight, Pol Pot was, well, not much of anything, really. Not considered a revolutionary. Barely remembered years later by those who attended school with him. Gained a little bit of clout as a really, really good teacher of French literature. (Go figure.) And yet, slowly but surely, daring to live outside of the Cambodian norms laid down by Sihanouk (first as king, then as p.m.) within twenty years Pol Pot was the murderous dictator responsible for reimagining, then destroying, an entire country.
Works both ways, I guess.
I just find it strange -- that those who are born on the outside of the elite economic and political systems that rule us all are sometimes the very people who end up representing, modifying and altering those very same systems. The very people we look to for entertainment, enlightenment, illumination. The very people that can lead us into temptation or (some) form of collective redemption, if we're lucky.
The weird thing was, the hosts of the show were Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise. Not exactly who first comes to mind when you here the word 'Nobel', is it.
Makes perfect sense to me, though. Both Oprah and Cruise represent the kind of innovative thinking that the Nobel spirit represents.
I'm serious.
Oh, and they can sing.
For the finale, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall did her version of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (with various other artists contributing a verse here and there), and so we were treated to the sort-of-weird sight of Winfrey and Cruise rocking and holding hands and squinting at a teleprompter as they did their best to sing in key.
Here you have the most prestigious, important prize in the history of the known universe, a concert hall filled with the super-elite of the world's hoitiest-toitiest intellectuals, all of it presided over by two people who, when they were growing up, were nobody's vote to succeed at much of anything.
Winfrey was a poor black girl in 1950's Mississipi; I don't need to say anything more than that. Cruise had a single mom who bopped around America with her three daughters and little boy looking for work (and ending up in Ottawa, Ontario, for a couple of years, where Cruise attended junior high, believe it or not. So let's consider him an honorary Canadian, alright?)
Neither is a university graduate. Neither was groomed for success. And yet they are, without question, two of the most powerful people on the planet, if power is measured in money. (It usually is.)
How does this happen?
They did their own thing, is what they did.
They went after what they wanted to go after.
All too often, the good things in life tend to go to those who follow the traditional path -- the university educated, play-it-safe scholars and businessmen who become part of the Establishment and reap its benefits.
But the true movers and shakers, innovators and inventors, are the ones who have created alternate pathways for themselves, or been able to emerge from circumstances that do not seem to necessarily lend themselves to lives of greatness. The Bill Clinton who was the son of a hairdresser in smalltown Arkansas; the Bill Gates who dropped out of university; the Einstein who was a patent clerk; the Quentin Tarantino who dropped out of junior high. These are the people who society neglects to consider, or who are deemed somewhat insignificant, and yet they are the very same people who, later in life, create the disruptions that truly revolutionize the worlds we live in. The middle-to-elite help run the world; the oddball who persists changes it.
There's a downside to this kind of fiercely independent thinking, of course. I'm reading a new biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short (which is very readable, because the guy's a journalist and not an academic) and in this book we discover that, by age twenty-seven, twenty-eight, Pol Pot was, well, not much of anything, really. Not considered a revolutionary. Barely remembered years later by those who attended school with him. Gained a little bit of clout as a really, really good teacher of French literature. (Go figure.) And yet, slowly but surely, daring to live outside of the Cambodian norms laid down by Sihanouk (first as king, then as p.m.) within twenty years Pol Pot was the murderous dictator responsible for reimagining, then destroying, an entire country.
Works both ways, I guess.
I just find it strange -- that those who are born on the outside of the elite economic and political systems that rule us all are sometimes the very people who end up representing, modifying and altering those very same systems. The very people we look to for entertainment, enlightenment, illumination. The very people that can lead us into temptation or (some) form of collective redemption, if we're lucky.
PRELUDE TO A COUP
Five a.m. air, cool and dark
Cloaks the Royal guard as he sleeps
At his post.
I run past,
Aware
Of the limp M-16
Resting against his leg
As somewhere beyond him
The newly crowned king
Stirs in his sleep
Troubled by dreams
That hint,
That allude,
To inertia
Unrest...
A trigger cocked.
His patient enemies
Rely on sleeping guards
To sleep a little longer.
All of them,
Waiting
For the day
To break
Cloaks the Royal guard as he sleeps
At his post.
