This song always takes me back to a specific time and place:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx9br5ISRpo
Back to precisely where, and exactly when, is irrelevant to my point (as is the message of the song, whose mysterious, haunting tone bewitches me still), which is that music accesses different parts of ourselves than movies or books, text or images. We hear something, a song, and we're doing something else, profound or trival, or both at one and the same time, and then later, ten years or twenty years down the line, the song emerges from inside of ourselves, or out of the radio, and it's as if time and space have collapsed in upon themselves. We are twenty again, or perhaps we have always been twenty, even at birth, and we will be once again at death. Faulkner knew that the past isn't even past, but it's also not only present. It points towards a future we can't yet glimpse, or sense, or imagine. A cold wind blows upon our necks as the song sings its glorious, nostalgic, mournful chorus. The sky in stasis so far above is grey and distant, almost mocking, and yet: no matter. From my past my younger self declares (or I hereby order him to proclaim): "I will remember this moment, dread this moment, savor this moment, fucking feel this moment when fate or chance decides to play out its tune for me a last and glorious time."
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
A PAGE IS TURNED
News of Steven Page leaving The Barenaked Ladies was big news in Canada a few months back. It wasn't the Beatles breaking up, no, but for Canadians, it was close enough.
BNL has come to represent everything fun and heartfelt, goofy and socially conscious about Canada. When I was in high school, the band broke free from Scarborough with word-of mouth copies of their debut 'yellow tape', a homemade cassette sold at concerts and passed around Ontario. My brother would stick it in the tape deck as we drove for running workouts in and around St.Catharines. I remember how proud I was of them when their first CD came out. And when they played Saturday Night Live. And when they then hit number one in the States with 'One Week'. (Their second CD provided the soundtrack for my freshman year of university. The cold and windy North York winters were soothed by endless repeats of two or three songs on my CD player. Knowing that Steven Page and Ed Roberts, the lead singers, both attended my university made the sounds even sweeter. Even now, fifteen years on, I can clearly picture my dorm room in Winters College, and my roommate, Nathan, out and about somewhere, and me lying on my back, listening to the wind and the Barenaked Ladies battle each other for sonic supremacy.)
And now Page, the big guy, is on his own, and the others will continue on in their own specific way, shape and form.
I'm sure the newly emancipated Page will do good stuff, as will the Ladies, but still.
Some things shouldn't end.
Here's my favorite BNL song, with Page on stage singing lead vocals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLv7RUPxdWA
And here's my second favorite (technically a cover, but what the hell):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7e9TdzJIA&feature=related
BNL has come to represent everything fun and heartfelt, goofy and socially conscious about Canada. When I was in high school, the band broke free from Scarborough with word-of mouth copies of their debut 'yellow tape', a homemade cassette sold at concerts and passed around Ontario. My brother would stick it in the tape deck as we drove for running workouts in and around St.Catharines. I remember how proud I was of them when their first CD came out. And when they played Saturday Night Live. And when they then hit number one in the States with 'One Week'. (Their second CD provided the soundtrack for my freshman year of university. The cold and windy North York winters were soothed by endless repeats of two or three songs on my CD player. Knowing that Steven Page and Ed Roberts, the lead singers, both attended my university made the sounds even sweeter. Even now, fifteen years on, I can clearly picture my dorm room in Winters College, and my roommate, Nathan, out and about somewhere, and me lying on my back, listening to the wind and the Barenaked Ladies battle each other for sonic supremacy.)
And now Page, the big guy, is on his own, and the others will continue on in their own specific way, shape and form.
I'm sure the newly emancipated Page will do good stuff, as will the Ladies, but still.
Some things shouldn't end.
