Somebody in the book I'm reading right now, Erik Erikson's psychoanalytic study Gandhi's Truth: On the Orgins of Militant Nonvioence, describes the Indian saint as something like a "twenty-four man", a phrase that leapt out at me. Made me think. Made me pause. To be authentically humane at all times, every hour, consistently -- is that what we're here for? Could anyone other than Ganhdi do such a thing?
I don't think there's anything particularly masculine in the phrase; substitute 'woman' for 'man', and although the particulars may change, the overall sentiment remains basically intact. To be all that we, as human creatures, are capable of being; to achieve what we are put here to be.
Can I do that? Can you do that?
Just now, moments ago, a common sight: in the midst of a pouring rainstorm, a young Khmer boy, thin, poor, guides his blind grandfather around by the the hand, begging for change. Often such old folks are playing instruments or singing; sometimes, like today, they are simply there, existing to be used, elderly.
Think of that boy, if you please, and of his life. He probably does not go to school. He probably never will go to school. His life consists of wandering around in the rain, asking strangers for money he will probably not receive, money that will, instead, give his family the means for a meal. I know he does not do this out of the goodness of his heart, and I know that his life, undoubtedly, consists of highs and lows and sorrows and joys that I no doubt surpass my own at times, if not all the time. He is no saint, and he did not ask for these circumstances.
But still. What he is doing. The basic dignity of it. His willingness to do it, even if he abhors it. I do not know if he is being 'a twenty-four man', since he is not yet a man at all, but there must be something dwelling deep within him that would recognize the truth of such a statement. I'm not even sure what that particular phrase means, of course; I'm adding my own allusions and half-baked insights onto somebody else's perceptions. And yet I believe if anyone could embody that aspect of Gahndi, that little boy does. I do not know why, but I feel it. I don't trust my feelings, no, but they are there, and they are real, and that is all I have to go on.
Surrounded by monks on a daily basis does tend to ground one in a certain way. I'm not sure why, and it could be simply my own cultural appropriation of somebody else's religion; the monks, in their purple robes, often wearing glasses, clutching school books, seem possessed of some kind of inner wisdom that I would never associate with priests-in-training. And I know my own perceptions have been proven false by my very own eyes; I've taught monks, and watched them cheat like everyone else, and sat beside them in the student computer lab and noticed that they, too, search match.com, looking for love. But there's something in their discipline, their ascetism, that stands out, that demands to be taken seriously. If they do not attain a higher level of wisdom after years of study, it's not for a lack of trying. Two meals a day, none after noon; flip-flops the only luxury clothes they possess, and often these, two, are absent from their feet. The memory of one of my first students, a young monk who was curious and interested and passionate about the links between Buddhism and Christianity and Hinduism and all of the world's myriad religions, because they were part of the grand human quest for a universal truth that transcended religion itself. It's the vibes that the monks give off, I suppose, more than anything else, a serene desire for understanding that feels so fundamentally delicate and alien in this sun-soaked land, detached but linked to my cold Canadian heritage, as if virtue and truth were a flake of snow fastly melting in this tropical heat.
I don't spend most days or many days contemplating what it means to be good, but I wonder. The last line of Robert Pirsig's Leila, which was the sequel to Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, postulates the concept of good as a noun, not an adjective. Good as a noun, a thing, a Platonic Form. Sometimes my mind drifts to that idea, that good could in fact turn out to be a tangible thing, a touchable force, maybe the Force that George Lucas was talking about. Can we somehow find it, this goodness? Can we grasp it? Can we harness it so that we, too, can become twenty-four people?
I don't know.
But I want to find that kid and warn that kid, the one with the grandfather on his arm. I want to stop him from becoming the young street kid I fear he will be in five, ten years time, the ones that wander around Phnom Penh sniffing glue from plastic bags, the ones who I see while running in the mornings along the banks of the river, the ones who sleep on the grass and take money for sex. I want to grab this young lad by the shoulders and let him know that now, in his current state, he is a twenty-four hour kid, and that he is the goodness that the world is lacking. He would not understand what I was saying, even if I were speaking Khmer. He would only look at me strangely, and grab his grandfather's bony hand a little tighter, and continue on his way down the long and dusty road, bored and tired, angry but diligent, trying to raise money for his family because that is what he has been trained to do. In that precise and fleeting moment he would thus become what I seek.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Saturday, July 30, 2005
SOME STUFF I'M THINKING ABOUT
The viability of an 'Aquaman' movie -- I thought about this while swimming last night. There's just something so cool about swooshing your hand through the water, watching the waves cascade through your fingertips. As a kid (and, um, okay, as an adult, too), whenever I was on a boat I'd lean over the side and stick my hand in the blue and pretend that I was shooting water out of my fingertips, controlling the oceans, summoning the dolphins. And such effects are totally cinematically possible, me thinks, and I think it's high time (or is it high tide) that Aquaman got the big-screen treatment he deserves. I mean, c'mon -- the dude breathes underwater. I'm sure with all the CGI available today they could do a decent job of an underwater Atlantis. I'd heard rumors that they're already considering a Sub-Mariner movie -- the Sub-Mariner being Prince Namor, another citizen of that lost city of Atlantis, albeit one featured in a rival company, Marvel Comics (Aquaman's published by DC). That would be cool, too, although Namor is a bit more, well sinister; he's sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes a friend of The Fantastic Four, and sometimes a foe.
What old people say to younger people -- For some reason, maybe it's because I'm teaching again, I found myself remembering what my third year Creative Writing teacher said to us -- that most novelists don't publish a book until they're well past forty, that most writers are depressives and alcoholics, and that it's almost impossible to make a living from writing, so don't even bother. And there I was, young and idealistic and trying to write novels on the side. I don't fault my teacher, who's a good man and a good writer; he was just trying to inject some pragmatism into our veins, which is probably a good thing. But I wonder. When you're young, you don't know shit, and you tend to look at and up to those who do. It's the job of the old to caution the young, I suppose; but it's also the job of the young to disregard such cautions whenever possible...
All the books I want to read -- A new biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger by Laurence Leaner. The new novel by Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J.Sawyer (www.sfwriter.com) A book on the history of baseball I picked up in paperback over here. (I don't like watching baseball all that much, or playing it all that much, but I do like reading about it very much. Go figure. And I like reading about how things work, whether they be corporations or governments or sporting leagues.) A new novel called Mafia Summer by some dude who was TV producer Aaron Spelling's right-hand man for many years, simply because the way that he came across when being interviewed by Larry King, and the story that he told, of his friend who didn't make it out of the streets, in real life and the book, made both him and the book seem humane and true. From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman, which is about fifteen years old, but I'm hoping that it explains the Middle East situation in a way that is comprehensible to me. And, most importantly, the new John Irving novel, Until I Find You, because, well, it's the new John Irving novel.
The Khmer Rouge Tribunal -- It's supposed to be set up sometime soon, but they've been saying that for years and years, so I'll believe it when I see it. I have the gnawing feeling that the whole thing will take place when I'm gone from Cambodia, which will be somewhat ironic, because I think the tribunal will then put Cambodia back in the news for a little while. (Actually, is that ironic? Maybe not. Must have been listening to too much Alanis, don't you think...)
Whether or not Wayne Gretzky will coach the Phoneix Coyotes -- Because if he does, everytime he comes back to Canada to coach against the Leafs or the Canucks or the Canadiens or the Flames or the Senators or the Oilers he may very well be the first coach who is asked for more autographs than the players. (Because Wayne Gretzky, like Mario Lemieux, is basically God in Canada. If Wayne ever ran for Prime Minister, forget about it. He'd win in a landslide. Probably do a pretty good job, too.)
The fact that it's the beginning of August, and it should feel like summer's winding down, but it's always freakin' bloody hot over here, so there's absolutely no sense of seasons passing, which is kind of neat at first but which gradually, almost insidiously gets somewhat spooky after one or two years -- Self-explanatory.
The way that some strangers don't say 'thank-you' when you 'god bless' them -- Pisses me off.
The essential goodness of Rocky II -- Because each of the characters sacrifices what they want most for the desire of the ones they love: Rocky's trainer, Mickey, who wants nothing more than to see Rocky kick Apollo Creed's ass in a rematch, tells Rocky, overcome with grief at the fact that his wife, Adrian, is in a coma after giving birth, that he will train him, yes, but if he wants to blow it, well, they'll blow it together, the two of them, sitting in church, day after day, praying; Rocky, whose whole essence is that of a fighter, tells Adrian, after giving birth, that if she doesn't want him fighting, they'll figure some other way to survive; Adrian, after hearing Rocky's offer, telling him that there's nothing else she wants him to do but win. They all love each other so much that they give up what makes them happiest for the hope of happiness in the other. Beautiful.
What old people say to younger people -- For some reason, maybe it's because I'm teaching again, I found myself remembering what my third year Creative Writing teacher said to us -- that most novelists don't publish a book until they're well past forty, that most writers are depressives and alcoholics, and that it's almost impossible to make a living from writing, so don't even bother. And there I was, young and idealistic and trying to write novels on the side. I don't fault my teacher, who's a good man and a good writer; he was just trying to inject some pragmatism into our veins, which is probably a good thing. But I wonder. When you're young, you don't know shit, and you tend to look at and up to those who do. It's the job of the old to caution the young, I suppose; but it's also the job of the young to disregard such cautions whenever possible...
All the books I want to read -- A new biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger by Laurence Leaner. The new novel by Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J.Sawyer (www.sfwriter.com) A book on the history of baseball I picked up in paperback over here. (I don't like watching baseball all that much, or playing it all that much, but I do like reading about it very much. Go figure. And I like reading about how things work, whether they be corporations or governments or sporting leagues.) A new novel called Mafia Summer by some dude who was TV producer Aaron Spelling's right-hand man for many years, simply because the way that he came across when being interviewed by Larry King, and the story that he told, of his friend who didn't make it out of the streets, in real life and the book, made both him and the book seem humane and true. From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman, which is about fifteen years old, but I'm hoping that it explains the Middle East situation in a way that is comprehensible to me. And, most importantly, the new John Irving novel, Until I Find You, because, well, it's the new John Irving novel.
The Khmer Rouge Tribunal -- It's supposed to be set up sometime soon, but they've been saying that for years and years, so I'll believe it when I see it. I have the gnawing feeling that the whole thing will take place when I'm gone from Cambodia, which will be somewhat ironic, because I think the tribunal will then put Cambodia back in the news for a little while. (Actually, is that ironic? Maybe not. Must have been listening to too much Alanis, don't you think...)
Whether or not Wayne Gretzky will coach the Phoneix Coyotes -- Because if he does, everytime he comes back to Canada to coach against the Leafs or the Canucks or the Canadiens or the Flames or the Senators or the Oilers he may very well be the first coach who is asked for more autographs than the players. (Because Wayne Gretzky, like Mario Lemieux, is basically God in Canada. If Wayne ever ran for Prime Minister, forget about it. He'd win in a landslide. Probably do a pretty good job, too.)
The fact that it's the beginning of August, and it should feel like summer's winding down, but it's always freakin' bloody hot over here, so there's absolutely no sense of seasons passing, which is kind of neat at first but which gradually, almost insidiously gets somewhat spooky after one or two years -- Self-explanatory.
The way that some strangers don't say 'thank-you' when you 'god bless' them -- Pisses me off.
The essential goodness of Rocky II -- Because each of the characters sacrifices what they want most for the desire of the ones they love: Rocky's trainer, Mickey, who wants nothing more than to see Rocky kick Apollo Creed's ass in a rematch, tells Rocky, overcome with grief at the fact that his wife, Adrian, is in a coma after giving birth, that he will train him, yes, but if he wants to blow it, well, they'll blow it together, the two of them, sitting in church, day after day, praying; Rocky, whose whole essence is that of a fighter, tells Adrian, after giving birth, that if she doesn't want him fighting, they'll figure some other way to survive; Adrian, after hearing Rocky's offer, telling him that there's nothing else she wants him to do but win. They all love each other so much that they give up what makes them happiest for the hope of happiness in the other. Beautiful.
Friday, July 29, 2005
A HARSH, DANGEROUS WORLD POPULATED BY, UM, PEOPLE WHO BUTT IN LINE? or A LESSON IN CROSS-CULTURAL TOGETHERNESS
I knew he was going to butt in front of me. Knew it. I waited for it, was ready for it, and dealt with it accordingly.
(This constitutes 'drama' and 'confrontation' in my life in Phnom Penh.)
I'm used to 'cultural differences'. Living in Japan for four years was a megaton-level wake-up call for this Ontario small-city boy as to the convoluted societal regulations inherent in a millienia-old society. To even begin to list the intricacies of Japanese dos and don't would take pages, possibly volumes. Irritating, yes. Annoying as hell, sure. Comprehensible? Sometimes. But after awhile I grinned and bore it. There was nothing else to do. Especially because they were, and are, so damn polite about everything -- and really, how angry can you get at somebody for being too nice?
Things are not quite as a complex here in Cambodia. Don't get me wrong. I don't begin to understand much, if anything, of what Cambodia is truly like, even after living here for two years. (Think about it -- do you really, truly understand your hometown, let alone your country? Can you even figure out what the rationale behind what occurs at your local Wal-Mart? Trying to do psychoanalysis on a Southeast Asian country just doesn't cut it.) Cambodian people are a lot more, well, open than the Japanese. (Which is not a value judgement, by the way.) They smile and laugh and get pissed off quite easily and openly. You may not always know where you stand with them, but you know where you don't stand. If that makes sense.
But there are some things about Cambodian life I still haven't quite gotten the handle on. Pissing in the street, fine. No big deal. Refusing to admit that they don't understand something, even though they say they do -- got it.
And yet, time and time again, month after month, I'm baffled by this:
Standing in line at a convenience store. Waiting for my change at a grocery shop. And here comes a Khmer, stepping in right in front of me.
I don't mind if people don't see me, are half-asleep, are blind, whatever. Sometimes mistakes are made. And I'm not sure if this is strictly a 'foreigner' thing, though I doubt it, because I've seen the same thing happen at the snack shop on the Cambodian-Vietnam border, where a Cambodian dude just blatantly ignored the long line, took out a dollar bill, and walked to the counter, waving it in the air like a bullfighter taunting his animal.
But it happens all the time. People just walking right on by me and placing their goods down and generally ignoring me.
I honestly don't get it. Do they think that because I'm a foreigner and they're a Khmer citizen that lines are thus not for them? I know that, in general, most Cambodians don't really follow the whole 'line' thing -- but how can you just cavalierly sidestep someone who's directly in front of you?
So this particular time, the other night, at BB World, after ordering my #1 combo, I refused to back down.
A young Cambodian kid, in a rush, was coming up behind him. He brushed by me and literally pushed me aside with his shoulder and shouted out his order.
I, feeling royally ticked off and pleasantly pleased that my prediction had come true, pushed him back, slightly, with my own shoulder, a move I have not made on anyone since I used to (attempt to) bodycheck people during hockey games all those moons ago.
His reaction?
A sheepish grin.
He knew he'd been caught red-handed in the act. (Khmers tend to smile and grin nervously whenever they're nervous, unsettled, embarrassed or ashamed.) I was left alone to finish my order in peaceful bliss.
I felt vindicated. I felt stupid for feeling vindicated.
And yet, I suppose it's alright, this peeve of mine. In this sense: in a world of terrorism run amok, where people are willing to maim each other and kill each other because they disagree with somebody's principles and way of life, I suppose there's some small form of comfort in the fact that the biggest criticism I can think of regarding living in Cambodia is the fact that people sometimes butt ahead of me in line. In today's world, in fact, I suspect a minor infraction like that could even be deemed somewhat, well, quaint.
(This constitutes 'drama' and 'confrontation' in my life in Phnom Penh.)
I'm used to 'cultural differences'. Living in Japan for four years was a megaton-level wake-up call for this Ontario small-city boy as to the convoluted societal regulations inherent in a millienia-old society. To even begin to list the intricacies of Japanese dos and don't would take pages, possibly volumes. Irritating, yes. Annoying as hell, sure. Comprehensible? Sometimes. But after awhile I grinned and bore it. There was nothing else to do. Especially because they were, and are, so damn polite about everything -- and really, how angry can you get at somebody for being too nice?