I run past,
Aware
Of the limp M-16
Resting against his leg
As somewhere beyond him
The newly crowned king
Stirs in his sleep
Troubled by dreams
That hint,
That allude,
To inertia
Unrest...
A trigger cocked.
His patient enemies
Rely on sleeping guards
To sleep a little longer.
All of them,
Waiting
For the day
To break
Friday, January 07, 2005
THE TAO OF BILL MURRAY AND THE WOW OF WES ANDERSON
I'm not sure what universe Bill Murray inhabits, but it's not ours. I think he just visits here, popping in from time to time to visit old friends and make a few movies. His latest, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, is directed by Wes Anderson, who previously directed Murray in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums; Anderson, too, is not from this earth, so when his universe and Murray's universe somehow align themselves in space and time, weird stuff happens. Good stuff happens.
I won't say anything specific about the movie. It's out now in theatres in big cities in North America. I watched it here in Cambodia. If you've seen Wes Anderson's other movies, you have an idea of what you're in for. If you haven't, and you watch this flick expecting another Ghostbusters or something, I feel for you. Usually, a lot of people come out of Wes Anderson's films saying "I don't get it". This time, I think a lot of Wes Anderson fans will walk out of this Wes Anderson film saying "I don't get it."
This is a good thing. This is a great thing, in fact, because The Life Aquatic is a bizarre, slightly off-kilter experience that resembles Anderson's past work, yes, and it bears some kind of tangential relationship to the real world that we walk through and talk through most of the days of our lives, certainly, but it has an inexplicable, internal logic that our world lacks, and that Wes's world somehow summons at will.
I actually met Wes Anderson in '97 or '98. This was before he had worked with Bill Murray three times, before Martin Scorsese had labelled him his favorite young director, before his first movie had even been released in actual theatres. His first movie was called Bottle Rocket, a small independent movie he had shot with his Texas roommates Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson, and the three of them (along with the older Wilson brother whose name I forget) were schlepping the flick around Canadian college campuses, hoping to generate some buzz before its limited Toronto release.
It wasn't working. At York University, they used to (maybe still do?) have movie nights using the big screens draping the lecture halls. This particular night they had a screening of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, followed by Bottle Rocket, with the director and stars in (nervous) attendance.
A few hundred people laughed their lily-white asses off all the way through Ace Ventura II.
Then came Bottle Rocket.
Then came the sound of seats being thwack-thwuck-thwicked down as people gradually, then rapidly began leaving the theatre. After the movie was finished, there were only a dozen or so people left.
Wes Anderson came out, as did Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson and the other Wilson brother. They didn't look happy. They looked, what's the word, glum. (I felt bad for them. I don't think it was their movie that people didn't like, necessarily; York is mostly a commuter school -- I think people just wanted to get home, that's why they were leaving so early. And hey -- Jim Carrey is a tough act to follow.)
My friend Eric asked a particulary filmish question to Wes Anderson, who replied with a particulary filmish answer. Anderson had geeky classes and Don King hair and looked exactly like they kind of guy who would, and did, inhabit our film classes. (In fact, he looked exactly like the kind of guy who would make movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
After the (very brief) q and a was over, me and Eric went up to talk to the director and stars. They were all very nice, low-key guys in their mid-twenties, not much older than us, and I remember talking to Owen Wilson, who later went on to co-star in movies with such no-names as Jackie Chan and Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman, and I got them all to sign my copy of ESQUIRE with Al Pacino on the cover, and I'm convinced that I was the first one to ever get an autograph from these guys. To tell the truth, my friend Eric and I kind of felt sorry for these dudes, because most of the audience had left during the flick. I cornered them in the hallway outside of the lecture hall and had them sign their names and felt kind of dorky, them not being famous and all, but what the hell.
And then they walked out of Curtis Lecture Hall L that dark and snowy night, probably talking dejectedly about what a poor screening that had been, not knowing that they would soon, in a few short years, be big, big movie stars, and high-profile directors, and that that black and cold York U night would recede into their memory like a bad (but not forgotten) dream.