Here's my favorite BNL song, with Page on stage singing lead vocals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLv7RUPxdWA
And here's my second favorite (technically a cover, but what the hell):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7e9TdzJIA&feature=related
SEVEN (ELEVEN) ON THE COUCH
Early this morning, while hustling in and out of the 7-11 near my station, I found myself humming along to the muzak bubbling forth from the convenience store's speakers, and it took me a second to recognize the tune, and then I realized that it was the theme song from Welcome Back Kotter, and the fact that it had been converted to muzak, and that I was listening to such a bizarre rendition of a beloved seventies' sitcom from my early childhood in a convenience store in Yokohama, provided a much needed early-morning boost to a rainy day in May. I am now in Japan, reasonably adult, but somewhere, in some other realm, I'm still seven, on the couch, and Mr.Kotter is still trying to get Epstein and Washington, Barbarino and Horschack to sit down and shut up.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
TURNING LEFT OR RIGHT
Should you ever find yourself at Shin-Yokohama station, you'll have two ticket gates to choose from in order to exit the building. Coming up the stairs, turning left will take you to the larger, swankier, busier bullet-train platform that most of the commuting hordes are heading towards. Coming up the stairs, turning right will lead you to the smaller gate that leads towards my apartment. Not many people are headed towards this gate, but it's where I end up each and every day.
Me, and the mourners, and the lovers.
The building kitty-corner to my own, more or less, is a funeral parlor. A Japanese kind . A Buddhist kind. I'm guessing. For weeks after I first moved in last semester, as I left my apartment for the five-minute walk to the station, I would often notice large groups of men and women, usually older, almost always solemn, filing towards this building wearing blacks suits and even blacker dresses. It looks like an ordinary office building, but occasionally a siren will sound, and a hearse will slowly emerge from the underground parking garage (can a hearse even go fast?) and a serious-looking man will halt traffic as a group of mourners bow deeply, almost the ground, as if they're looking for lost change, until the car has rounded the corner and continued on its way. If I'm near the building at around this time, I'm forced to stop. And watch. Death, in all its mundane, every-day anti-glory.
That's what happens if I turn right out of my building.
If I turn left, however, and mosey up the streets a little ways towards the Family Mart convenience store, I'm confronted by two or three 'love hotels', which are designed for, well, you can guess. Japanese folks often live with their families, or even extended families, so intimacy is difficult, if not impossible. To fill the gap, love hotels blanket the urban cityscape. They often look like little castles. Other times they look like, well, nothing known to modern architecture. One down the road is named, in English, 'Hotel Chapel Coconuts', and has a vaguely jungle theme, with a billboard adorned in monkeys, and tiki-lamps sprouting real, full flames, and outside TV monitors endlessly replaying what looks like Malaysian dancers bopping to their foreign, supposedly romantic, beat. (I haven't figured out where the 'chapel' part comes into play.)
Some nights after work, heading home, softly whistling under the Japanese moon that is identical to the Canadian, Cambodian and Philippines moons I'm intimitately familiar with, I imagine a couple entering one of those love hotels. Fresh, smiling, the man carrying the plastic bags full of beer and instant noodles they've purchased moments before at the 7-11. Ready for action, so sto speak. Nine months later they have a child. The man gets a job near Shin-Yokohama station, so they decide to settle in the area. The child grows up here, goes to school here, finds a job here. Fifty years later, he suffers a heart attack at home while watching the Tokyo Giants defeat the Hiroshima Carp on TV. He is given a funeral at the funeral home around the corner from where he was conceived. His life has ended where it begun.
There is an odd kind of symmetry to this morbid fantasy. Life and death, conception and extinction, forming an inevitable loop against our collective will. Not likely that such a scenario could play itself out, but it also wasn't likely that John Ritter could have been born in the same hospital that he died in, and that happened, so I suppose something like this could, too.
Whenever I have such morbid, oddly comforting notions such as this, something absurd will spring me back to the sunshine of reality. Just yesterday, while walking past the east exit of the bullet train platform at the station, I noticed a middle-aged black man with a young Japanese female on his arm, accompanied by an elderly Japanese couple. The black man smiled and nodded at someone looking at him. His Japanese admirer smiled back. Why would he nod at a stranger, I wondered? As he got closer towards me, I realized that I recognized him, one of the most famous foreigners in Japan, and he was wearing a black shirt that read TEAM BILLY on the back.