Things are not quite as a complex here in Cambodia. Don't get me wrong. I don't begin to understand much, if anything, of what Cambodia is truly like, even after living here for two years. (Think about it -- do you really, truly understand your hometown, let alone your country? Can you even figure out what the rationale behind what occurs at your local Wal-Mart? Trying to do psychoanalysis on a Southeast Asian country just doesn't cut it.) Cambodian people are a lot more, well, open than the Japanese. (Which is not a value judgement, by the way.) They smile and laugh and get pissed off quite easily and openly. You may not always know where you stand with them, but you know where you don't stand. If that makes sense.
But there are some things about Cambodian life I still haven't quite gotten the handle on. Pissing in the street, fine. No big deal. Refusing to admit that they don't understand something, even though they say they do -- got it.
And yet, time and time again, month after month, I'm baffled by this:
Standing in line at a convenience store. Waiting for my change at a grocery shop. And here comes a Khmer, stepping in right in front of me.
I don't mind if people don't see me, are half-asleep, are blind, whatever. Sometimes mistakes are made. And I'm not sure if this is strictly a 'foreigner' thing, though I doubt it, because I've seen the same thing happen at the snack shop on the Cambodian-Vietnam border, where a Cambodian dude just blatantly ignored the long line, took out a dollar bill, and walked to the counter, waving it in the air like a bullfighter taunting his animal.
But it happens all the time. People just walking right on by me and placing their goods down and generally ignoring me.
I honestly don't get it. Do they think that because I'm a foreigner and they're a Khmer citizen that lines are thus not for them? I know that, in general, most Cambodians don't really follow the whole 'line' thing -- but how can you just cavalierly sidestep someone who's directly in front of you?
So this particular time, the other night, at BB World, after ordering my #1 combo, I refused to back down.
A young Cambodian kid, in a rush, was coming up behind him. He brushed by me and literally pushed me aside with his shoulder and shouted out his order.
I, feeling royally ticked off and pleasantly pleased that my prediction had come true, pushed him back, slightly, with my own shoulder, a move I have not made on anyone since I used to (attempt to) bodycheck people during hockey games all those moons ago.
His reaction?
A sheepish grin.
He knew he'd been caught red-handed in the act. (Khmers tend to smile and grin nervously whenever they're nervous, unsettled, embarrassed or ashamed.) I was left alone to finish my order in peaceful bliss.
I felt vindicated. I felt stupid for feeling vindicated.
And yet, I suppose it's alright, this peeve of mine. In this sense: in a world of terrorism run amok, where people are willing to maim each other and kill each other because they disagree with somebody's principles and way of life, I suppose there's some small form of comfort in the fact that the biggest criticism I can think of regarding living in Cambodia is the fact that people sometimes butt ahead of me in line. In today's world, in fact, I suspect a minor infraction like that could even be deemed somewhat, well, quaint.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
NOW IS THE TIME WHEN YOU GIVE ME SOME MONEY
“ Now is the time when you give me some money.”
Those words, spoken to me by a Cambodian policeman who was helping me deal with replacing my lost passport, seem to symbolize something about my Southeast Asian experience up until now. I wouldn’t say that it’s representative of the people of Cambodia or the culture of Cambodia or anything beyond my own, individual encounters with those institutions that are -- on paper, anyways -- supposed to be bastions of diplomacy and fair-play.
Before living in Cambodia, I never gave much thought to government structures, both physical and symbolical. Roads were roads. Schools were schools. The idea that government itself had something to with these commonplace institutions was surely somewhere in the back of my mind, but I’m not exactly sure where; perhaps locked away in those portions of the brain that scientists claim we so rarely use.
Ah, but to lose a passport, and to lose it in a place like Cambodia, forces you into manuoevers and machinations that are not sufficiently dealt with in the Ontario school system. I was never taught about the protocol for bribing a police officer; I must have missed that particular Social Studies class.
Cambodians themselves didn’t miss that class, because they don’t NEED that class. They know that you can’t trust the police, and that the people in power are not there to serve the people. This is not necessarily a hypothesis; in desperately poor countries like Cambodia, it serves as a fact, and it is a fact that you learn quite young here.
Let’s start with the schools: woefully underfunded, criminally underdeveloped, with a pay for teachers that starts at a whopping twenty bucks a month. A few times I visited a few of the high schools here in Phnom Penh, along with the marketing head of our university and his assistant (the same chap, Veasna, who was killed by a drunk driver a month or so ago), hoping to drum up interest in our school. Let me tell you. Can I tell you? Let me tell you. It was like something out of a Van Damme movie set inside one of Thailand’s premier kickboxing arenas. I shit you not. Video games down in the dusty, darkened entrance, food being cooked, chickens running around, cramped classrooms with fifty students and a teacher standing on a box clutching a squawking microphone that whined in and out of sonic audibility. And this was one of the good schools. Gotta love that Ministry of Education. No money for books or renovations, no, but boy, their cars sure are spiffy.
When you have to bribe a teacher to go to school, something’s fucked up within the system. When the politicians drive Mercedes Benz around town while most people can barely afford a moto, there is, most certainly, a ‘cancer on the presidency’, to use an old Watergate quote. (Okay, okay – Cambodia doesn’t have a president, only a prime minister, but ‘cancer on the prime ministership’ doesn’t sound boss…)
Sometimes I’m left reeling here. Not only by what I know about Cambodia, firsthand, but what I read about the rest of Asia, secondhand. The latest issue of THE ECONOMIST features a headline that reads: “How To Save Myanmar”, another corrupt military regime that does jackshit for its people and has no intention of altering that present state of stasis. The newest news out of the Philippines details yet another corruption scandal involving their leader, Gloria Arroyo, and protesters yet again demanding a better, stronger, fairer government. A recent article I read regarding the situation in the Philippines made an interesting point: Fillipinos have to learn to trust their institutions, and not their leaders. By investing so much energy into a savior who will lead them to the economic promised land, they are inevitably setting themselves up for failure, because that’s what people do – fail. It’s only the system itself that can endure. (But at least they’re protesting, one could argue. I view, from a distance, the recent corruption scandals in Canada, and I realize: The reason why there aren’t mass protests is simply because, by and large, more often than not, people are doing all right. Even look at some of the recent news coming from Sony; they paid off radio stations and their employees, offering them cash and vacations, in order to play their artists. Nobody on the streets is rioting. Why? Because they are surviving. The politicians may or may not be corrupt, and the corporations may or may not be on the take, constantly, consistently, and the businessmen and governors and premiers may or may not be lying through their teeth, and hockey may have been missed for a year, but, in the end, life is good. Ah. Inertia. You wonder why most of the world seen on your nightly news seems so, well, chaotic? Why the people seem so angry? Because the leaders are corrupt and the system itself is fucked and it’s the people that pay. Almost everywhere. Throughout the world. I feel like I’ve seen it, lived it, felt it. That’s the only conclusion I can come to.)
It reminded me of what Al Pacino says in The Godfather III – as a young man, he thought that the higher up he climbed, the more moral and humane the system would become, only to discover otherwise. How much do we trust our institutions? How much do we trust the people running them? At a certain point, no matter how high you get, will it always come down to a man in a back room with faulty air conditioning saying: “Now is the time when you give me some money”?
I don’t know.
Growing up, I trusted the people at the front of the room. The ones wearing glasses, with the ties and the nifty pens. They seemed to know the deal.
The scary thing is, I’ve now become one of those dudes – wearing glasses, standing in front of a whiteboard, saying this and saying that and trying to look, if not credible, at least intelligible. (And sometimes even succeeding.) I had the good fortune of being an ‘individual consultant’ with a UN agency for an extended period of time, and I gradually realized that, despite an institution’s size or gravity, people are people are people are people. You can be flattered by the logo on the shirt, awed by the mural on the wall, but there are people inside, and they are often noble and scared, passionate and exhausted, and they are sometimes confused, and they are trying to do their best, the only way that they know how. (Kind of like the Duke boys in Hazzard county, though that’s just a little bit more than the law will allow…)
Sometimes that is a recipe for progress, development, innovation and growth; often, it is a recipe for incompetence, stall-tactics, justifications.
So, yes. I think that’s what happens. As complex and convoluted as the world and its many corridors are, there is a similar process that opens the lock each and every time. You are taken into a back room, and money exchanges hands. Perhaps not literally, no, because we in the west are more subtle than that, more careful than that. But at a certain point, somebody in power has something that you want, and you have to do what you have to do to get it. That could mean cash, or cheque, or a slow and steady compromise of your principals – the tie you don’t want to wear at work, or the little white lie you have to tell your client every now and then. It may be more gritty and blunt over here in Cambodia, and you may feel the sweat of the palm you’re greasing a little more easily, but that’s just a matter of degrees. Plain and simple, isn’t it?
But sometimes I just wish it wasn’t so complicated.
Those words, spoken to me by a Cambodian policeman who was helping me deal with replacing my lost passport, seem to symbolize something about my Southeast Asian experience up until now. I wouldn’t say that it’s representative of the people of Cambodia or the culture of Cambodia or anything beyond my own, individual encounters with those institutions that are -- on paper, anyways -- supposed to be bastions of diplomacy and fair-play.
Before living in Cambodia, I never gave much thought to government structures, both physical and symbolical. Roads were roads. Schools were schools. The idea that government itself had something to with these commonplace institutions was surely somewhere in the back of my mind, but I’m not exactly sure where; perhaps locked away in those portions of the brain that scientists claim we so rarely use.
Ah, but to lose a passport, and to lose it in a place like Cambodia, forces you into manuoevers and machinations that are not sufficiently dealt with in the Ontario school system. I was never taught about the protocol for bribing a police officer; I must have missed that particular Social Studies class.
Cambodians themselves didn’t miss that class, because they don’t NEED that class. They know that you can’t trust the police, and that the people in power are not there to serve the people. This is not necessarily a hypothesis; in desperately poor countries like Cambodia, it serves as a fact, and it is a fact that you learn quite young here.
Let’s start with the schools: woefully underfunded, criminally underdeveloped, with a pay for teachers that starts at a whopping twenty bucks a month. A few times I visited a few of the high schools here in Phnom Penh, along with the marketing head of our university and his assistant (the same chap, Veasna, who was killed by a drunk driver a month or so ago), hoping to drum up interest in our school. Let me tell you. Can I tell you? Let me tell you. It was like something out of a Van Damme movie set inside one of Thailand’s premier kickboxing arenas. I shit you not. Video games down in the dusty, darkened entrance, food being cooked, chickens running around, cramped classrooms with fifty students and a teacher standing on a box clutching a squawking microphone that whined in and out of sonic audibility. And this was one of the good schools. Gotta love that Ministry of Education. No money for books or renovations, no, but boy, their cars sure are spiffy.
When you have to bribe a teacher to go to school, something’s fucked up within the system. When the politicians drive Mercedes Benz around town while most people can barely afford a moto, there is, most certainly, a ‘cancer on the presidency’, to use an old Watergate quote. (Okay, okay – Cambodia doesn’t have a president, only a prime minister, but ‘cancer on the prime ministership’ doesn’t sound boss…)
Sometimes I’m left reeling here. Not only by what I know about Cambodia, firsthand, but what I read about the rest of Asia, secondhand. The latest issue of THE ECONOMIST features a headline that reads: “How To Save Myanmar”, another corrupt military regime that does jackshit for its people and has no intention of altering that present state of stasis. The newest news out of the Philippines details yet another corruption scandal involving their leader, Gloria Arroyo, and protesters yet again demanding a better, stronger, fairer government. A recent article I read regarding the situation in the Philippines made an interesting point: Fillipinos have to learn to trust their institutions, and not their leaders. By investing so much energy into a savior who will lead them to the economic promised land, they are inevitably setting themselves up for failure, because that’s what people do – fail. It’s only the system itself that can endure. (But at least they’re protesting, one could argue. I view, from a distance, the recent corruption scandals in Canada, and I realize: The reason why there aren’t mass protests is simply because, by and large, more often than not, people are doing all right. Even look at some of the recent news coming from Sony; they paid off radio stations and their employees, offering them cash and vacations, in order to play their artists. Nobody on the streets is rioting. Why? Because they are surviving. The politicians may or may not be corrupt, and the corporations may or may not be on the take, constantly, consistently, and the businessmen and governors and premiers may or may not be lying through their teeth, and hockey may have been missed for a year, but, in the end, life is good. Ah. Inertia. You wonder why most of the world seen on your nightly news seems so, well, chaotic? Why the people seem so angry? Because the leaders are corrupt and the system itself is fucked and it’s the people that pay. Almost everywhere. Throughout the world. I feel like I’ve seen it, lived it, felt it. That’s the only conclusion I can come to.)
It reminded me of what Al Pacino says in The Godfather III – as a young man, he thought that the higher up he climbed, the more moral and humane the system would become, only to discover otherwise. How much do we trust our institutions? How much do we trust the people running them? At a certain point, no matter how high you get, will it always come down to a man in a back room with faulty air conditioning saying: “Now is the time when you give me some money”?
I don’t know.
Growing up, I trusted the people at the front of the room. The ones wearing glasses, with the ties and the nifty pens. They seemed to know the deal.
The scary thing is, I’ve now become one of those dudes – wearing glasses, standing in front of a whiteboard, saying this and saying that and trying to look, if not credible, at least intelligible. (And sometimes even succeeding.) I had the good fortune of being an ‘individual consultant’ with a UN agency for an extended period of time, and I gradually realized that, despite an institution’s size or gravity, people are people are people are people. You can be flattered by the logo on the shirt, awed by the mural on the wall, but there are people inside, and they are often noble and scared, passionate and exhausted, and they are sometimes confused, and they are trying to do their best, the only way that they know how. (Kind of like the Duke boys in Hazzard county, though that’s just a little bit more than the law will allow…)
Sometimes that is a recipe for progress, development, innovation and growth; often, it is a recipe for incompetence, stall-tactics, justifications.
So, yes. I think that’s what happens. As complex and convoluted as the world and its many corridors are, there is a similar process that opens the lock each and every time. You are taken into a back room, and money exchanges hands. Perhaps not literally, no, because we in the west are more subtle than that, more careful than that. But at a certain point, somebody in power has something that you want, and you have to do what you have to do to get it. That could mean cash, or cheque, or a slow and steady compromise of your principals – the tie you don’t want to wear at work, or the little white lie you have to tell your client every now and then. It may be more gritty and blunt over here in Cambodia, and you may feel the sweat of the palm you’re greasing a little more easily, but that’s just a matter of degrees. Plain and simple, isn’t it?
But sometimes I just wish it wasn’t so complicated.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
LANCE ARMSTRONG: GENIUS
Back when Lance Armstrong was just beginning to earn a name for himself as an astonishingly talented triathlete, before he switched to cycling full-time, during those hot and humid summers of the mid-eighties, I was already hooked on the Tour de France. My brother had recently taken up cycling, while I had taken up, um, the latest issues of G.I.JOE and THE UNCANNY X-MEN, but I did like Saturday morning television, and so it was that cartoons were temporarily pushed aside and we found ourselves glued to the set each and every weekend, mesmerized by the coverage of CBS Sports, energized by John Tesh’s electrifying score.
(Hey, I’m serious here! Before John Tesh became an Entertainment Tonight anchor, before John Tesh blessed the world with his musical compositions, he covered the Tour as an on-site reporter, and, in an odd convergence, he also composed the music for the TV coverage. Over-the-top it was, both his reporting and his music, but hey – at nine, ten years old, over-the-top is what you want. And when the aforementioned music was combined with commentator Phil Ligget’s breathless, dramatic delivery, forget about it.)
I didn’t cycle (still don’t), so it wasn’t the cycling per se that held my interest. (Full disclosure: I have no idea what the hell ‘per se’ really means, or where it comes from, but I use it anyways.) No, it was the scale of the event itself, the personas involved, the sheer heart and ambition and sweat that somehow seemed to make the TV itself sweat.
The enormity of the Tour is what continues to fascinate; over three weeks long, through hills and mountains, watched by spectators so close to the action that they sometimes alter the action, a marathon of cycling each day, ever day, with the fastest cumulative time winning.
Novelist Norman Mailer, once touting the superiority of the novelist over the practitioner of the short story writer, commented that a good short story writer only has to be good for one, two weeks, tops. A good novelist, on the other hand, has to be good day after day for months and months and years and years, never truly knowing whether the work itself will eventually collapse.
Same with the Tour, oddly enough. It’s not enough to be fast and strong for one hour, one day. You have to plot and plan and endure and react and triumph day after day, week after week. To win even one stage of the Tour de France is the dream of many a cyclist; to actually win the Tour itself, well, that’s entering into fantasy-land. To win it seven times, in a row, is well, plain ridiculous. Unless you’re Lance Armstrong.