It's so weird, is all I'm saying. Anderson's movies, Murray being in them, me watching them in Cambodia. I was watching a scene with Owen Wilson arguing with Willem Dafoe, and I suddenly remembered that I had spoken to both of these guys at different points in time, Owen Wilson before he was famous, in a classroom at my school, and Willem Dafoe in a movie theatre in Toronto, when I suddenly realized that the guy waiting in line in front of me was none other than the dude who had died in Platoon and died as Jesus. So I asked him if he was Willem Dafoe, and he sheepishly smiled that creepy smiled and said he was, and I asked him what he was doing in Toronto, and he said filming a movie, and I said which movie, and he said Existenz, by Canadian director David Cronenberg, and I don't know why that's so important to me -- this acknowledgement, as I watched The Life Aquatic here in Cambodia, that I had exchanged a few words with the people on my t.v. set.
Maybe it goes back to where I began. To Murray, and Anderson's movies, and their mutual, unspoken agreement that life is filled with unusual coincidences and longings.
Bill Murray is a real, honest-to-goodness human being. (I know, because I was the biggest fan of Meatballs and Stripes in the world, and when I was fifteen or sixteen I convinced my dad to take me and my friends to Camp White Pine while we were in Haliburton, Ontario, because it was there that Meatballs had been filmed fifteen years before, and just the fact that we drove along the same road leading to the cottages that Murray had trod upon many summers ago was enough to make my day, month, year, enough to solidify once and for all that Murray was flesh and blood, had walked the same earth as me. And, incidentally, if you haven't seen Stripes, or even Meatballs, you must. This is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form. The Murray in Rushmore is the Murray of Stripes twenty years later, the wiseass engulfed by the drudgery of life who yearns and learns to smirk and feel once more.) And yet Murray marches to his own drum. So does Anderson. In fact, it's not even a drum they march to, no, but another, unfamiliar instrument only they can hear.
When you watch their movies, so much is intrinsically offbeat and skewed; so much is angular. But there's a rhythm to their off-rhythm beat, a recognition of our need for connection and empathy. Murray is not sentimental, and neither is Anderson, but boy can they taunt and toy with emotion; man can they hint at what makes us puny humans love and need each other so muchy.
It's in Murray's smile, I think. He wields it like a knife. He doesn't smile often, and he doesn't do it easily, but when he does, what you see is humanity shining through. You see goodness. You see his smarm and cynicism about life that is his trademark stripped clean. It's a wink to the audience, a nod to the good will we can still summon through the dark.
Overanalyzing? Of course. When you're dealing with people as complex and heightened and enlightened as Bill Murray and Wes Anderson, you can't help but examine life differently. You can't help but wonder whether our own individual versions of the world will somehow, someday resemble theirs, of if they sometimes already do.
I won't say anything specific about the movie. It's out now in theatres in big cities in North America. I watched it here in Cambodia. If you've seen Wes Anderson's other movies, you have an idea of what you're in for. If you haven't, and you watch this flick expecting another Ghostbusters or something, I feel for you. Usually, a lot of people come out of Wes Anderson's films saying "I don't get it". This time, I think a lot of Wes Anderson fans will walk out of this Wes Anderson film saying "I don't get it."
This is a good thing. This is a great thing, in fact, because The Life Aquatic is a bizarre, slightly off-kilter experience that resembles Anderson's past work, yes, and it bears some kind of tangential relationship to the real world that we walk through and talk through most of the days of our lives, certainly, but it has an inexplicable, internal logic that our world lacks, and that Wes's world somehow summons at will.
I actually met Wes Anderson in '97 or '98. This was before he had worked with Bill Murray three times, before Martin Scorsese had labelled him his favorite young director, before his first movie had even been released in actual theatres. His first movie was called Bottle Rocket, a small independent movie he had shot with his Texas roommates Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson, and the three of them (along with the older Wilson brother whose name I forget) were schlepping the flick around Canadian college campuses, hoping to generate some buzz before its limited Toronto release.
It wasn't working. At York University, they used to (maybe still do?) have movie nights using the big screens draping the lecture halls. This particular night they had a screening of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, followed by Bottle Rocket, with the director and stars in (nervous) attendance.
A few hundred people laughed their lily-white asses off all the way through Ace Ventura II.
Then came Bottle Rocket.
Then came the sound of seats being thwack-thwuck-thwicked down as people gradually, then rapidly began leaving the theatre. After the movie was finished, there were only a dozen or so people left.