So whenever I'm thinking too much of life and death, birth and survival, turning left and turning right, I accidentally run into Billy Blanks, inventor of Tae-Bo, and I'm reminded, again, that the cosmos have, if not a sense of humor, at least a sense of proportion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Blanks
Me, and the mourners, and the lovers.
The building kitty-corner to my own, more or less, is a funeral parlor. A Japanese kind . A Buddhist kind. I'm guessing. For weeks after I first moved in last semester, as I left my apartment for the five-minute walk to the station, I would often notice large groups of men and women, usually older, almost always solemn, filing towards this building wearing blacks suits and even blacker dresses. It looks like an ordinary office building, but occasionally a siren will sound, and a hearse will slowly emerge from the underground parking garage (can a hearse even go fast?) and a serious-looking man will halt traffic as a group of mourners bow deeply, almost the ground, as if they're looking for lost change, until the car has rounded the corner and continued on its way. If I'm near the building at around this time, I'm forced to stop. And watch. Death, in all its mundane, every-day anti-glory.
That's what happens if I turn right out of my building.
If I turn left, however, and mosey up the streets a little ways towards the Family Mart convenience store, I'm confronted by two or three 'love hotels', which are designed for, well, you can guess. Japanese folks often live with their families, or even extended families, so intimacy is difficult, if not impossible. To fill the gap, love hotels blanket the urban cityscape. They often look like little castles. Other times they look like, well, nothing known to modern architecture. One down the road is named, in English, 'Hotel Chapel Coconuts', and has a vaguely jungle theme, with a billboard adorned in monkeys, and tiki-lamps sprouting real, full flames, and outside TV monitors endlessly replaying what looks like Malaysian dancers bopping to their foreign, supposedly romantic, beat. (I haven't figured out where the 'chapel' part comes into play.)
Some nights after work, heading home, softly whistling under the Japanese moon that is identical to the Canadian, Cambodian and Philippines moons I'm intimitately familiar with, I imagine a couple entering one of those love hotels. Fresh, smiling, the man carrying the plastic bags full of beer and instant noodles they've purchased moments before at the 7-11. Ready for action, so sto speak. Nine months later they have a child. The man gets a job near Shin-Yokohama station, so they decide to settle in the area. The child grows up here, goes to school here, finds a job here. Fifty years later, he suffers a heart attack at home while watching the Tokyo Giants defeat the Hiroshima Carp on TV. He is given a funeral at the funeral home around the corner from where he was conceived. His life has ended where it begun.
There is an odd kind of symmetry to this morbid fantasy. Life and death, conception and extinction, forming an inevitable loop against our collective will. Not likely that such a scenario could play itself out, but it also wasn't likely that John Ritter could have been born in the same hospital that he died in, and that happened, so I suppose something like this could, too.
Whenever I have such morbid, oddly comforting notions such as this, something absurd will spring me back to the sunshine of reality. Just yesterday, while walking past the east exit of the bullet train platform at the station, I noticed a middle-aged black man with a young Japanese female on his arm, accompanied by an elderly Japanese couple. The black man smiled and nodded at someone looking at him. His Japanese admirer smiled back. Why would he nod at a stranger, I wondered? As he got closer towards me, I realized that I recognized him, one of the most famous foreigners in Japan, and he was wearing a black shirt that read TEAM BILLY on the back.
So whenever I'm thinking too much of life and death, birth and survival, turning left and turning right, I accidentally run into Billy Blanks, inventor of Tae-Bo, and I'm reminded, again, that the cosmos have, if not a sense of humor, at least a sense of proportion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Blanks
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
RED ROVER, RED ROVER, I CALL MY CHILDHOOD OVER!
I had forgotten all about Red Rover. The game. The one we used to play as kids, on dusky summer nights when the sun was gradually setting, and the air was getting cool, and in this hint of night the mesh soccer shirts we all wore suddenly seemed far too thin, the sleeves much too short, the sweatshirts our mothers advocated only hours before suddenly seeming like missing, hidden talismans. Two teams faced each other across the field. One person would shout: "Red rover, red over, I call Brendan over!" And Brendan (or Chris, or Tracey) would have to attempt to make it across the wide and pungent grass without getting caught. Or tackled. Or touched.