But before Lance, there was Greg Lemond, America’s great cycling champion, and it was his battles with fellow teammate Bernard Hinault that made for riveting, heartwrenching drama. It was their battles that gave me respect for the Tour and awe for the Tour. Friendship and betrayal, lies and deceptions – the two of them battled each other for love and respect and victory. (Just go to www.wikipedia.org, type in their names, and you can read about their legendary battles.)
Lemond won the Tour three times – and, like Armstrong, he had his share of personal setbacks, to say the least. Like, getting accidentally shot by his brother-in-law while going out hunting, almost killing him and forcing him to miss the Tour (quite obviously). He came back and won the Tour two more times. At the time, America was more than a little indifferent to cycling, and I still think it is; what America likes is Lance.
In recent years, Lemond has been quite vocal in his suspicions of Armstrong’s alleged use of illegal performance enhancing drugs. I’m not naïve; I believe that a huge number of athletes in cycling and track and field, in particular, are on the juice. (Marion Jones, please step forward.) With Armstrong, however, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; I think, perhaps idealistically, that Armstrong is one of those humans genetically gifted from birth (with an abnormally large heart), and that, coupled with his ferocious drive and determination, he has been able to do the impossible, consistently. I also think of long-jumper and sprinter Carl Lewis as one of those chosen few who were blessed with physical gifts and then trained their asses off like no one else before them to actualize those gifts.)
What separates Armstrong from Lemond, however, aside from Lance's seven Tour wins to Lemond's four, is cancer. Getting accidentally shot while hunting is not something that most people can relate to, or worry about. (I can, however, being the son and brother of avid hunters, but that’s another post.) Cancer, though. Even the word is daunting. Everybody knows somebody who has cancer or has had cancer. Everybody worries that it’s a possibility for them, too.
Armstrong was given less than a fifty percent chance to live due to testicular cancer that later spread to his brain, a prognosis that even his doctors admitted was inflated so as to not make him overly depressed. Losing a year in cycling is not like losing a year in any other sport, according to Greg Lemond; the margin of error is so small, the competition is so great, that being thrown off your game, being robbed of your training for so long is tantamount to involuntary retirement. To beat cancer (if one can beat such a thing), to return to cycling, to win the Tour once – that, in and of itself, would have been something close to a miracle. To do it seven times, is, well...
Lance Armstrong.
David Foster Wallace, the insanely talented author of Infinite Jest, was once a pretty good junior tennis player, and he once wrote an article for Esquire profiling the tennis player ranked 100th in the world, whose name escapes me. Which was the point of the article, though; we think somebody ranked 100th in the world as being not that special, but as Wallace points out, somebody ranked 100th is amazing beyond any normal person’s rational ability to perceive. Think about being the 100th best person in the world at anything, Wallace posits; these people, these athletes, are operating at levels mere mortals cannot comprehend.
So when we try to appreciate what Lance Armstrong has done, we can’t. We literally cannot. Somebody once said: “Talent is doing what ordinary people find difficult; genius is doing what talented people find impossible.”
That’s the only way I can approach somebody like Armstrong. His cancer made him vulnerable, approachable, human – but the Tour has made him a genius in the realm of athletics and the realm of life, and, if not immortal figure, if not a mythic here, he’s as close, in this modern, cynical era, as we are going to get to one.
(Hey, I’m serious here! Before John Tesh became an Entertainment Tonight anchor, before John Tesh blessed the world with his musical compositions, he covered the Tour as an on-site reporter, and, in an odd convergence, he also composed the music for the TV coverage. Over-the-top it was, both his reporting and his music, but hey – at nine, ten years old, over-the-top is what you want. And when the aforementioned music was combined with commentator Phil Ligget’s breathless, dramatic delivery, forget about it.)
I didn’t cycle (still don’t), so it wasn’t the cycling per se that held my interest. (Full disclosure: I have no idea what the hell ‘per se’ really means, or where it comes from, but I use it anyways.) No, it was the scale of the event itself, the personas involved, the sheer heart and ambition and sweat that somehow seemed to make the TV itself sweat.
The enormity of the Tour is what continues to fascinate; over three weeks long, through hills and mountains, watched by spectators so close to the action that they sometimes alter the action, a marathon of cycling each day, ever day, with the fastest cumulative time winning.
Novelist Norman Mailer, once touting the superiority of the novelist over the practitioner of the short story writer, commented that a good short story writer only has to be good for one, two weeks, tops. A good novelist, on the other hand, has to be good day after day for months and months and years and years, never truly knowing whether the work itself will eventually collapse.
Same with the Tour, oddly enough. It’s not enough to be fast and strong for one hour, one day. You have to plot and plan and endure and react and triumph day after day, week after week. To win even one stage of the Tour de France is the dream of many a cyclist; to actually win the Tour itself, well, that’s entering into fantasy-land. To win it seven times, in a row, is well, plain ridiculous. Unless you’re Lance Armstrong.
But before Lance, there was Greg Lemond, America’s great cycling champion, and it was his battles with fellow teammate Bernard Hinault that made for riveting, heartwrenching drama. It was their battles that gave me respect for the Tour and awe for the Tour. Friendship and betrayal, lies and deceptions – the two of them battled each other for love and respect and victory. (Just go to www.wikipedia.org, type in their names, and you can read about their legendary battles.)
Lemond won the Tour three times – and, like Armstrong, he had his share of personal setbacks, to say the least. Like, getting accidentally shot by his brother-in-law while going out hunting, almost killing him and forcing him to miss the Tour (quite obviously). He came back and won the Tour two more times. At the time, America was more than a little indifferent to cycling, and I still think it is; what America likes is Lance.
In recent years, Lemond has been quite vocal in his suspicions of Armstrong’s alleged use of illegal performance enhancing drugs. I’m not naïve; I believe that a huge number of athletes in cycling and track and field, in particular, are on the juice. (Marion Jones, please step forward.) With Armstrong, however, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; I think, perhaps idealistically, that Armstrong is one of those humans genetically gifted from birth (with an abnormally large heart), and that, coupled with his ferocious drive and determination, he has been able to do the impossible, consistently. I also think of long-jumper and sprinter Carl Lewis as one of those chosen few who were blessed with physical gifts and then trained their asses off like no one else before them to actualize those gifts.)
What separates Armstrong from Lemond, however, aside from Lance's seven Tour wins to Lemond's four, is cancer. Getting accidentally shot while hunting is not something that most people can relate to, or worry about. (I can, however, being the son and brother of avid hunters, but that’s another post.) Cancer, though. Even the word is daunting. Everybody knows somebody who has cancer or has had cancer. Everybody worries that it’s a possibility for them, too.
Armstrong was given less than a fifty percent chance to live due to testicular cancer that later spread to his brain, a prognosis that even his doctors admitted was inflated so as to not make him overly depressed. Losing a year in cycling is not like losing a year in any other sport, according to Greg Lemond; the margin of error is so small, the competition is so great, that being thrown off your game, being robbed of your training for so long is tantamount to involuntary retirement. To beat cancer (if one can beat such a thing), to return to cycling, to win the Tour once – that, in and of itself, would have been something close to a miracle. To do it seven times, is, well...
Lance Armstrong.
David Foster Wallace, the insanely talented author of Infinite Jest, was once a pretty good junior tennis player, and he once wrote an article for Esquire profiling the tennis player ranked 100th in the world, whose name escapes me. Which was the point of the article, though; we think somebody ranked 100th in the world as being not that special, but as Wallace points out, somebody ranked 100th is amazing beyond any normal person’s rational ability to perceive. Think about being the 100th best person in the world at anything, Wallace posits; these people, these athletes, are operating at levels mere mortals cannot comprehend.
So when we try to appreciate what Lance Armstrong has done, we can’t. We literally cannot. Somebody once said: “Talent is doing what ordinary people find difficult; genius is doing what talented people find impossible.”
That’s the only way I can approach somebody like Armstrong. His cancer made him vulnerable, approachable, human – but the Tour has made him a genius in the realm of athletics and the realm of life, and, if not immortal figure, if not a mythic here, he’s as close, in this modern, cynical era, as we are going to get to one.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
EVERYPLACE IS SOMEPLACE
One of the intriguing aspects of living in a foreign country (or even your own country) for an extended period of time occurs when you begin to learn about its culture, language, people and customs, becoming, if not an expert, at least a competent amateur. The other development, running simultanously alongside the first, is the slowly dawning realization that nobody else gives a shit.
Well, that's not true -- at least not totally.
Take Cambodia. People currently living in Cambodia, people who have lived in Cambodia, people interested in Southeast Asian cultures and economies -- they might, in fact, be interested in Cambodia. They may sincerely want to hear about its people and its plans. Just today, in fact, I received an email from an old student of mine in Japan, who is intensely interested in world politics; his field of interest largely centred around all those '---stan' countries in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, et al. (And, oddly enough, it was his interest in those countries that prompted me to pick up a copy of a book called Jihad the other day, which traces the rise of radical Islam in those countries.) He wrote me an email asking for my opinions about various military and political theories, and whether or not they applied to Cambodia.
But the reality is, a lot of countries are off the map. The news doesn't talk about them. The media could care less. The only time Cambodia was in the major mainstream press recently was a month or so ago when a Canadian kid was killed in hostage situation up in Siem Reap.
Hell, let's forget about Cambodia for a minute -- what about Canada? The recent passing of gay-marriage legislation has put Canada on CNN's homepage quite a little bit, but other than that -- nada. Diddly. Squat.
Which is fine. More than fine, actually, because I've realized that if a country is not mentioned very much in the news, it usually means that's doing pretty okey-dokey all by itself. Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada -- not much fireworks going on there.
And yet, the opposite is true, too. Some countries just are not very politically relevant to the major powers-that-be, and Cambodia is one of them. I had an interview with the UN Office On Drugs and Crime a few weeks back, and the dude there told me that the entire office itself might be shut down. Why? Well, because the U.S. is a big backer of the office, and Cambodia's drug problem, as immense as it is, as tragic as it is, just doesn't affect the U.S. all that much. As Deep Throat said all those years ago (in the movie version of the Watergate affair, anyway): "Follow the money." Truer words were never spoken, me thinks.
But in the end, conversely, it's not about the money. The world and the media may not be interested in your neck of the woods, but it's your neck, and your woods. Where you are is where it's at. Nobody else in the world may be interested in the fact that you're in Phnom Penh, Cambodia or Boise, Idaho or the eastern edge of Siberia -- but you may be surprised. After all, everyplace is someplace, and perhaps the greatest legacy of bloggers and blogging itself will be that it allowed average citizens to chronicle their specific place and point in time -- and allowed others, if interested, if intrigued, to become part of that world (which is really, the more you think of it, our world too).
Well, that's not true -- at least not totally.
Take Cambodia. People currently living in Cambodia, people who have lived in Cambodia, people interested in Southeast Asian cultures and economies -- they might, in fact, be interested in Cambodia. They may sincerely want to hear about its people and its plans. Just today, in fact, I received an email from an old student of mine in Japan, who is intensely interested in world politics; his field of interest largely centred around all those '---stan' countries in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, et al. (And, oddly enough, it was his interest in those countries that prompted me to pick up a copy of a book called Jihad the other day, which traces the rise of radical Islam in those countries.) He wrote me an email asking for my opinions about various military and political theories, and whether or not they applied to Cambodia.
But the reality is, a lot of countries are off the map. The news doesn't talk about them. The media could care less. The only time Cambodia was in the major mainstream press recently was a month or so ago when a Canadian kid was killed in hostage situation up in Siem Reap.
Hell, let's forget about Cambodia for a minute -- what about Canada? The recent passing of gay-marriage legislation has put Canada on CNN's homepage quite a little bit, but other than that -- nada. Diddly. Squat.
Which is fine. More than fine, actually, because I've realized that if a country is not mentioned very much in the news, it usually means that's doing pretty okey-dokey all by itself. Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada -- not much fireworks going on there.
And yet, the opposite is true, too. Some countries just are not very politically relevant to the major powers-that-be, and Cambodia is one of them. I had an interview with the UN Office On Drugs and Crime a few weeks back, and the dude there told me that the entire office itself might be shut down. Why? Well, because the U.S. is a big backer of the office, and Cambodia's drug problem, as immense as it is, as tragic as it is, just doesn't affect the U.S. all that much. As Deep Throat said all those years ago (in the movie version of the Watergate affair, anyway): "Follow the money." Truer words were never spoken, me thinks.
But in the end, conversely, it's not about the money. The world and the media may not be interested in your neck of the woods, but it's your neck, and your woods. Where you are is where it's at. Nobody else in the world may be interested in the fact that you're in Phnom Penh, Cambodia or Boise, Idaho or the eastern edge of Siberia -- but you may be surprised. After all, everyplace is someplace, and perhaps the greatest legacy of bloggers and blogging itself will be that it allowed average citizens to chronicle their specific place and point in time -- and allowed others, if interested, if intrigued, to become part of that world (which is really, the more you think of it, our world too).
HE'S MONEY, BABY...
Is Vince Vaughan the new Bill Murray?
I wouldn't go that far, but he's close. In his own way.
I haven't seen Vaughan's new flick The Wedding Crashers (though I have no doubt that it will be available on bootleg DVD any day now in Cambodia), but his work in Swingers and Dodgeball and Starsky and Hutch is proof of a comedic mind that, if not equals Murray's own, at least competes in the same softball league.
Both share a certain laconic, dry humor that lends their everyday-guy persona a certain levity. But that levity is tempered by sarcasm, and cynicism, and weariness. The wisecracking Bill Murray of Stripes (which is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form) has evolved into the slightly bitter, always cranky Murray of Rushmore and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. (Understand that I'm talking about Murray's screen persona, here; in real life, for all I know, he could be as upbeat as Anthony Robbins.)
And yet, Vaughan, I think, has a darker edge. It's what motivated Gus Vant to cast him as Norman Bates in his remake of Psycho. (A film that was universally trashed by critics and audiences alike, but one that is far more interesting and adventurous than it's given credit for, simply in its' exploration of what cinema can and cannot do -- more in a future post...) It's what led to his playing a more than credible 'villian' opposite John Travolta in the otherwise frankly forgettable thriller Domestic Disturbance. There's a creepy little comedy from a few years back called Clay Pigeons in which Vaughan plays a creepy little killer, and there's a gleam in his eyes that is more than a little chilling. (Call Murray many things, but chilling isn't one of them.) In that sense, something about Vaughan reminds me of Michael Keaton, another actor with a slightly skewed comedic sense who went on to play convincing psychos. Something about their eyebrows and their eyes. Comedy is always balanced between levity and cruelty, and both Keaton and Vaughan somehow can twist the knife in either direction.
Something about his voice, too. I read an interview with him a few days back, and the interviewer mentioned how his voice is distinct, even unusual, which pleased Vaughan to no end, prompting him to relate how he did, in fact, have voice training for a few years. I think voice is underestimated in cinema, and Vaughan's voice -- gravelly, laconic, slightly uneven, deep but not deep -- has that unidentifiable something that great actors learn to wield. (Think of Jack Nicholson's voice. Or Denzel Washington's. Or Al Pacino, who did a marvellous thing -- as a young man, the strength of his voice was in its softness; as an older man, his voice, aged by alcohol and cigarettes, I'm sure, took on a graspy, gravelly edge, and Pacino, being the actor that he is, changed his performance style accordingly. Genius.)
I hope Vaughan doesn't get stuck in a comedic rut for the next few years. Don't get me wrong -- I think his turn in Dodgeball, not to mention Swingers ("You are so money") is classic, Murray-level comedy. But as he gets older, those 'goofy' parts will fade away, and I'm kind of hoping that that other Vaughan, the Vaughan from Psycho, the one with the edge, will show his face one or two more times.
I wouldn't go that far, but he's close. In his own way.
I haven't seen Vaughan's new flick The Wedding Crashers (though I have no doubt that it will be available on bootleg DVD any day now in Cambodia), but his work in Swingers and Dodgeball and Starsky and Hutch is proof of a comedic mind that, if not equals Murray's own, at least competes in the same softball league.
Both share a certain laconic, dry humor that lends their everyday-guy persona a certain levity. But that levity is tempered by sarcasm, and cynicism, and weariness. The wisecracking Bill Murray of Stripes (which is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form) has evolved into the slightly bitter, always cranky Murray of Rushmore and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. (Understand that I'm talking about Murray's screen persona, here; in real life, for all I know, he could be as upbeat as Anthony Robbins.)