Wes Anderson came out, as did Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson and the other Wilson brother. They didn't look happy. They looked, what's the word, glum. (I felt bad for them. I don't think it was their movie that people didn't like, necessarily; York is mostly a commuter school -- I think people just wanted to get home, that's why they were leaving so early. And hey -- Jim Carrey is a tough act to follow.)
My friend Eric asked a particulary filmish question to Wes Anderson, who replied with a particulary filmish answer. Anderson had geeky classes and Don King hair and looked exactly like they kind of guy who would, and did, inhabit our film classes. (In fact, he looked exactly like the kind of guy who would make movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
After the (very brief) q and a was over, me and Eric went up to talk to the director and stars. They were all very nice, low-key guys in their mid-twenties, not much older than us, and I remember talking to Owen Wilson, who later went on to co-star in movies with such no-names as Jackie Chan and Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman, and I got them all to sign my copy of ESQUIRE with Al Pacino on the cover, and I'm convinced that I was the first one to ever get an autograph from these guys. To tell the truth, my friend Eric and I kind of felt sorry for these dudes, because most of the audience had left during the flick. I cornered them in the hallway outside of the lecture hall and had them sign their names and felt kind of dorky, them not being famous and all, but what the hell.
And then they walked out of Curtis Lecture Hall L that dark and snowy night, probably talking dejectedly about what a poor screening that had been, not knowing that they would soon, in a few short years, be big, big movie stars, and high-profile directors, and that that black and cold York U night would recede into their memory like a bad (but not forgotten) dream.
It's so weird, is all I'm saying. Anderson's movies, Murray being in them, me watching them in Cambodia. I was watching a scene with Owen Wilson arguing with Willem Dafoe, and I suddenly remembered that I had spoken to both of these guys at different points in time, Owen Wilson before he was famous, in a classroom at my school, and Willem Dafoe in a movie theatre in Toronto, when I suddenly realized that the guy waiting in line in front of me was none other than the dude who had died in Platoon and died as Jesus. So I asked him if he was Willem Dafoe, and he sheepishly smiled that creepy smiled and said he was, and I asked him what he was doing in Toronto, and he said filming a movie, and I said which movie, and he said Existenz, by Canadian director David Cronenberg, and I don't know why that's so important to me -- this acknowledgement, as I watched The Life Aquatic here in Cambodia, that I had exchanged a few words with the people on my t.v. set.
Maybe it goes back to where I began. To Murray, and Anderson's movies, and their mutual, unspoken agreement that life is filled with unusual coincidences and longings.
Bill Murray is a real, honest-to-goodness human being. (I know, because I was the biggest fan of Meatballs and Stripes in the world, and when I was fifteen or sixteen I convinced my dad to take me and my friends to Camp White Pine while we were in Haliburton, Ontario, because it was there that Meatballs had been filmed fifteen years before, and just the fact that we drove along the same road leading to the cottages that Murray had trod upon many summers ago was enough to make my day, month, year, enough to solidify once and for all that Murray was flesh and blood, had walked the same earth as me. And, incidentally, if you haven't seen Stripes, or even Meatballs, you must. This is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form. The Murray in Rushmore is the Murray of Stripes twenty years later, the wiseass engulfed by the drudgery of life who yearns and learns to smirk and feel once more.) And yet Murray marches to his own drum. So does Anderson. In fact, it's not even a drum they march to, no, but another, unfamiliar instrument only they can hear.
When you watch their movies, so much is intrinsically offbeat and skewed; so much is angular. But there's a rhythm to their off-rhythm beat, a recognition of our need for connection and empathy. Murray is not sentimental, and neither is Anderson, but boy can they taunt and toy with emotion; man can they hint at what makes us puny humans love and need each other so muchy.
It's in Murray's smile, I think. He wields it like a knife. He doesn't smile often, and he doesn't do it easily, but when he does, what you see is humanity shining through. You see goodness. You see his smarm and cynicism about life that is his trademark stripped clean. It's a wink to the audience, a nod to the good will we can still summon through the dark.
Overanalyzing? Of course. When you're dealing with people as complex and heightened and enlightened as Bill Murray and Wes Anderson, you can't help but examine life differently. You can't help but wonder whether our own individual versions of the world will somehow, someday resemble theirs, of if they sometimes already do.
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