But that's wrong. Because I seem to remember different rules. Contradictory ones. Ones where we were all running across the field as one, our entire team, and if somebody was caught, anybody was caught, then they automatically became part of the other team.
Did we have two different sets of rules? How could something so simple, so rudimentary as the rules that once defined a good portion of my hours suddenly be missing from the space inside of my head? I used to know this stuff the same way I now know the combination to my mailbox. That routine, boring click that opens the way to flyers and bills.
I only ask because David Mitchell's extraordinary novel Black Swan Green, about a twelve year old British boy's entry into adolescene, adulthood, life, in 1982 contains a scene featuring Red Rover, but while reading the rules struck me as different. Familiar, but English. And yet when I tried to remember the rules from my own youth, I was left with nothing but vague, wispy images; the mad cackle of childhood, multiplied; sweaty, smelly t-shirts grabbed by the neck, almost torn, as punishment for being caught.
The best fiction takes us back, not forward. It reminds us of who we were and what we lost. And since we all lose our childhood, slowly, then ultimately all at once, it doesn't take a genius to recognize Mitchell's extraordinary ability to immerse us in the vivid present of those awful, wonderful early years.
How fresh everything was! Life can become so mandatory. Even me, having lived for almost exactly a decade in three unceasingly foreign countries, having straddled multiple languages and impenetrable cities, having continually borne witness to cancer and its insidious, extended grasp on everyone around it, can become numb with the nagging, cloud-grey repetition of it all. Sometimes we need the imaginary to plant us back in the technicolor savagery and grace of the past. Of the madness of childhood.
How could I have fucking forgotten the rules of Red Rover? It's almost obscene. There were days and nights in those dead and distant days of 1980, '82, '84, when games of Red Rover, kick-the-can and hide-and-go-seek seemed like sensational means of ordinary elevation. The stupendous was so routine that we didn't catch sight of our soaring imaginations. We would simply rise through our play. Effortlessly. A blue rubber ball became the focus of our obsessions. A hockey stick with shoddy tape remained a weapon, an instrument of ego. The sandbox at my school was vast, a potential entry into quicksand and oblivion. I played marbles at recess every day without fail, shielding their prowess in a deep purple wine pouch, the steelies being the most valuable, round and shiny and globe-like in their immensity. After school, there were five or six kids in the neighbourhood around Bayshore Crescent who were more than happy to indulge again in extended versions of G-Force and The A-Team. A few years later, we could play army and First Blood, Chuck Norris and Uncommon Valor with green machine guns to the steady, insistent beat of the waves softly lapping Lake Ontario's shore, whose waters almost reached my bedroom window, where on dark and chilly November nights I could see an infinity of stars keeping watch on Toronto, the CN Tower stretching upward, somehow reaching out and towards me, leaping the gap across that glorious lake, willing me away from my childhood and my city. Soon I will leave all of this behind, I thought. I will go there, to that place. Not knowing if it was a threat or a lament.
How long has it been since I had grass stains on my shorts? Scabs on my elbows? As a kid I fell down a slide and bonked my nose, the blood flowing freely, my brother and my cousin coming back with me to my grandmother's house to make sure I wasn't dead or damaged beyond repair. Sometimes I can still taste that stinging, invigorating blood in the back of my throat, reminding me of a different time within myself. Always autumn, this time remains. Blackboard clouds bringing winter. My comics in my room -- cloaked in plastic backs, backed by cardboard, safe and protected -- and the closed chambers in my head begged to be opened so that they could let imagination work its wonder. Even lead me, if lucky, to a mental spring and summer whose sunshine would help stain the endless February to follow.
But that's wrong. Because I seem to remember different rules. Contradictory ones. Ones where we were all running across the field as one, our entire team, and if somebody was caught, anybody was caught, then they automatically became part of the other team.
Did we have two different sets of rules? How could something so simple, so rudimentary as the rules that once defined a good portion of my hours suddenly be missing from the space inside of my head? I used to know this stuff the same way I now know the combination to my mailbox. That routine, boring click that opens the way to flyers and bills.