And yet, Vaughan, I think, has a darker edge. It's what motivated Gus Vant to cast him as Norman Bates in his remake of Psycho. (A film that was universally trashed by critics and audiences alike, but one that is far more interesting and adventurous than it's given credit for, simply in its' exploration of what cinema can and cannot do -- more in a future post...) It's what led to his playing a more than credible 'villian' opposite John Travolta in the otherwise frankly forgettable thriller Domestic Disturbance. There's a creepy little comedy from a few years back called Clay Pigeons in which Vaughan plays a creepy little killer, and there's a gleam in his eyes that is more than a little chilling. (Call Murray many things, but chilling isn't one of them.) In that sense, something about Vaughan reminds me of Michael Keaton, another actor with a slightly skewed comedic sense who went on to play convincing psychos. Something about their eyebrows and their eyes. Comedy is always balanced between levity and cruelty, and both Keaton and Vaughan somehow can twist the knife in either direction.
Something about his voice, too. I read an interview with him a few days back, and the interviewer mentioned how his voice is distinct, even unusual, which pleased Vaughan to no end, prompting him to relate how he did, in fact, have voice training for a few years. I think voice is underestimated in cinema, and Vaughan's voice -- gravelly, laconic, slightly uneven, deep but not deep -- has that unidentifiable something that great actors learn to wield. (Think of Jack Nicholson's voice. Or Denzel Washington's. Or Al Pacino, who did a marvellous thing -- as a young man, the strength of his voice was in its softness; as an older man, his voice, aged by alcohol and cigarettes, I'm sure, took on a graspy, gravelly edge, and Pacino, being the actor that he is, changed his performance style accordingly. Genius.)
I hope Vaughan doesn't get stuck in a comedic rut for the next few years. Don't get me wrong -- I think his turn in Dodgeball, not to mention Swingers ("You are so money") is classic, Murray-level comedy. But as he gets older, those 'goofy' parts will fade away, and I'm kind of hoping that that other Vaughan, the Vaughan from Psycho, the one with the edge, will show his face one or two more times.
Saturday, July 23, 2005
OTHER POOLS, OTHER ERAS
Last night, swimming. Hotel. Under a Cambodian moon. So long, since I swam last. Over two years ago, in Japan, in a health club. Watching row after row of elderly Japanese ladies walk through the water, knees rising, smiles fixed in place. And me, sometimes joining the line. There is something oddly strange and comforting and familiar about walking through water. You are in motion, but barely. You are moving, but with difficulty. There is no pain, only resistance.
That moon. A remark I've remarked upon before, but it comes back to me. A Cambodian moon, yes, but also a Thai moon, a Fijian moon, a Khazakstan moon, a Canadian moon.
You can explain the physics of it, the science of it, the logic of it. I may even understand you, or at least pretend to. (I'm good at pretending to understand.) I know that when you are in a car, and the car is moving, and you look out the window, and you see the moon following you, possibly even stalking you, that that is not for real. I understand that. But as a child, in the backseat, I would close my eyes, wait a few moments, open them, and see if the moon was still there, gliding at the same speed of the car. And it always was.
But how can that be? I look up at the moon in the clear dark sky from the vantage point of a swimming pool in Cambodia. White mist shrouds that moon; the glow from the hotel's lights somehow adds its own, incadescent aura. And yet I know, I'm positive, that people in Thailand, in the same time zone, are staring at that same moon, just above their head. And back in Canada, where it's almost morning, the moon is a clear, gray orb, visible in the morning sky, a backdrop to a Canadian flag flutterling slightly in the summer breeze.
How is that possible?
I watched that moon for awhile. Swam for awhile. Swimming always makes me feel fluid, attached to alternate pools I've inhabited, in other countries. Other eras. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. North Bay, Ontario. Different versions of myself, younger, more agile. I remember one chilly March night in Myrtle Beach running with a bunch of others from the hotel pool and onto the beach and into the ocean, into the frigid water, and then racing back up the sand, up the steps, into the hot tubs, alive and well and laughing. A few days before we had been frozen in Canada, and now were swimming, at night, under the stars. Under that American moon. Remembering that I'd remember that moment. And I have.
That moon. A remark I've remarked upon before, but it comes back to me. A Cambodian moon, yes, but also a Thai moon, a Fijian moon, a Khazakstan moon, a Canadian moon.
You can explain the physics of it, the science of it, the logic of it. I may even understand you, or at least pretend to. (I'm good at pretending to understand.) I know that when you are in a car, and the car is moving, and you look out the window, and you see the moon following you, possibly even stalking you, that that is not for real. I understand that. But as a child, in the backseat, I would close my eyes, wait a few moments, open them, and see if the moon was still there, gliding at the same speed of the car. And it always was.
But how can that be? I look up at the moon in the clear dark sky from the vantage point of a swimming pool in Cambodia. White mist shrouds that moon; the glow from the hotel's lights somehow adds its own, incadescent aura. And yet I know, I'm positive, that people in Thailand, in the same time zone, are staring at that same moon, just above their head. And back in Canada, where it's almost morning, the moon is a clear, gray orb, visible in the morning sky, a backdrop to a Canadian flag flutterling slightly in the summer breeze.
How is that possible?
I watched that moon for awhile. Swam for awhile. Swimming always makes me feel fluid, attached to alternate pools I've inhabited, in other countries. Other eras. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. North Bay, Ontario. Different versions of myself, younger, more agile. I remember one chilly March night in Myrtle Beach running with a bunch of others from the hotel pool and onto the beach and into the ocean, into the frigid water, and then racing back up the sand, up the steps, into the hot tubs, alive and well and laughing. A few days before we had been frozen in Canada, and now were swimming, at night, under the stars. Under that American moon. Remembering that I'd remember that moment. And I have.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
GIVEN THE CHANCE
If you kill one life, you kill the whole of humanity.
That's what somebody said on CNN the other day, quoting the Koran, I believe, explaining that every true, bona fide Muslim knows this. Me, not being a true, bona fide Muslim, was not aware of that quote -- but it's one that I like, and it's one that I've heard before, in various variations and echoes.
Dr.Beat Richner, otherwise known as 'Beatocello', is a Swiss doctor who founded and runs a hospital in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (See www.beatocello.com for more details.) Every Friday and Saturday night, all year long, he plays the cello for groups of tourists, hoping for their attention and their cash. The attention for his performance, and their cash for his hospital. When I watched him play last fall, he answered his critics who wondered what the point of the whole enterprise was, given the enormity of people suffering in Cambodia, given the fact that he couldn't possibly save everyone.
"We only get one life," he said. "So to the person whose life you are saving, you are saving life itself." (Or words to that effect.)
Something about the brevity and simiplicity of that statement stuck with me. I see it and feel it everywhere, in places I would not expect. A child shitting in the streets. An old woman begging for change. A bored cop, asking for money. These are all individual lives that, cumulatively, form a society, a world, a universe. If one of them dies, the world does not die. But when one of them dies, a portion of life, a fragment of life, is extinguished.
It's like that other Buddhist quote I like: "Your life is not your own -- it can be taken from you at any time." The drunk driver you don't see. The pop can you trip over. The shot to the stomach from a robber's pistol. We can only control so much. We can safeguard so little. In the end, the life that we wield for ourselves can very easily be stolen and shattered by a stranger.
I used to think of death as an actual, tangible force. Part of the reason why I was so fascinated by the movie Flatliners as a kid was because the characters were able to taste death, taunt death, enter into its realm. What is death like? I wondered. What is death's structure and density? I didn't see death as heaven or hell, but as a place all unto itself -- something akin to purgatory, I suppose.
Now, I think differently. I see death as the absence of life. Plain and simple.
But --
Is life the absence of death?
That's debatable, I suppose. Two sides of the same coin. We cannot have a concept of life unless we have a concept of death, and vice versa. But I believe that we get so caught up in life that we sometimes take it for granted. We fetishize it, even. We buy this and that, go here and there, diss him and praise her. It's what we do.
But every Friday and Saturday night, a portly, saintly man stands on stage and plays his cello and asks for money, because at his hospital, every day, death is postponed, and death is embraced, and life, for what it's worth, is not taken for granted. Lives are elongated, and lives are let go. Life is played out in extreme measures all day long.
A child opens her eyes. The pain is gone! A child closes her eyes. The pain is gone. To the child whose eyes open, life itself continues. To the child whose eyes close, life itself, in this realm, fades away.
You save one person, you save the world entire. Somebody else said that, too. (Mandela, maybe? Kofi Annan? Gotta be Shore, I think. Gotta be Pauly.) You kill a single person, the world dies. You save a single person, the world is rescued. Captain Kirk and his crew knew that, right? He sacrificed his whole career, his whole life, for the mere possibility that Spock could come back from the dead. (See Stark Trek III: The Search For Spock for more details.)
As a kid, that blew me away, that selflessness. At the same time, it struck me as perfectly natural. Spock was his friend; Spock was in trouble. Ipso facto, you do what you have to do.
All we have in this life is life itself, and that translates to people. Life. Is. People. The person sitting next to us on the bus, and the teacher at the front of the room, and the boss who scratches his balls when he thinks noone's looking. That's it. We are life personified and they are life, too, in the flesh, every last one of them, like it or not. Not participants in life, and not players in life, but life. Period.
You don't have to stand on a stage and play the cello for them, or children you don't know, or refuguees you'll never meet. You don't even have to like them. (In fact, if you did like your boss who scratches his balls, I'd be worried about you. Especially if your boss is a woman.) But, if ever given the chance, you have to keep them here, these people, or at least try to. We endure to help others endure. I think we're all here to keep us all here.
That's what somebody said on CNN the other day, quoting the Koran, I believe, explaining that every true, bona fide Muslim knows this. Me, not being a true, bona fide Muslim, was not aware of that quote -- but it's one that I like, and it's one that I've heard before, in various variations and echoes.
Dr.Beat Richner, otherwise known as 'Beatocello', is a Swiss doctor who founded and runs a hospital in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (See www.beatocello.com for more details.) Every Friday and Saturday night, all year long, he plays the cello for groups of tourists, hoping for their attention and their cash. The attention for his performance, and their cash for his hospital. When I watched him play last fall, he answered his critics who wondered what the point of the whole enterprise was, given the enormity of people suffering in Cambodia, given the fact that he couldn't possibly save everyone.
"We only get one life," he said. "So to the person whose life you are saving, you are saving life itself." (Or words to that effect.)
Something about the brevity and simiplicity of that statement stuck with me. I see it and feel it everywhere, in places I would not expect. A child shitting in the streets. An old woman begging for change. A bored cop, asking for money. These are all individual lives that, cumulatively, form a society, a world, a universe. If one of them dies, the world does not die. But when one of them dies, a portion of life, a fragment of life, is extinguished.
It's like that other Buddhist quote I like: "Your life is not your own -- it can be taken from you at any time." The drunk driver you don't see. The pop can you trip over. The shot to the stomach from a robber's pistol. We can only control so much. We can safeguard so little. In the end, the life that we wield for ourselves can very easily be stolen and shattered by a stranger.
I used to think of death as an actual, tangible force. Part of the reason why I was so fascinated by the movie Flatliners as a kid was because the characters were able to taste death, taunt death, enter into its realm. What is death like? I wondered. What is death's structure and density? I didn't see death as heaven or hell, but as a place all unto itself -- something akin to purgatory, I suppose.
Now, I think differently. I see death as the absence of life. Plain and simple.
But --
Is life the absence of death?
That's debatable, I suppose. Two sides of the same coin. We cannot have a concept of life unless we have a concept of death, and vice versa. But I believe that we get so caught up in life that we sometimes take it for granted. We fetishize it, even. We buy this and that, go here and there, diss him and praise her. It's what we do.
But every Friday and Saturday night, a portly, saintly man stands on stage and plays his cello and asks for money, because at his hospital, every day, death is postponed, and death is embraced, and life, for what it's worth, is not taken for granted. Lives are elongated, and lives are let go. Life is played out in extreme measures all day long.
A child opens her eyes. The pain is gone! A child closes her eyes. The pain is gone. To the child whose eyes open, life itself continues. To the child whose eyes close, life itself, in this realm, fades away.
You save one person, you save the world entire. Somebody else said that, too. (Mandela, maybe? Kofi Annan? Gotta be Shore, I think. Gotta be Pauly.) You kill a single person, the world dies. You save a single person, the world is rescued. Captain Kirk and his crew knew that, right? He sacrificed his whole career, his whole life, for the mere possibility that Spock could come back from the dead. (See Stark Trek III: The Search For Spock for more details.)
As a kid, that blew me away, that selflessness. At the same time, it struck me as perfectly natural. Spock was his friend; Spock was in trouble. Ipso facto, you do what you have to do.
All we have in this life is life itself, and that translates to people. Life. Is. People. The person sitting next to us on the bus, and the teacher at the front of the room, and the boss who scratches his balls when he thinks noone's looking. That's it. We are life personified and they are life, too, in the flesh, every last one of them, like it or not. Not participants in life, and not players in life, but life. Period.
You don't have to stand on a stage and play the cello for them, or children you don't know, or refuguees you'll never meet. You don't even have to like them. (In fact, if you did like your boss who scratches his balls, I'd be worried about you. Especially if your boss is a woman.) But, if ever given the chance, you have to keep them here, these people, or at least try to. We endure to help others endure. I think we're all here to keep us all here.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
THE DON KNOTTS/NORMAN FELL/LEE MAJORS APPROACH TO RELIGION, WHICH, WHILE NOT LIKELY, IS THE BEST I CAN DO AT AGE 29
Almost finished reading Freedom At Midnight, about the carving up of India that led to Great Britain's backing out of the country they had ruled for centuries, the creation of Pakistan to give India's millions of Muslims their own homeland, and how all of this somehow resulted in Gandhi's assassination. Vivid, fascinating stuff. New stuff. To me, anyways, whose knowledge of Indian and Pakistani history and politics and religion remains, shall we say, inadequate.
But boy, is it an interesting tale. Full of bloodshed and grace. Horror and humanity. And through it all the albatross and enlightenment of religion. Hindus slaughtering Muslims. Muslims killing Hindus. The Sikhs somewhere in between. And Kashmir, a mostly Muslim land declared Indian territory, at the heart of the dispute. (Or one of the hearts, anyways.)
So frustrating and confusing this notion of religion is. So unsolvable, this dilemma. Here we have the human desire to reach out, reach up; here we have Gods without number worshipped, deified. And, in the names of these Gods, so much blood has been shed, so much prejudice has been enacted, so many castes have been formed. And all of it based upon our own, individual and collective notions regarding the supernatural.
I don't know what to make of it. Religion. Spirituality. The whole deal. I often yearn for a more spiritual west that is free from restrictive dogma -- but is spirituality even possible without some form of dogma? Buddhism seems the most accessible, least painful alternative, but even Buddhism has its problems, not the least of which is the notion of one paying in this life for the sins of one's past life. (Leading to a disregard for the poor and the wretched in places like Cambodia.)
I look at the map of the world, and I see so much division, and so much of it on ancient, religious lines. A Pakistan put in place for the Muslims, Iraq torn apart by lunatic fundamentalists, and on, and on, and on. I think it's fundamental within us, this need for gods. I think, in large part, it serves and satisfies a purpose. But when you see the division with the United States, often over religious lines, and the bloodshed in Iraq, and the ongoing, unending disputes in the Middle East, it makes me wonder.
Wouldn't it be better, and easier, to say: Okay, we know (or believe) that there's a God, but we're not gonna name it, and we're not gonna it classify it ; the God is there, so, by all means, worship. Worship your brains out. But don't fight the guy next to you because he thinks God is black and you think he's white. Don't demean his book of belief because it isn't your book of belief. Don't fight over which land is holy and which isn't. Dirt is dirt. Sod is sod. We can live whereever, and find divinity whereever. Don't deny someone a job or deny someone a life because you were born into a family that believes X is the truth and the whole truth, and therefore their belief, Y, is misguided, archaic bullshit. We know this will be hard. We know that a lot of religion is culture, and culture is religion. We know that history and family have formed the way you view the divine. But when we cloister ourselves into our own little sects, we separate ourselves. And anytime we separate ourselves, we drift further and further apart. So, believe, by all means. Just, you know, say a little prayer, look up, and believe. In a general way. Don't get into specifics. It will be hard not to, maybe impossible not to, but try. Specifics only leads to division. It's like: We can agree that THREE'S COMPANY was a cool show without getting into who was the better landlord, Roper or Furley. They were both good. They both had their qualities, if you will. You may think THE FALL GUY was not Lee Majors' finest hour, being partial to THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, but we can both agree that Majors was 'cool' personified. Let's agree on what we can agree on, okay? If He/She/They are up there, then He/She/ They're sure as hell hearing our good wishes and prayers. And then when you do that, you can call it a day. Maybe even ask the dude next door if he needs any help with his lawn.