I only ask because David Mitchell's extraordinary novel Black Swan Green, about a twelve year old British boy's entry into adolescene, adulthood, life, in 1982 contains a scene featuring Red Rover, but while reading the rules struck me as different. Familiar, but English. And yet when I tried to remember the rules from my own youth, I was left with nothing but vague, wispy images; the mad cackle of childhood, multiplied; sweaty, smelly t-shirts grabbed by the neck, almost torn, as punishment for being caught.
The best fiction takes us back, not forward. It reminds us of who we were and what we lost. And since we all lose our childhood, slowly, then ultimately all at once, it doesn't take a genius to recognize Mitchell's extraordinary ability to immerse us in the vivid present of those awful, wonderful early years.
How fresh everything was! Life can become so mandatory. Even me, having lived for almost exactly a decade in three unceasingly foreign countries, having straddled multiple languages and impenetrable cities, having continually borne witness to cancer and its insidious, extended grasp on everyone around it, can become numb with the nagging, cloud-grey repetition of it all. Sometimes we need the imaginary to plant us back in the technicolor savagery and grace of the past. Of the madness of childhood.
How could I have fucking forgotten the rules of Red Rover? It's almost obscene. There were days and nights in those dead and distant days of 1980, '82, '84, when games of Red Rover, kick-the-can and hide-and-go-seek seemed like sensational means of ordinary elevation. The stupendous was so routine that we didn't catch sight of our soaring imaginations. We would simply rise through our play. Effortlessly. A blue rubber ball became the focus of our obsessions. A hockey stick with shoddy tape remained a weapon, an instrument of ego. The sandbox at my school was vast, a potential entry into quicksand and oblivion. I played marbles at recess every day without fail, shielding their prowess in a deep purple wine pouch, the steelies being the most valuable, round and shiny and globe-like in their immensity. After school, there were five or six kids in the neighbourhood around Bayshore Crescent who were more than happy to indulge again in extended versions of G-Force and The A-Team. A few years later, we could play army and First Blood, Chuck Norris and Uncommon Valor with green machine guns to the steady, insistent beat of the waves softly lapping Lake Ontario's shore, whose waters almost reached my bedroom window, where on dark and chilly November nights I could see an infinity of stars keeping watch on Toronto, the CN Tower stretching upward, somehow reaching out and towards me, leaping the gap across that glorious lake, willing me away from my childhood and my city. Soon I will leave all of this behind, I thought. I will go there, to that place. Not knowing if it was a threat or a lament.
How long has it been since I had grass stains on my shorts? Scabs on my elbows? As a kid I fell down a slide and bonked my nose, the blood flowing freely, my brother and my cousin coming back with me to my grandmother's house to make sure I wasn't dead or damaged beyond repair. Sometimes I can still taste that stinging, invigorating blood in the back of my throat, reminding me of a different time within myself. Always autumn, this time remains. Blackboard clouds bringing winter. My comics in my room -- cloaked in plastic backs, backed by cardboard, safe and protected -- and the closed chambers in my head begged to be opened so that they could let imagination work its wonder. Even lead me, if lucky, to a mental spring and summer whose sunshine would help stain the endless February to follow.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
RIGHT IN YOUR LAP
Being ignorant of all things science, I've never understood why it is that potato chip bags are always only half-full, or why fizzy drinks in plastic bottles inevitably have that little gap near the top that leaves you with less liquid than you thought had to begin with, and I realize that the explanation has something to do with air pressure, and volume, and things settling near the opening, and I've never completely bought that scenario, truth be told, figuring, instead, that it was all a carefully prepared ploy by the potato chip companies and soft-drink manufacturers to rob us, the 'valued' consumer, out of our rightful junk-food due, and now I have proof, visible, sustained, observable proof, that such does not have to be the case, that there are companies with the guts and the dignity to fill it all the way to the top, corporate bigwigs and bosses be damned.
Of course, it might not be entire companies that are paving the way. It may, in fact, reside in the hands of one determined, dedicated individual.
Recently I've been buying Magnolia Orange Juice drink, in a bottle, from various convenience stores in the Baguio area. The first time I twisted the lid, I spilled a little bit of orange drink all over my pants. As this is not exactly a rare occurrence in my life, complete klutz that I am, at first I blamed it on myself, but then I noticed: the bottle was full. I mean, filled to the top, full. There was no gap between the lid and the liquid; there was no space; there was 'room for settling'.
I thought this was an isolated incidence.
I was wrong.
For I've now bought half a dozen of these 335ml bottles, and in every case the same thing happens. I twist the lid, and I see, smell, taste that the liquid is filled up to the neck and over the top.
How could this be so? How come I've never encountered such a surprising, satisfying phenomena with any other drink I've bought in the last twenty years?
I soon realized: This is no accident.
Most likely, it's the work of one man. A dedicated worker, yes, but one who serves a higher calling. He knows that it's a crock of shit, this 'leaving-room-for-settling' in the container that the companies keep proclaiming is the reason why they rob us of one sip of liquid in each and every drink we buy from the bottle. It may be only one sip, but one sip added up over millions and millions of bottles shipped world-wide amounts to millions and millions of dollars saved at corporate head-office, money that is undoubtedly being used, even as I write these words, to fund fox-coats for slinky mistresses and posh private schools for bratty kids. There is a worker on some assembly line, in Mumbai or Manila, Tokyo or Toledo, who understands this injustice. He is a good man, a family man, not prone to breaking the law. Not looking to risk his life and livelihood for a better social order. And yet he recognizes that all this waste need not be the case. I'm not sure exactly how drinks are put into plastic bottles at the factory level, but somehow this anonymous man, who wants nothing more from life than the roof over his head and the food on his table and the sun up above which all too rarely shines on his face, given that he has the night shift, has always had the shift, ever since the age of eighteen, and this man, he decides, on a daily basis, to buck the system. To put that extra sip of orange juice into each and every bottle. I don't think he has been caught, this man. And I don't think he craves glory, so I hope I'm not violating his privacy. And yet I cannot let this brave and noble and selfless act of his go unnoticed. Each day he risks dismissal, and jeopardizes the lives of himself and his family, and yet he will not beaten. His pay is meager. He needs the money. His family is relying on him and him alone to keep the wolves at bay. He persists, nevertheless. Always looking over his shoulder. Always keeping one eye on the assembly line, the other looking out for his boss. I don't know if he fills these bottles by hand, and I 'm not able to ascertain whether or not he has reprogrammed the automated machine that does the dirty work. All I know for certain is that he is there, in some darkly-lit factory, sweating, doing what he can to make our juice-drinking lives a little better. When his shift his over the sun is already emerging moment by moment, up, up and away, red and full in an ash-grey sky shifting from dull black to brilliant blue, and he will miss most of the day and most of this sky, asleep on his cot in his hot, cramped apartment. His children are at school. His wife is at work. He smokes a well-deserved cigarette before plumping his pillow and collapsing on his make-shift couch. The day is just beginning but his is already ending. But while the rest of the world chases ever more shallow dreams, vain and empty wisps of pride, he has carved out of life a small crest of dignity that is his and his alone, that he hides, almost hordes. When the moon begins to rise, so will he, and the half-mile walk to his work will seem all the more sweeter because he knows that there is something waiting for him a few minutes away. Something pure that he protects. A bottle, a splash of juice, a space. Endlessly repeated. He will stand all night and imagine the surprise on the faces of those who open his bottles, the shock followed by joy that only comes when something sweet and unexpected lands right in your lap.
Of course, it might not be entire companies that are paving the way. It may, in fact, reside in the hands of one determined, dedicated individual.
Recently I've been buying Magnolia Orange Juice drink, in a bottle, from various convenience stores in the Baguio area. The first time I twisted the lid, I spilled a little bit of orange drink all over my pants. As this is not exactly a rare occurrence in my life, complete klutz that I am, at first I blamed it on myself, but then I noticed: the bottle was full. I mean, filled to the top, full. There was no gap between the lid and the liquid; there was no space; there was 'room for settling'.