Naive, implausible, unworkable. I know all that. To each his own; I know that, too. It's just, reading that book, the one about India and Pakistan, and learning about how many thousands of people were killed in the name of religious riteousness, makes all the old questions new again. So much of the earth is guided by their relation to the One up above. I guess sometimes I just wish that so many of us would stop looking upward and keep our eyes more firmly fixed on the ground beneath our feet, where others, neighbours, stand alongside us.
But boy, is it an interesting tale. Full of bloodshed and grace. Horror and humanity. And through it all the albatross and enlightenment of religion. Hindus slaughtering Muslims. Muslims killing Hindus. The Sikhs somewhere in between. And Kashmir, a mostly Muslim land declared Indian territory, at the heart of the dispute. (Or one of the hearts, anyways.)
So frustrating and confusing this notion of religion is. So unsolvable, this dilemma. Here we have the human desire to reach out, reach up; here we have Gods without number worshipped, deified. And, in the names of these Gods, so much blood has been shed, so much prejudice has been enacted, so many castes have been formed. And all of it based upon our own, individual and collective notions regarding the supernatural.
I don't know what to make of it. Religion. Spirituality. The whole deal. I often yearn for a more spiritual west that is free from restrictive dogma -- but is spirituality even possible without some form of dogma? Buddhism seems the most accessible, least painful alternative, but even Buddhism has its problems, not the least of which is the notion of one paying in this life for the sins of one's past life. (Leading to a disregard for the poor and the wretched in places like Cambodia.)
I look at the map of the world, and I see so much division, and so much of it on ancient, religious lines. A Pakistan put in place for the Muslims, Iraq torn apart by lunatic fundamentalists, and on, and on, and on. I think it's fundamental within us, this need for gods. I think, in large part, it serves and satisfies a purpose. But when you see the division with the United States, often over religious lines, and the bloodshed in Iraq, and the ongoing, unending disputes in the Middle East, it makes me wonder.
Wouldn't it be better, and easier, to say: Okay, we know (or believe) that there's a God, but we're not gonna name it, and we're not gonna it classify it ; the God is there, so, by all means, worship. Worship your brains out. But don't fight the guy next to you because he thinks God is black and you think he's white. Don't demean his book of belief because it isn't your book of belief. Don't fight over which land is holy and which isn't. Dirt is dirt. Sod is sod. We can live whereever, and find divinity whereever. Don't deny someone a job or deny someone a life because you were born into a family that believes X is the truth and the whole truth, and therefore their belief, Y, is misguided, archaic bullshit. We know this will be hard. We know that a lot of religion is culture, and culture is religion. We know that history and family have formed the way you view the divine. But when we cloister ourselves into our own little sects, we separate ourselves. And anytime we separate ourselves, we drift further and further apart. So, believe, by all means. Just, you know, say a little prayer, look up, and believe. In a general way. Don't get into specifics. It will be hard not to, maybe impossible not to, but try. Specifics only leads to division. It's like: We can agree that THREE'S COMPANY was a cool show without getting into who was the better landlord, Roper or Furley. They were both good. They both had their qualities, if you will. You may think THE FALL GUY was not Lee Majors' finest hour, being partial to THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, but we can both agree that Majors was 'cool' personified. Let's agree on what we can agree on, okay? If He/She/They are up there, then He/She/ They're sure as hell hearing our good wishes and prayers. And then when you do that, you can call it a day. Maybe even ask the dude next door if he needs any help with his lawn.
Naive, implausible, unworkable. I know all that. To each his own; I know that, too. It's just, reading that book, the one about India and Pakistan, and learning about how many thousands of people were killed in the name of religious riteousness, makes all the old questions new again. So much of the earth is guided by their relation to the One up above. I guess sometimes I just wish that so many of us would stop looking upward and keep our eyes more firmly fixed on the ground beneath our feet, where others, neighbours, stand alongside us.
Monday, July 18, 2005
SARTRE, SANDLER, AND WHY KNOWING A LOT OF STUFF DOESN'T NECESSARILY MEAN SHIT
MAN: Boy, it looks like you guys make your own fun around here, eh?
ANOTHER MAN: Everybody makes their own fun. Otherwise it's called 'entertainment'.
(A more-or-less accurate quote from David Mamet's State and Main, which I've never seen, but I heard about the quote, and I like it...)
I remember a review Roger Ebert wrote a few years back, about a movie I'd never seen, whose title I can no longer recall. It starred Mike Nichols and Wallace Shawn; I do remember that. (I could google it, I'm sure, but my refusal to do so is my way of maintaining a little mystery in life, however small and transient it may prove to be.) The reason I can recollect it at all is because the central idea of the flick sounded intriguing: Can we be too educated?
Meaning, is it better to live a life full of references to Satre and Schopenhauer, existentialism and Jung, the Middle Ages and the modernism? (The sad thing is, in university I took a course titled 'Modernism and Anti-Modernism', and I can barely remember which is which; I DO remember my instructor patiently explaining to us all that 'anti-modernism' actually came BEfore modernism'. I remember nodding solemnly. I remember thinking: Thank God ross-country practice starts in one hour...)
In other words: Is it better to be a fisherman living in a small village in the north of Cambodia, raising a family, living life, marking the seasons and moving on? Or is one's life fuller, richer, more sentient by simply knowing more stuff.
I don't know.
It's personal, I suppose. I like knowing stuff. I like learning stuff. But I'm not sure that it really makes one intelligent, simply knowing stuff. Most young Cambodians know very, very little about the outside world, about the stars and the sun, about astronomy or cartography, geography or history; and yet I would say, in all sincerity, that I consider most Cambodians of university age to be fundamentally more intelligent than most Canadians of the same age. Their education has been abysmal. Their political system is a joke. Their prospects are few and far between. And yet, their English is often sensational, their observations apt, their questions incisive. Donald Rumsfeld once famously said something like: "There's what we know. There's what we know we don't know. And there's what we don't know what we don't know." A lot of Cambodians, most of Cambodians, don't know what they don't know, but they seem happy, or at least content. They live. They don't need Freud.
The thing is, learning can be contagious. It can be seductive. And yet, it can also be an intellectual dead-end, I think, when the whole goal of life becomes simply ingest, ingest, ingest. It's why, so far removed here from western culture, I look at it with more than a little degree of alarm: all anyone seems to do is complain about nothing is good any more, nothing is intelligent enough, nothing is entertaining enough, nothing is (insert complaint here) enough. It's always everybody else's fault, not on our own. Our own engagement in life too often seems to be predicated on what somebody else can do for us, rather than we can generate for ourselves. And that makes me sad.
I love the scene in Adam Sandler's Mr.Deeds where Sandler, playing a small-town hick who has inherited a bunch of cash, tells off a snobby rich dude in a fancy restaurant. He says something like: "You know, if I spent an hour with your friends, at the end of the hour they'd think I'm a pretty good guy, but if you spent an hour with my friends, at the end of the hour they'd be beating the shit out of you." Or something like that. Meaning, the snobbery would be too much to handle. And what is snobbery but: I know more than you, therefore I'm better than you.
I don't know. I'm not saying I want to take a bus up to Rattanakiri province in northern Cambodia and exist as a fisherman for the rest of my days. But there's something to be said for living life on its own terms, at its own pace, free from the pretense that seems to govern so much of our short little lives.
ANOTHER MAN: Everybody makes their own fun. Otherwise it's called 'entertainment'.
(A more-or-less accurate quote from David Mamet's State and Main, which I've never seen, but I heard about the quote, and I like it...)
I remember a review Roger Ebert wrote a few years back, about a movie I'd never seen, whose title I can no longer recall. It starred Mike Nichols and Wallace Shawn; I do remember that. (I could google it, I'm sure, but my refusal to do so is my way of maintaining a little mystery in life, however small and transient it may prove to be.) The reason I can recollect it at all is because the central idea of the flick sounded intriguing: Can we be too educated?
Meaning, is it better to live a life full of references to Satre and Schopenhauer, existentialism and Jung, the Middle Ages and the modernism? (The sad thing is, in university I took a course titled 'Modernism and Anti-Modernism', and I can barely remember which is which; I DO remember my instructor patiently explaining to us all that 'anti-modernism' actually came BEfore modernism'. I remember nodding solemnly. I remember thinking: Thank God ross-country practice starts in one hour...)
In other words: Is it better to be a fisherman living in a small village in the north of Cambodia, raising a family, living life, marking the seasons and moving on? Or is one's life fuller, richer, more sentient by simply knowing more stuff.
I don't know.
It's personal, I suppose. I like knowing stuff. I like learning stuff. But I'm not sure that it really makes one intelligent, simply knowing stuff. Most young Cambodians know very, very little about the outside world, about the stars and the sun, about astronomy or cartography, geography or history; and yet I would say, in all sincerity, that I consider most Cambodians of university age to be fundamentally more intelligent than most Canadians of the same age. Their education has been abysmal. Their political system is a joke. Their prospects are few and far between. And yet, their English is often sensational, their observations apt, their questions incisive. Donald Rumsfeld once famously said something like: "There's what we know. There's what we know we don't know. And there's what we don't know what we don't know." A lot of Cambodians, most of Cambodians, don't know what they don't know, but they seem happy, or at least content. They live. They don't need Freud.
The thing is, learning can be contagious. It can be seductive. And yet, it can also be an intellectual dead-end, I think, when the whole goal of life becomes simply ingest, ingest, ingest. It's why, so far removed here from western culture, I look at it with more than a little degree of alarm: all anyone seems to do is complain about nothing is good any more, nothing is intelligent enough, nothing is entertaining enough, nothing is (insert complaint here) enough. It's always everybody else's fault, not on our own. Our own engagement in life too often seems to be predicated on what somebody else can do for us, rather than we can generate for ourselves. And that makes me sad.
I love the scene in Adam Sandler's Mr.Deeds where Sandler, playing a small-town hick who has inherited a bunch of cash, tells off a snobby rich dude in a fancy restaurant. He says something like: "You know, if I spent an hour with your friends, at the end of the hour they'd think I'm a pretty good guy, but if you spent an hour with my friends, at the end of the hour they'd be beating the shit out of you." Or something like that. Meaning, the snobbery would be too much to handle. And what is snobbery but: I know more than you, therefore I'm better than you.
I don't know. I'm not saying I want to take a bus up to Rattanakiri province in northern Cambodia and exist as a fisherman for the rest of my days. But there's something to be said for living life on its own terms, at its own pace, free from the pretense that seems to govern so much of our short little lives.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
A CERTAIN SYNCHRONICITY: PAGING MS.OTSUKA
While browsing through the bookshelves at D's Books the other day I came across an old paperback copy of Chekhov's plays that bore the handwritten inscription on the title page: "Julie Otsuka -- New Haven -- 1980".
And, because I'm weird, and find myself with a little more time on my hands than usual, I decided to google that information.
To my surprise, I realized that the 'Julie Otsuka' who had neatly written her name on that page is the same 'Julie Otsuka' who is a Japanese=American novelist, and recently published a popular novel entitled When The Emperor Was Divine. From an interview, I learned that she waitressed in New Haven, Connecticut for a few years after graduation. So there you go.
( haven't read her novel, though I did see it a copy of it in another bookshop here a few weeks ago.)
I love weird little moments in time, moments in life like this. All those years ago, when I was, what, only five years old, she sat down in her bedroom or kitchen in New Haven, and opened that Chekhov book, and wrote her name on the front page. She didn't know she would, one day, be a successful novelist; she might have hoped that that would happen, sure, but she didn't know it.
And exactly how did that book end up in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, twenty-five years later? How many hands did it pass through? How many people turned its pages? (Judging by its' rather pristine condition, I would guess: not that many.)
I feel sorry for the book. I do. In that intervening space in time, its' one-time owner, Ms.Otsuka, has gone on to live a life, to write a novel, to do a book-tour. While the book itself, the Chekhov book, has been sitting on a shelf. Maybe for months. Possibly for years. Dusty. Surrounded by other lonely, unread tomes. Waiting.
I want to go back to the shop and buy that book. I would like to wait until Ms.Otsuka's next book tour, and go to one of her readings, one of her signings, and present that book to her, the book that she owned a quarter of a century ago, when the world was young. I think it would mean something to her. Because when you write your name on the title page of a book, you are not merely claiming a possession; if that were the case, we would label our TVs and couches and chesterfields in a similar manner. No. When you write your name in a book, along with the place, along with the date, you are saying: "This is who I am, at this point in time, in this place. This is what I was interested in. I was here and I mattered and I had this book in my hands."
To return it to her hands, all these years later, all this life later, would result in a certain synchronicity. It would prove that that which is lost can sometimes be found. It would show that sometimes life has a way of rebounding in on itself. It would prove that the young woman who read Chekhov and dreamed of being a writer had had her dreams fulfilled. It would do all and probably none of those things. But it would be cool.
Or I could let the book sit, on those shelves, in this city. Allow it to run its due course. Perhaps it was not meant to return to Ms.Otsuka's hands; perhaps it was meant for other hands, other inscriptions.
And who knows? If I choose not to intervene, it could, still, somehow, end up with Ms.Otsuka. Maybe not next year, or the year after, but in five, ten years time. As she browses through a bookshop in San Diego. Or scans the used-books at her local library.
For some reason, I so want to believe that the cycle of life has an innate, revolving sense of symmetry. That that book should, eventually, return to the lady who owned it so very long ago. That the marking of a book with your own name, using your own pen, gives you a kind of cosmic, eternal claim on it.
It could happen. It might happen. It should happen.
And, because I'm weird, and find myself with a little more time on my hands than usual, I decided to google that information.
To my surprise, I realized that the 'Julie Otsuka' who had neatly written her name on that page is the same 'Julie Otsuka' who is a Japanese=American novelist, and recently published a popular novel entitled When The Emperor Was Divine. From an interview, I learned that she waitressed in New Haven, Connecticut for a few years after graduation. So there you go.
( haven't read her novel, though I did see it a copy of it in another bookshop here a few weeks ago.)
I love weird little moments in time, moments in life like this. All those years ago, when I was, what, only five years old, she sat down in her bedroom or kitchen in New Haven, and opened that Chekhov book, and wrote her name on the front page. She didn't know she would, one day, be a successful novelist; she might have hoped that that would happen, sure, but she didn't know it.
And exactly how did that book end up in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, twenty-five years later? How many hands did it pass through? How many people turned its pages? (Judging by its' rather pristine condition, I would guess: not that many.)
I feel sorry for the book. I do. In that intervening space in time, its' one-time owner, Ms.Otsuka, has gone on to live a life, to write a novel, to do a book-tour. While the book itself, the Chekhov book, has been sitting on a shelf. Maybe for months. Possibly for years. Dusty. Surrounded by other lonely, unread tomes. Waiting.
I want to go back to the shop and buy that book. I would like to wait until Ms.Otsuka's next book tour, and go to one of her readings, one of her signings, and present that book to her, the book that she owned a quarter of a century ago, when the world was young. I think it would mean something to her. Because when you write your name on the title page of a book, you are not merely claiming a possession; if that were the case, we would label our TVs and couches and chesterfields in a similar manner. No. When you write your name in a book, along with the place, along with the date, you are saying: "This is who I am, at this point in time, in this place. This is what I was interested in. I was here and I mattered and I had this book in my hands."
To return it to her hands, all these years later, all this life later, would result in a certain synchronicity. It would prove that that which is lost can sometimes be found. It would show that sometimes life has a way of rebounding in on itself. It would prove that the young woman who read Chekhov and dreamed of being a writer had had her dreams fulfilled. It would do all and probably none of those things. But it would be cool.
Or I could let the book sit, on those shelves, in this city. Allow it to run its due course. Perhaps it was not meant to return to Ms.Otsuka's hands; perhaps it was meant for other hands, other inscriptions.
And who knows? If I choose not to intervene, it could, still, somehow, end up with Ms.Otsuka. Maybe not next year, or the year after, but in five, ten years time. As she browses through a bookshop in San Diego. Or scans the used-books at her local library.
For some reason, I so want to believe that the cycle of life has an innate, revolving sense of symmetry. That that book should, eventually, return to the lady who owned it so very long ago. That the marking of a book with your own name, using your own pen, gives you a kind of cosmic, eternal claim on it.
It could happen. It might happen. It should happen.
Friday, July 15, 2005
DOWN WITH KRINGLE
There is no such thing as a gullible cynic. This is what I've come to believe. It's one of those thoughts I have late at night or early in the morning, when the lightning is crackling and the rain is strong and daylight is far, far away. Sometimes words and phrases pop into my head and I tell myself that I have to remember them, write them down, make sense of them, but then I drift back to sleep. The sound of rain on a rooftop does that to you.
Whenever I start to feel that I'm getting a wee bit cynical, I remember my gullibility. Stephen King has a wonderful introduction to his 1992 story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes in which he recounts that, as a child, he tended to believe anything and everything that anyone and everyone told him. I'm the same way. (Just, you know, minus the marvellous storytelling ability and the millions upon millions of dollars in the bank. Other than that, we're identical.)
A few months ago I happened to be at a small dinner party thrown by the French manager of the Cambodiana hotel, one of the biggest, classiest hotels in Cambodia. (Granted, that doesn't take much, does it, this being Cambodia, but you get the picture.) We were in the living room of his apartment, which happened to be in the hotel itself, and what an apartment it was. Not large, no, but stylish, decorated, compact and comfortable. On the wall were various paintings that looked quite familiar. They were Picassos, I noticed. One of them was even the famous sunflower picture. (Or wait -- did Van Gogh do the sunflower one? I think he did. Which just kind of proves my point to come...)
"Is that the real one?" I asked, pointing to the picture.
"Yes, it is," the manager said.
"Wow."
Of course, the logical part of my brain, that part that paid attention in school, should have realized: Those must be copies. But I didn't think of that. Where I come from, where I grew up, people don't usually hang reproductions of Picassos (or Van Goghs) on their walls. So here was this guy -- rich and French and owner of the swankiest hotel in the country -- and, well, it was certainly possible that he was loaded, and had bought the real thing. Wasn't it?
Uh, no.
When a few other guests and the managers chortled that chortled that makes you realize you are, without question, the biggest knob in the planet, if not the galaxy, you slap your hand to your forehead and tell yourself what a goofball you are.
Of course it wasn't the real one, Spencer.
I felt stupid, but later rather relieved. Because for a second, a moment, I had believed in something that was rather absurd. I had been taken in. I had been had. I wasn't as cynical as I thought. Hallejuah. I'm still able to believe the unbelievable.
I'm still convinced that there could be a Santa up there in the North Pole, working hard all year long, cranking out toys with his merry little band of elfin helpers. I mean, shit. I've seen stuff in Phnom Penh far, far more absurd and ridiculous than a kind old man in a red suit living north of Norway and greasing down his sleigh. Who's to say the dude doesn't exist? Until it's proven otherwise, I'm down with Kringle, is what I'm saying. (And I still plan on writing my Santa Claus novel, someday. Just not today.)
There was a bad storm here last night. Rain, thunder, lightning, the whole deal. The kind of storm that forces you to lay in bed, sweating, staring at the darkened ceiling. Thinking strange thoughts. Coining odd phrases that sometimes dissipate come morning, but every now and then linger.
I hope it rains again tonight, too.
Whenever I start to feel that I'm getting a wee bit cynical, I remember my gullibility. Stephen King has a wonderful introduction to his 1992 story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes in which he recounts that, as a child, he tended to believe anything and everything that anyone and everyone told him. I'm the same way. (Just, you know, minus the marvellous storytelling ability and the millions upon millions of dollars in the bank. Other than that, we're identical.)
A few months ago I happened to be at a small dinner party thrown by the French manager of the Cambodiana hotel, one of the biggest, classiest hotels in Cambodia. (Granted, that doesn't take much, does it, this being Cambodia, but you get the picture.) We were in the living room of his apartment, which happened to be in the hotel itself, and what an apartment it was. Not large, no, but stylish, decorated, compact and comfortable. On the wall were various paintings that looked quite familiar. They were Picassos, I noticed. One of them was even the famous sunflower picture. (Or wait -- did Van Gogh do the sunflower one? I think he did. Which just kind of proves my point to come...)
"Is that the real one?" I asked, pointing to the picture.
"Yes, it is," the manager said.
"Wow."
Of course, the logical part of my brain, that part that paid attention in school, should have realized: Those must be copies. But I didn't think of that. Where I come from, where I grew up, people don't usually hang reproductions of Picassos (or Van Goghs) on their walls. So here was this guy -- rich and French and owner of the swankiest hotel in the country -- and, well, it was certainly possible that he was loaded, and had bought the real thing. Wasn't it?
Uh, no.
When a few other guests and the managers chortled that chortled that makes you realize you are, without question, the biggest knob in the planet, if not the galaxy, you slap your hand to your forehead and tell yourself what a goofball you are.
Of course it wasn't the real one, Spencer.
I felt stupid, but later rather relieved. Because for a second, a moment, I had believed in something that was rather absurd. I had been taken in. I had been had. I wasn't as cynical as I thought. Hallejuah. I'm still able to believe the unbelievable.
I'm still convinced that there could be a Santa up there in the North Pole, working hard all year long, cranking out toys with his merry little band of elfin helpers. I mean, shit. I've seen stuff in Phnom Penh far, far more absurd and ridiculous than a kind old man in a red suit living north of Norway and greasing down his sleigh. Who's to say the dude doesn't exist? Until it's proven otherwise, I'm down with Kringle, is what I'm saying. (And I still plan on writing my Santa Claus novel, someday. Just not today.)
There was a bad storm here last night. Rain, thunder, lightning, the whole deal. The kind of storm that forces you to lay in bed, sweating, staring at the darkened ceiling. Thinking strange thoughts. Coining odd phrases that sometimes dissipate come morning, but every now and then linger.
I hope it rains again tonight, too.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
TAKE ME BACK or WHY STAR WARS WAS, IS AND SHALL ALWAYS BE THE END-ALL BE-ALL OF SUPREME AND TOTAL COOLNESS
You have to understand something. Arguing about why the new Star Wars trilogy sucks to somebody of my age (29) or thereabouts is tantamount to blasphemy, at least in my book. (My book isn 't the book, no, but as a non-Christian and a non-Muslim, the Bible or the Koran ain't going to cut it; Star Wars is the closest I will get to a religion. That and Marvel Comics...)
Then again, I suspect I may be in the minority here, as many folks my age feel wounded, betrayed, kicked-in-the-crotch by what George Lucas has wrought this second time out.
Not me.
You see, when you're seven years old, and you save the proof-of-purchase certificates from four or five Star Wars action figures, diligently cutting them out from the back of the box, and then you send those same proof-of-purchase cardboard ovals carefully in the mail, hoping against hope that the mailman doesn't lose that precious little envelope, all with the promise of receiving an exclusive, can't-buy-it-in-the-stores Nien Numb action figure in the mail, and two, three months later that figure actually arrives, in your house, in a small gray cardboard box, well, when such an act occurs, it is akin to all those folks who see images of the Virgin Mary in pieces of toast. (And if you think I'm exaggerating, think again.)
So I can, if pressed, rationally explain to you why I actually really, really like The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and, finally, Revenge Of The Sith. I can state that I love how Lucas has retroactively refitted his original story, making it now the primary narrative not of Luke Skywalker, but that of his father, Anakin Skywalker, later to become Darth Vader. I can relate how this is now a saga of a father who chooses the wrong way in life, and is then redeemed by his son, who faces similar temptation, then resists. I can point out how the entire series, all six films, reflects the circular nature of history, how democracies are fragile enterprises that often come undone by the actions of a few misguided individuals, and how the empires that arise are then, in turn, undone by a concentrated group of dedicated rebels. I could even hypothesize that Lucas has attempted something that nobody in cinema has ever done before -- using one family's personal saga, intimate and emotional, and interwoven it with the fate of an entire civilization. I could, on reflection, show how various Buddhist, Christian and Muslim ideas surrounding God, fate, prophecies and prophets are interwoven together alongside the spaceships and light sabres, and how embedded within the entire saga is a subtle critique of how institutionalized religion inevitably becomes corrupted alongside the institutions that govern our lives, and that it is only when the religion itself breaks free from its schematic, regimented requirements that true spiritual redemption arises.
I could say all of that, but it would be bullshit.
Because what matters is that when I was seven years old I sent away for a Star Wars action figure that could not be found at Zellers, or Towers, and it arrived, in my hands, weeks later. A solid, bendable, force. You have to understand -- this was Nien Numb, people, the co-pilot of the Millenium Falcon, Lando Calrissian's right-hand man when they attacked and destroyed the second Death Star.
So, I understand all the criticisms of the new Star Wars films. I even agree with some of them. And again, if a light sabre was pressed to my throat, I could articulate, in an 800 page essay, the political, social and familial themes that Lucas was articulating.
But the seven year old who got Nien Numb delivered by mail to his house would respond:
"Did you see that fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan? And the way Anakin's face, like, melted? And Yoda crawling through that little crawlspace! And how Anakin killed all those Jedi, even the younglings? And..."
When the seven year old inside of you pipes up, you listen, and you listen hard. That boy's religion was Star Wars, and while it may not be a mature relgion, or a real religion, it was mine, more or less. Trying to explain to me why Star Wars sucks is like trying to convince a born-again why evolution is the real deal. I will nod my head and smile politely and concede that you do, in fact, have quite a good argument. But nothing will change.
Very few things in life can take me back to that boy who waited, patiently, day after day, for his action figure to arrive -- and the things that can accomplish that feat, Star Wars or otherwise, I revere, plain and simple.
Then again, I suspect I may be in the minority here, as many folks my age feel wounded, betrayed, kicked-in-the-crotch by what George Lucas has wrought this second time out.
Not me.
You see, when you're seven years old, and you save the proof-of-purchase certificates from four or five Star Wars action figures, diligently cutting them out from the back of the box, and then you send those same proof-of-purchase cardboard ovals carefully in the mail, hoping against hope that the mailman doesn't lose that precious little envelope, all with the promise of receiving an exclusive, can't-buy-it-in-the-stores Nien Numb action figure in the mail, and two, three months later that figure actually arrives, in your house, in a small gray cardboard box, well, when such an act occurs, it is akin to all those folks who see images of the Virgin Mary in pieces of toast. (And if you think I'm exaggerating, think again.)
So I can, if pressed, rationally explain to you why I actually really, really like The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and, finally, Revenge Of The Sith. I can state that I love how Lucas has retroactively refitted his original story, making it now the primary narrative not of Luke Skywalker, but that of his father, Anakin Skywalker, later to become Darth Vader. I can relate how this is now a saga of a father who chooses the wrong way in life, and is then redeemed by his son, who faces similar temptation, then resists. I can point out how the entire series, all six films, reflects the circular nature of history, how democracies are fragile enterprises that often come undone by the actions of a few misguided individuals, and how the empires that arise are then, in turn, undone by a concentrated group of dedicated rebels. I could even hypothesize that Lucas has attempted something that nobody in cinema has ever done before -- using one family's personal saga, intimate and emotional, and interwoven it with the fate of an entire civilization. I could, on reflection, show how various Buddhist, Christian and Muslim ideas surrounding God, fate, prophecies and prophets are interwoven together alongside the spaceships and light sabres, and how embedded within the entire saga is a subtle critique of how institutionalized religion inevitably becomes corrupted alongside the institutions that govern our lives, and that it is only when the religion itself breaks free from its schematic, regimented requirements that true spiritual redemption arises.
I could say all of that, but it would be bullshit.
Because what matters is that when I was seven years old I sent away for a Star Wars action figure that could not be found at Zellers, or Towers, and it arrived, in my hands, weeks later. A solid, bendable, force. You have to understand -- this was Nien Numb, people, the co-pilot of the Millenium Falcon, Lando Calrissian's right-hand man when they attacked and destroyed the second Death Star.
So, I understand all the criticisms of the new Star Wars films. I even agree with some of them. And again, if a light sabre was pressed to my throat, I could articulate, in an 800 page essay, the political, social and familial themes that Lucas was articulating.
But the seven year old who got Nien Numb delivered by mail to his house would respond:
"Did you see that fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan? And the way Anakin's face, like, melted? And Yoda crawling through that little crawlspace! And how Anakin killed all those Jedi, even the younglings? And..."
When the seven year old inside of you pipes up, you listen, and you listen hard. That boy's religion was Star Wars, and while it may not be a mature relgion, or a real religion, it was mine, more or less. Trying to explain to me why Star Wars sucks is like trying to convince a born-again why evolution is the real deal. I will nod my head and smile politely and concede that you do, in fact, have quite a good argument. But nothing will change.
Very few things in life can take me back to that boy who waited, patiently, day after day, for his action figure to arrive -- and the things that can accomplish that feat, Star Wars or otherwise, I revere, plain and simple.
Monday, July 11, 2005
WAITING FOR A HAPPY PIZZA
Cambodian kick-boxing was on the TV. I watched and waited for my happy pizza, minus the 'happy'. ('Happy' being a little marijuana sprinkled on the pizza. 'Happy happy' being a lot of marijuna sprinkled on the pizza.) Tourists strolled by the river. Children begged. The restaurant had a good crowd for a Sunday night, three or four tables full.
A bored waitress was sitting next to me, watching TV.
"Do you like boxing?" I asked.
"I like boxing very much," she said, both her English and enthusiasm surprising me. I didn't expect a positive response; what woman likes boxing?
"You like it?" I said.
"Yes," she said. "In school, I used to box in school."
"They taught boxing in school?"
"Yes," she said, nodding, the words coming quicker. "I was very good. My teacher, he boxed in Cambodia and Thailand and Laos and Vietnam. Now he's very old, eighty, so he doesn't box anymore. He teaches."
We watched the TV some more. I waited for my pizza. A slight breeze came, went.
"You from Phnom Penh?" I asked.
"No, Kompong Chhang province."
"How often do you go back home?"
"Three days every year."
"That's it?" I said. "Only three days?"
"It's okay," she said. "I like to work. I don't like to go back home. I don't trust my parents. They say bad things, they lie, they take things."
"You don't trust your parents?"
"I don't trust anyone," she said. "My friends, they call me, they want to go out, but I don't go. I stay here, I work. They do bad things, sometimes. I don't trust anyone."
"You have any days off?"
"No days off. But that's okay. I don't trust anyone. I trust myself." Pointing at her chest.
My pizza was ready. I had already paid, so I stood up, smiled, asked her her name. She told me hers, and I told her mine.
I went outside to get a moto. She turned her attention back to the TV, to the boxing. I felt a little sad. The air was cool and the sky was a little gray and I hopped on a bike and left.
A bored waitress was sitting next to me, watching TV.
"Do you like boxing?" I asked.
"I like boxing very much," she said, both her English and enthusiasm surprising me. I didn't expect a positive response; what woman likes boxing?
"You like it?" I said.
"Yes," she said. "In school, I used to box in school."
"They taught boxing in school?"
"Yes," she said, nodding, the words coming quicker. "I was very good. My teacher, he boxed in Cambodia and Thailand and Laos and Vietnam. Now he's very old, eighty, so he doesn't box anymore. He teaches."
We watched the TV some more. I waited for my pizza. A slight breeze came, went.
"You from Phnom Penh?" I asked.
"No, Kompong Chhang province."
"How often do you go back home?"
"Three days every year."
"That's it?" I said. "Only three days?"
"It's okay," she said. "I like to work. I don't like to go back home. I don't trust my parents. They say bad things, they lie, they take things."
"You don't trust your parents?"
"I don't trust anyone," she said. "My friends, they call me, they want to go out, but I don't go. I stay here, I work. They do bad things, sometimes. I don't trust anyone."
"You have any days off?"
"No days off. But that's okay. I don't trust anyone. I trust myself." Pointing at her chest.
My pizza was ready. I had already paid, so I stood up, smiled, asked her her name. She told me hers, and I told her mine.
I went outside to get a moto. She turned her attention back to the TV, to the boxing. I felt a little sad. The air was cool and the sky was a little gray and I hopped on a bike and left.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
SALVATORE LOMBINO/EVAN HUNTER/ED MCBAIN (1926-2005): AMERICAN WRITER
Salvatore Lombino died the other day. So did Evan Hunter. Ed McBain, too.
They were all the same person, of course. Lombino was an Italian-American writer who changed his name early in his career because he felt authors of Italian heritage didn't get any respect. He became Evan Hunter, who wrote mainstream novels, and then transformed himself into Ed McBain, master of the mystery and the police procedural.
I discovered Ed McBain before Hunter. When I was twelve years old, I devoured anything and everything Stephen King wrote, only to find myself in a curious dilemma -- I had caught the literature bug, quite badly, and I needed a fix, but I had read all of King's stuff, so what was I to do? Panic set. Short-lived panic, fortunately. I soon discovered, while browsing through the bookshops, that King had 'blurbed' quite a number of books, giving his positive comments to any number of thrillers, chillers and, occasionally, serious works of literature. It was how I initially discovered Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, even John Irving.
And McBain. I even remember the first McBain books I read, back in 1988, purchased from the Avondale convenience store just down the road from my elementary school. It was a two pack -- a paperback copy of McBain's new release, Vespers, packaged alongside a reprinted edition of his very first 87th precinct novel, Cop-Hater, written in the early fifties.
I was hooked. Instantly. From the get-go. McBain's 87th precinct novels are set in the mythical city of Isola (modelled after New York), populated by fresh cops new to the force and lifers just waiting, dear God, for what the next day will bring. At the beginning of each mystery, there is usually a murder -- the rest of the book revolves around interviewing suspects, following leads, capturing the culprit.
Routine stuff, in other words. But oh, this is Ed McBain we're talking about here. His plots move, his characters are real, their pain is honest. These traits may sound obligatory for any good novel, and I suppose they are -- but how often do you find them? What separates McBain from all of the other suspense novelists out there is 1) character and 2) story. For a long time I didn't read any mystery novels, but I always read McBain; I cared about the people, who I followed from book to book, and I cared about the stories. And what stories! And so many! He started writing his 87th precint stories in the early fifties, usually at the pace of one or two a year, and I started reading them in the late eighties, so you can do the math -- that's a lot of fiction. A lot of fun.
(And I wasn't the only fan, either. McBain was generally considered the grandmaster of his field. The TV series Hill Street Blues was basically a carbon-copy of his 87th precinct books -- albeit without the credit to McBain, which ticked him off to no end. Stephen King even had one of McBain's perennial cops, Steve Carella, show up in the unexpurgated edition of The Stand, which I thought was a fun little 'tip of the cap'. Carella also pops up in the final novel of McBain's other series of books, the ones featuring private eye Matthew Hope. I'm telling you, I don't know when the guy slept.)
Oh, but wait. Ed McBain was only part of the equation. And not the first part, either.
Salvatore Lombino's first novel was written under the name of Evan Hunter, and that novel was The Blackboard Jungle. A stunning success, it was, about a young teacher in the inner city trying to do good. Became a hit movie starring Glenn Ford. And it holds up; I vividly remember reading the last line in my high school cafeteria, shutting the book, and saying: "Wow." (And I still remember that last line, too, though I won't tell you what it is.) Hunter also went on to write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's great film The Birds.
The thing is, when writing as 'Evan Hunter', the novels were serious novels, often family novels -- what movies would call 'dramas'. Fathers and Sons traced a grandfather, son and grandson through life. Streets of Gold was probably the only novel I ever read told from the point-of-view of a blind person. A blind musician. It sounds gimmicky, but it isn't, because Hunter makes it real, and it's a great novel about the costs and sacrifices associated with the American dream. He wrote a moving novel of adolescence called Last Summer, and followed it up with an equally moving sequel, Come Winter. A story of father-daughter love, realistically told, was captured in Love, Dad. And just last fall, on a layover in Taiwan, I read most of his recent novel The Moment She Was Gone, which was advertised as a thriller but, instead, dealt sensitively and movingly with a young girl's mental illness, and the effect that it has on her family. (Most of his 'Evan Hunter' novels were written in the seventies, and are now, sadly, out of print; lucky for me, the St.Catharines Centennial Library, where I slaved and toiled for a few years in high school, had an excellent fiction section, so I was able to find most of his old work there. I still remember the smell of those books The yellowed paper. The black-and-white photos on the back. I remember reading Last Summer in the basement of my old house, because we did not have air conditioning and it was cool down there, cool and hidden. Tied up, tangled up in my adolescence, Hunter was...)
I always felt that the skills Hunter employed in his 'serious' novels, namely the depth of his characterization, were what made his 'Ed McBain' thrillers come alive and resonate; and, conversely, the storytelling skills he employed in his police procedurals also enabled his mainstream work to move and flow and not get stuck in the kind of endless navel-gazing that so much of modern fiction seems to dwell on.
(A few years ago, he published a book called Candyland under both of his pseudonyms, Evan Hunter and Ed McBain. The first half was written by Hunter, and felt like a mainstream novel; the second half was written by McBain, and felt like a crime book. Wonderful fun.)
Hunter/McBain was one of the first writers who showed me that writing was writing. If you were good, you could dip in and out of different genres with ease. If it was real, and true, then it didn't matter if the label was 'thriller' or 'drama' or 'fiction'; all that mattered was the story, and he was a master storyteller. And I will miss him.
They were all the same person, of course. Lombino was an Italian-American writer who changed his name early in his career because he felt authors of Italian heritage didn't get any respect. He became Evan Hunter, who wrote mainstream novels, and then transformed himself into Ed McBain, master of the mystery and the police procedural.
I discovered Ed McBain before Hunter. When I was twelve years old, I devoured anything and everything Stephen King wrote, only to find myself in a curious dilemma -- I had caught the literature bug, quite badly, and I needed a fix, but I had read all of King's stuff, so what was I to do? Panic set. Short-lived panic, fortunately. I soon discovered, while browsing through the bookshops, that King had 'blurbed' quite a number of books, giving his positive comments to any number of thrillers, chillers and, occasionally, serious works of literature. It was how I initially discovered Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, even John Irving.
And McBain. I even remember the first McBain books I read, back in 1988, purchased from the Avondale convenience store just down the road from my elementary school. It was a two pack -- a paperback copy of McBain's new release, Vespers, packaged alongside a reprinted edition of his very first 87th precinct novel, Cop-Hater, written in the early fifties.
I was hooked. Instantly. From the get-go. McBain's 87th precinct novels are set in the mythical city of Isola (modelled after New York), populated by fresh cops new to the force and lifers just waiting, dear God, for what the next day will bring. At the beginning of each mystery, there is usually a murder -- the rest of the book revolves around interviewing suspects, following leads, capturing the culprit.
Routine stuff, in other words. But oh, this is Ed McBain we're talking about here. His plots move, his characters are real, their pain is honest. These traits may sound obligatory for any good novel, and I suppose they are -- but how often do you find them? What separates McBain from all of the other suspense novelists out there is 1) character and 2) story. For a long time I didn't read any mystery novels, but I always read McBain; I cared about the people, who I followed from book to book, and I cared about the stories. And what stories! And so many! He started writing his 87th precint stories in the early fifties, usually at the pace of one or two a year, and I started reading them in the late eighties, so you can do the math -- that's a lot of fiction. A lot of fun.
(And I wasn't the only fan, either. McBain was generally considered the grandmaster of his field. The TV series Hill Street Blues was basically a carbon-copy of his 87th precinct books -- albeit without the credit to McBain, which ticked him off to no end. Stephen King even had one of McBain's perennial cops, Steve Carella, show up in the unexpurgated edition of The Stand, which I thought was a fun little 'tip of the cap'. Carella also pops up in the final novel of McBain's other series of books, the ones featuring private eye Matthew Hope. I'm telling you, I don't know when the guy slept.)
Oh, but wait. Ed McBain was only part of the equation. And not the first part, either.
Salvatore Lombino's first novel was written under the name of Evan Hunter, and that novel was The Blackboard Jungle. A stunning success, it was, about a young teacher in the inner city trying to do good. Became a hit movie starring Glenn Ford. And it holds up; I vividly remember reading the last line in my high school cafeteria, shutting the book, and saying: "Wow." (And I still remember that last line, too, though I won't tell you what it is.) Hunter also went on to write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's great film The Birds.
The thing is, when writing as 'Evan Hunter', the novels were serious novels, often family novels -- what movies would call 'dramas'. Fathers and Sons traced a grandfather, son and grandson through life. Streets of Gold was probably the only novel I ever read told from the point-of-view of a blind person. A blind musician. It sounds gimmicky, but it isn't, because Hunter makes it real, and it's a great novel about the costs and sacrifices associated with the American dream. He wrote a moving novel of adolescence called Last Summer, and followed it up with an equally moving sequel, Come Winter. A story of father-daughter love, realistically told, was captured in Love, Dad. And just last fall, on a layover in Taiwan, I read most of his recent novel The Moment She Was Gone, which was advertised as a thriller but, instead, dealt sensitively and movingly with a young girl's mental illness, and the effect that it has on her family. (Most of his 'Evan Hunter' novels were written in the seventies, and are now, sadly, out of print; lucky for me, the St.Catharines Centennial Library, where I slaved and toiled for a few years in high school, had an excellent fiction section, so I was able to find most of his old work there. I still remember the smell of those books The yellowed paper. The black-and-white photos on the back. I remember reading Last Summer in the basement of my old house, because we did not have air conditioning and it was cool down there, cool and hidden. Tied up, tangled up in my adolescence, Hunter was...)
I always felt that the skills Hunter employed in his 'serious' novels, namely the depth of his characterization, were what made his 'Ed McBain' thrillers come alive and resonate; and, conversely, the storytelling skills he employed in his police procedurals also enabled his mainstream work to move and flow and not get stuck in the kind of endless navel-gazing that so much of modern fiction seems to dwell on.
(A few years ago, he published a book called Candyland under both of his pseudonyms, Evan Hunter and Ed McBain. The first half was written by Hunter, and felt like a mainstream novel; the second half was written by McBain, and felt like a crime book. Wonderful fun.)
Hunter/McBain was one of the first writers who showed me that writing was writing. If you were good, you could dip in and out of different genres with ease. If it was real, and true, then it didn't matter if the label was 'thriller' or 'drama' or 'fiction'; all that mattered was the story, and he was a master storyteller. And I will miss him.
Friday, July 08, 2005
LONDON
We are continually astonished by man's capacity to do harm. It jolts us, surprises us, awakens us. One would think that we would have been fully awakened by now, given all that has transpired in the last few years, the last hundred years, but no. We are jolted, again and again. The world is a mean and desperate place, but we have lives to live, do we not, so we go on, and on, until something, an act, an explosion, possibly four, reminds us of what we are capable of.
But we are capable of so much more! Yesterday, a group of people, probably no more than a handful, entered trains and buses in London, England and decided to show the world what they could do. They accomplished their mission. Their destruction was visible, life-altering, demented. Exactly what they wanted. And yet the madness of their actions was but a midwife to their true legacy -- the reactions of people, the humanity of people, the inherent dignity of people.
The only thing worthwhile that can emerge from a tragedy such as this is the realization and acceptance of our own naive humanity. We are forgetful people, vile people, and angelic people. We forget the inherent fragility of our world, because to remember, consistently, would leave us immobile. We are vile in what we can do to each other, willingly, in the name of ideology. We are angelic in our capacity to grieve and help.
An event like this always surprises us, as it should; the shock comes from the notion that we have acts like this capable inside of us. It seems like an aberration, even though we know, all too well, that it is the norm.
Hate and love are the flipsides of our nature, and just as we are blindsided by the carnage we can convey, we should also not neglect the daily acts of generosity and sympathy that continually remind us of our humanity. The driver who lets you switch lanes, the person who allows you to butt in line, the salesclerk who calls after you because you have left behind your purse on the counter -- these are the small, building-block examples of decency that culminate in a life well lived and a shared humanity. These tiny acts of kindness and grace are not showcased on the news with the fervor or intensity of a terrorist attack, no, but they should be noted, occasionally, and used as small reminders that we can do occasionally do monstrous things, violently and forcefully, but we can, more often, also do good things, repeatedly and effortlessly.
But we are capable of so much more! Yesterday, a group of people, probably no more than a handful, entered trains and buses in London, England and decided to show the world what they could do. They accomplished their mission. Their destruction was visible, life-altering, demented. Exactly what they wanted. And yet the madness of their actions was but a midwife to their true legacy -- the reactions of people, the humanity of people, the inherent dignity of people.
The only thing worthwhile that can emerge from a tragedy such as this is the realization and acceptance of our own naive humanity. We are forgetful people, vile people, and angelic people. We forget the inherent fragility of our world, because to remember, consistently, would leave us immobile. We are vile in what we can do to each other, willingly, in the name of ideology. We are angelic in our capacity to grieve and help.
An event like this always surprises us, as it should; the shock comes from the notion that we have acts like this capable inside of us. It seems like an aberration, even though we know, all too well, that it is the norm.
Hate and love are the flipsides of our nature, and just as we are blindsided by the carnage we can convey, we should also not neglect the daily acts of generosity and sympathy that continually remind us of our humanity. The driver who lets you switch lanes, the person who allows you to butt in line, the salesclerk who calls after you because you have left behind your purse on the counter -- these are the small, building-block examples of decency that culminate in a life well lived and a shared humanity. These tiny acts of kindness and grace are not showcased on the news with the fervor or intensity of a terrorist attack, no, but they should be noted, occasionally, and used as small reminders that we can do occasionally do monstrous things, violently and forcefully, but we can, more often, also do good things, repeatedly and effortlessly.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
LIVE 8's AFTERMATH
To know poverty you must spend seven years living in a foreign land, amongst the people, amidst the carnage, like Bruce Wayne in BATMAN BEGINS, and only then, possibly, good fortune willing, you may be able to appreciate what the lesser among us endure.
To know poverty you must spend your entire life treating the sick, the wounded, the feeble, the lost, and only then, certainly, can you begin to understand what the wretched of the earth have known for so long.
To know poverty you must attend a series of concerts, featuring multiple artists in multiple countries, and only then, for a moment, will wisdom announce its reclusive presence.
The truth is, I fear, that we can never know true, lasting, grinding poverty unless we are in it. Unless we are of it. Unless we are one of the billions who are unfortunate enough to have been born among it.
Cynicism never leads anywhere, which is why I hope I’m not being cynical when I find the whole Live 8 phenomenon somewhat, well, depressing.
Let me be clear: I think the concerts were a fantastic idea. I firmly believe that drawing attention to Africa’s problems, drawing attention to poverty itself, is a necessary, worthy and, dare I say it, divine goal. It united the world for a good cause, as the pundits say, and who can argue with that?
And yet.
I read that at the end of the concert held in Barrie, Ontario, Bryan Adams and Dan Ackyroyd and The Tragically Hip and thousands of concertgoers all chanted ‘Canada cares’ before leading into an impromptu rendition of our national anthem, ‘O Canada’.
Who can quabble with this warm-hearted display of sentiment and solidarity? Shit, if I were there, in that place, in that crowd, I have no doubt whatsoever that I, too, would have been smiling and laughing and singing along. It’s what we humans do.
And yet.
How many people will truly, sincerely, authentically be inspired to, well, DO something? Act. Engage. Some, especially the young, will. Others will have had a good day out.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, I believe that the concerts were a rousing success. One shouldn’t nitpick attempts at goodness, at greatness, at humaneness.
But I will, regardless.
My concerns:
1) A concert for Africa – Africa is not a country. Africa is a mammoth continent composed of dozens and dozens and dozens of countries. Some are doing fairly well; most are not. In most people’s eyes, the concept of ‘Africa’ seems to be: a place that is dying, and a place that needs our help’. Fine. All well and good. But Africa is filled with countries and cities and towns and villages. And people. Individuals. Some are good and some are bad and some are arrogant pricks while others are bordering on sainthood. Africa’s countries can and should speak for themselves, and I think they should have had a much, much larger presence within the concerts themselves. Maybe television ratings wouldn’t have been as high, and maybe more people would have tuned out, the message thus being lost, but still – it’s condescending, patronizing, and more than a little colonial to assert our own power and principles while relegating the people concerned to a status little higher than that of a helpless victim. It's our duty as more successful countries to help those less fortunate, but it's also our duty to include the people in their own projected development. The whole 'teach a man' to fish truism is truer than I ever knew; it's not easy to do, and it may not be what the people want to do, but capacity-building is the only way. You have to help the people help themselves, and that will not (only) be accomplished through an influx of cash; it will take years and years and decades and decades of teaching and development.
2) Canada cares – Well, good for Canada. Canada has decided that it cares. For me, that’s irrelevant. The concerts were supposed to be about the people who need help; when everything is reduced to ‘look how good we are’, topped off by a singing of our own national anthem, something has been lost in translation somewhere. Why was ‘Oh Canada’ being sung? To celebrate that concertgoers attended a cool concert? To wallow in how generous a country we are? Bullshit. Caring is action, plain and simple. If your action was nothing more than going to a concert to watch Neil Young jam again, well, I don’t think that’s something to gloat about. The issues involved are too big and too sad for that kind of pat-on-the-back. If every Canadian had decided to go to an African country for one year, six months, even month, and teach English, or architecture, or help design a road, if every Canadian had signed a legal pledge to do that, then I would truly, sincerely, believe that 'Canada cares'. Words are cheap, and sentiment alone, divorced from action, is even cheaper.
3) Africa Is A Place Designed For Our Goodwill – Africa has governments. It has corrupt governments. It has governments that will do whatever it can to take all of the money earmarked for development and keep it for themselves. As I’ve written about before (perhaps ad nauseum), I don’t think Westerners quite realize how absolutely entrenched corruption is in the very fabric of most countries’ social systems. (I sure as shit didn’t before I came to Cambodia.) The G-8 countries can give 20, 30, 40 more billion bucks every year, and it won’t mean shit. Unless safeguards are in place, unless accountability is in place, than the money will be filtered through channels so Byzantine that it will never be found. Somebody wrote a good column about this the other day – how, if no one’s held accountable for actions and intentions, then what’s the point? (Donor money keeps getting pumped into Cambodia, and the money keeps being squandered; it is only now, after a decade, that the donor countries are starting to say to the Cambodian government: You better do with it what we tell you to do with it.) The point is, Africa is not just some mythical blob of suffering that will be healed by cash. Cash will help; cash never hurts. But when you have generations of people raised to believe that ‘foreigner equeals someone who gives me money’, that damages and taints everything, from infrastructure to infant mortality.
4) There Is No They – Another one of my recurring themes here at this blog for the, oh, two people who may read it on a regular basis. The whole point of the concerts, as I understood them, was to force the G-8 countries to pony up the cash for Africa. Fine. But there was no talk of Africans helping themselves, and very little asked of the people attending the concerts. Mass mobilizations can work wonders and bring down civilizations, as recent events in the Middle East and Central Asia have shown. But that’s not enough. It comes down to you, and you alone. It comes down to the Africans. It comes down to individuals guided by conscience. There is no ‘they’. There is only you.
I hate to sound like a curmudgeon for writing all of this, but I don’t think most Canadians (barring the native Indians) have ever really, truly seen poverty up close. It stinks and it’s dehumanizing and it’s ugly. Poverty is two thousand kids picking trash at a garbage dump every day with the hope of raising twenty-five, maybe fifty cents for their family after ten hours work in the blazing sun. Poverty is a brilliant, shining girl living in a small village who studies English hard every single day and who will never go to university because her parents can’t afford the yearly tuition, which amounts to about the cost of sixty of the bottles of water sold at the Canada Live 8 concert. Poverty is a life of bathing and drinking from the same water you shit in. Poverty means selling children for sex, transporting children for sex, and killing children, physically and mentally, for sex. Poverty is the scab you pick that regenerates itself. And the only reason I sometimes get so worked up about this whole issues arises from my own guilt, my own sense of bourgeois liberal shame; you can’t live here and not feel, well, superior, because you are – economically and educationally, as a foreigner, you are superior. As a person, no. The kindest people I’ve ever met have had nothing at all; as Paul Theroux ends his account of Africa, Dark Star Safari: “The best of them are bare-assed.”
The attention from Live 8 will, hopefully, enable the G-8 leaders to give Africa the support it needs and deserves. But such support is complex; it needs hard questions with even harder answers. It needs acknowledging the responsibilities that individual governments in individual countries need to live up to. It entitles asking people to help themselves and lay claim to themselves.
I have no answers; sometimes I feel stupid even acting like I know what I’m talking about, when I really, really don’t. Perhaps I’m misguided, and misinterpreting and overanalyzing the whole thing. I don’t know. At the very least, though, I’ve asked myself these questions, and thought about these concerns; two, three years ago, they weren’t even on my radar. I’ve started to see, living here in Cambodia, how complex and fucked-up and craven the world truly is. I’ve also realized its’ generosity and good-heartedness.
Balancing those two realities, dwelling within their borders, accepting your own role and your own responsibility, is a life-long endeavor that requires much, much more from others and ourselves than a little song and a little dance every decade or two, I guess is what I’m saying.
To know poverty you must spend your entire life treating the sick, the wounded, the feeble, the lost, and only then, certainly, can you begin to understand what the wretched of the earth have known for so long.
To know poverty you must attend a series of concerts, featuring multiple artists in multiple countries, and only then, for a moment, will wisdom announce its reclusive presence.
The truth is, I fear, that we can never know true, lasting, grinding poverty unless we are in it. Unless we are of it. Unless we are one of the billions who are unfortunate enough to have been born among it.
Cynicism never leads anywhere, which is why I hope I’m not being cynical when I find the whole Live 8 phenomenon somewhat, well, depressing.
Let me be clear: I think the concerts were a fantastic idea. I firmly believe that drawing attention to Africa’s problems, drawing attention to poverty itself, is a necessary, worthy and, dare I say it, divine goal. It united the world for a good cause, as the pundits say, and who can argue with that?
And yet.
I read that at the end of the concert held in Barrie, Ontario, Bryan Adams and Dan Ackyroyd and The Tragically Hip and thousands of concertgoers all chanted ‘Canada cares’ before leading into an impromptu rendition of our national anthem, ‘O Canada’.
Who can quabble with this warm-hearted display of sentiment and solidarity? Shit, if I were there, in that place, in that crowd, I have no doubt whatsoever that I, too, would have been smiling and laughing and singing along. It’s what we humans do.
And yet.
How many people will truly, sincerely, authentically be inspired to, well, DO something? Act. Engage. Some, especially the young, will. Others will have had a good day out.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, I believe that the concerts were a rousing success. One shouldn’t nitpick attempts at goodness, at greatness, at humaneness.
But I will, regardless.
My concerns:
1) A concert for Africa – Africa is not a country. Africa is a mammoth continent composed of dozens and dozens and dozens of countries. Some are doing fairly well; most are not. In most people’s eyes, the concept of ‘Africa’ seems to be: a place that is dying, and a place that needs our help’. Fine. All well and good. But Africa is filled with countries and cities and towns and villages. And people. Individuals. Some are good and some are bad and some are arrogant pricks while others are bordering on sainthood. Africa’s countries can and should speak for themselves, and I think they should have had a much, much larger presence within the concerts themselves. Maybe television ratings wouldn’t have been as high, and maybe more people would have tuned out, the message thus being lost, but still – it’s condescending, patronizing, and more than a little colonial to assert our own power and principles while relegating the people concerned to a status little higher than that of a helpless victim. It's our duty as more successful countries to help those less fortunate, but it's also our duty to include the people in their own projected development. The whole 'teach a man' to fish truism is truer than I ever knew; it's not easy to do, and it may not be what the people want to do, but capacity-building is the only way. You have to help the people help themselves, and that will not (only) be accomplished through an influx of cash; it will take years and years and decades and decades of teaching and development.
2) Canada cares – Well, good for Canada. Canada has decided that it cares. For me, that’s irrelevant. The concerts were supposed to be about the people who need help; when everything is reduced to ‘look how good we are’, topped off by a singing of our own national anthem, something has been lost in translation somewhere. Why was ‘Oh Canada’ being sung? To celebrate that concertgoers attended a cool concert? To wallow in how generous a country we are? Bullshit. Caring is action, plain and simple. If your action was nothing more than going to a concert to watch Neil Young jam again, well, I don’t think that’s something to gloat about. The issues involved are too big and too sad for that kind of pat-on-the-back. If every Canadian had decided to go to an African country for one year, six months, even month, and teach English, or architecture, or help design a road, if every Canadian had signed a legal pledge to do that, then I would truly, sincerely, believe that 'Canada cares'. Words are cheap, and sentiment alone, divorced from action, is even cheaper.
3) Africa Is A Place Designed For Our Goodwill – Africa has governments. It has corrupt governments. It has governments that will do whatever it can to take all of the money earmarked for development and keep it for themselves. As I’ve written about before (perhaps ad nauseum), I don’t think Westerners quite realize how absolutely entrenched corruption is in the very fabric of most countries’ social systems. (I sure as shit didn’t before I came to Cambodia.) The G-8 countries can give 20, 30, 40 more billion bucks every year, and it won’t mean shit. Unless safeguards are in place, unless accountability is in place, than the money will be filtered through channels so Byzantine that it will never be found. Somebody wrote a good column about this the other day – how, if no one’s held accountable for actions and intentions, then what’s the point? (Donor money keeps getting pumped into Cambodia, and the money keeps being squandered; it is only now, after a decade, that the donor countries are starting to say to the Cambodian government: You better do with it what we tell you to do with it.) The point is, Africa is not just some mythical blob of suffering that will be healed by cash. Cash will help; cash never hurts. But when you have generations of people raised to believe that ‘foreigner equeals someone who gives me money’, that damages and taints everything, from infrastructure to infant mortality.
4) There Is No They – Another one of my recurring themes here at this blog for the, oh, two people who may read it on a regular basis. The whole point of the concerts, as I understood them, was to force the G-8 countries to pony up the cash for Africa. Fine. But there was no talk of Africans helping themselves, and very little asked of the people attending the concerts. Mass mobilizations can work wonders and bring down civilizations, as recent events in the Middle East and Central Asia have shown. But that’s not enough. It comes down to you, and you alone. It comes down to the Africans. It comes down to individuals guided by conscience. There is no ‘they’. There is only you.
I hate to sound like a curmudgeon for writing all of this, but I don’t think most Canadians (barring the native Indians) have ever really, truly seen poverty up close. It stinks and it’s dehumanizing and it’s ugly. Poverty is two thousand kids picking trash at a garbage dump every day with the hope of raising twenty-five, maybe fifty cents for their family after ten hours work in the blazing sun. Poverty is a brilliant, shining girl living in a small village who studies English hard every single day and who will never go to university because her parents can’t afford the yearly tuition, which amounts to about the cost of sixty of the bottles of water sold at the Canada Live 8 concert. Poverty is a life of bathing and drinking from the same water you shit in. Poverty means selling children for sex, transporting children for sex, and killing children, physically and mentally, for sex. Poverty is the scab you pick that regenerates itself. And the only reason I sometimes get so worked up about this whole issues arises from my own guilt, my own sense of bourgeois liberal shame; you can’t live here and not feel, well, superior, because you are – economically and educationally, as a foreigner, you are superior. As a person, no. The kindest people I’ve ever met have had nothing at all; as Paul Theroux ends his account of Africa, Dark Star Safari: “The best of them are bare-assed.”
The attention from Live 8 will, hopefully, enable the G-8 leaders to give Africa the support it needs and deserves. But such support is complex; it needs hard questions with even harder answers. It needs acknowledging the responsibilities that individual governments in individual countries need to live up to. It entitles asking people to help themselves and lay claim to themselves.
I have no answers; sometimes I feel stupid even acting like I know what I’m talking about, when I really, really don’t. Perhaps I’m misguided, and misinterpreting and overanalyzing the whole thing. I don’t know. At the very least, though, I’ve asked myself these questions, and thought about these concerns; two, three years ago, they weren’t even on my radar. I’ve started to see, living here in Cambodia, how complex and fucked-up and craven the world truly is. I’ve also realized its’ generosity and good-heartedness.
Balancing those two realities, dwelling within their borders, accepting your own role and your own responsibility, is a life-long endeavor that requires much, much more from others and ourselves than a little song and a little dance every decade or two, I guess is what I’m saying.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
SKIPPING STONES ON WATER
While having lunch today at the restaurant located across the street from the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World' drifted through the diner like some soothing, gossamer remnant of times gone by, and I remembered, quite suddenly, quite vividly, watching, as a kid, on video, the scene where the song appears in Good Morning Vietnam. A battle scene, a war scene, with a montage of fighting and explosions, all interwoven with the sensitivity inherent in Robin Williams' expressive eyes as he watches those young American men in trucks go off into battle.
It was the first time I was aware, I think, of juxtaposition, of irony, of two things colliding that created an effect larger and sweeter than the sum of their individual parts. Here you had a gentle song, celebrating the good stuff in life, and it was played over scenes of carnage, clearly the bad stuff in life.
My twelve year old brain didn't get it, couldn't get it. The song was about love; the images were about war. The song didn't fit the images! What the hell was going on?
And now, seventeen years later, I still don't know what the hell's going on, but I can appreciate that scene. At the time, I could barely imagine going to Toronto, let alone Vietnam; and hearing that song again, at twenty-nine, in a cafe in Cambodia, it brought me back. Returned me. To another time, another state of mind. One that seems very long ago, ages ago, and yet, paradoxically, as recent as yesterday, or this morning, or the minute before last. I remember watching that scene in that movie in that place. I remember the emotion it created. I remember the power of it.
What's that old quote? 'It's not that life's too short -- it's that death is so damn long.' Sometimes I can feel the tug and pull of life and at other times, like now, looking back, feeling back, I can recognize that we're here for a blip. One segment in time overlaps another, and some segments are longer than others, but still. In 1987, '88, I was a kid who loved movies, and Good Morning Vietnam was one that I loved. In 2004, '05, I'm a man who loves movies, who just returned from Vietnam. There's some kind of strange, if erratic, symmetry at work there. One that involves an understanding of life gleamed from a silver screen, and another, parallel understanding earned from a life lived in uncertain and hesitant starts and stops.
Sometimes I think it would be nice if life just spread outward, in a straight line. But there are always rings within rings. You can't tell where one starts and finishes. Past and future collide, each reinterpreting the other, with the present acting, in vain, as a deaf and dmb interpreter.
It's all like a stone skipped across water -- determining at what point the stone stopped before moving forward is a fool's game. It dips and bobs and eventually sinks. That's the whole point of throwing a rock across a lake -- to see how far you can hurl it before it succumbs to gravity. To see what kind of waves you can make. To see what type of speed you can get, and what unlikely, transitory pathway makes itself apparent on the surface of the water, before the pattern itself disintegrates, as it must.
It was the first time I was aware, I think, of juxtaposition, of irony, of two things colliding that created an effect larger and sweeter than the sum of their individual parts. Here you had a gentle song, celebrating the good stuff in life, and it was played over scenes of carnage, clearly the bad stuff in life.
My twelve year old brain didn't get it, couldn't get it. The song was about love; the images were about war. The song didn't fit the images! What the hell was going on?
And now, seventeen years later, I still don't know what the hell's going on, but I can appreciate that scene. At the time, I could barely imagine going to Toronto, let alone Vietnam; and hearing that song again, at twenty-nine, in a cafe in Cambodia, it brought me back. Returned me. To another time, another state of mind. One that seems very long ago, ages ago, and yet, paradoxically, as recent as yesterday, or this morning, or the minute before last. I remember watching that scene in that movie in that place. I remember the emotion it created. I remember the power of it.
What's that old quote? 'It's not that life's too short -- it's that death is so damn long.' Sometimes I can feel the tug and pull of life and at other times, like now, looking back, feeling back, I can recognize that we're here for a blip. One segment in time overlaps another, and some segments are longer than others, but still. In 1987, '88, I was a kid who loved movies, and Good Morning Vietnam was one that I loved. In 2004, '05, I'm a man who loves movies, who just returned from Vietnam. There's some kind of strange, if erratic, symmetry at work there. One that involves an understanding of life gleamed from a silver screen, and another, parallel understanding earned from a life lived in uncertain and hesitant starts and stops.
Sometimes I think it would be nice if life just spread outward, in a straight line. But there are always rings within rings. You can't tell where one starts and finishes. Past and future collide, each reinterpreting the other, with the present acting, in vain, as a deaf and dmb interpreter.
It's all like a stone skipped across water -- determining at what point the stone stopped before moving forward is a fool's game. It dips and bobs and eventually sinks. That's the whole point of throwing a rock across a lake -- to see how far you can hurl it before it succumbs to gravity. To see what kind of waves you can make. To see what type of speed you can get, and what unlikely, transitory pathway makes itself apparent on the surface of the water, before the pattern itself disintegrates, as it must.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)