I thought this was an isolated incidence.
I was wrong.
For I've now bought half a dozen of these 335ml bottles, and in every case the same thing happens. I twist the lid, and I see, smell, taste that the liquid is filled up to the neck and over the top.
How could this be so? How come I've never encountered such a surprising, satisfying phenomena with any other drink I've bought in the last twenty years?
I soon realized: This is no accident.
Most likely, it's the work of one man. A dedicated worker, yes, but one who serves a higher calling. He knows that it's a crock of shit, this 'leaving-room-for-settling' in the container that the companies keep proclaiming is the reason why they rob us of one sip of liquid in each and every drink we buy from the bottle. It may be only one sip, but one sip added up over millions and millions of bottles shipped world-wide amounts to millions and millions of dollars saved at corporate head-office, money that is undoubtedly being used, even as I write these words, to fund fox-coats for slinky mistresses and posh private schools for bratty kids. There is a worker on some assembly line, in Mumbai or Manila, Tokyo or Toledo, who understands this injustice. He is a good man, a family man, not prone to breaking the law. Not looking to risk his life and livelihood for a better social order. And yet he recognizes that all this waste need not be the case. I'm not sure exactly how drinks are put into plastic bottles at the factory level, but somehow this anonymous man, who wants nothing more from life than the roof over his head and the food on his table and the sun up above which all too rarely shines on his face, given that he has the night shift, has always had the shift, ever since the age of eighteen, and this man, he decides, on a daily basis, to buck the system. To put that extra sip of orange juice into each and every bottle. I don't think he has been caught, this man. And I don't think he craves glory, so I hope I'm not violating his privacy. And yet I cannot let this brave and noble and selfless act of his go unnoticed. Each day he risks dismissal, and jeopardizes the lives of himself and his family, and yet he will not beaten. His pay is meager. He needs the money. His family is relying on him and him alone to keep the wolves at bay. He persists, nevertheless. Always looking over his shoulder. Always keeping one eye on the assembly line, the other looking out for his boss. I don't know if he fills these bottles by hand, and I 'm not able to ascertain whether or not he has reprogrammed the automated machine that does the dirty work. All I know for certain is that he is there, in some darkly-lit factory, sweating, doing what he can to make our juice-drinking lives a little better. When his shift his over the sun is already emerging moment by moment, up, up and away, red and full in an ash-grey sky shifting from dull black to brilliant blue, and he will miss most of the day and most of this sky, asleep on his cot in his hot, cramped apartment. His children are at school. His wife is at work. He smokes a well-deserved cigarette before plumping his pillow and collapsing on his make-shift couch. The day is just beginning but his is already ending. But while the rest of the world chases ever more shallow dreams, vain and empty wisps of pride, he has carved out of life a small crest of dignity that is his and his alone, that he hides, almost hordes. When the moon begins to rise, so will he, and the half-mile walk to his work will seem all the more sweeter because he knows that there is something waiting for him a few minutes away. Something pure that he protects. A bottle, a splash of juice, a space. Endlessly repeated. He will stand all night and imagine the surprise on the faces of those who open his bottles, the shock followed by joy that only comes when something sweet and unexpected lands right in your lap.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
PHILIPPINES IN THE DAY AND 'AMERICA AT NIGHT': COVERT CONCERNS CONVERGE
While waiting for the Baguio Immigration Office to open up again the other day after its one hour lunch break, a big, jovial British bloke started to chat me up, asking where I was from and what I was doing here, sounding almost relieved, if not genuinely excited, to hear that I hailed from Canada, and he mentioned quite casually that he had an aunt living in Canada, somewhere in the, where was it, the western part of the country, he believed, Vancouver, perhaps, though one could never be sure, and he smiled contentedly as he talked about how he had lived and worked for many years in Saudi Arabia, and how he had been rather nicely settled here in the Philippines for fifteen months or so with his sweetheart, and he was quite friendly, this chap was, embodying that kind of instant intimacy that seems to unite fellow strangers in a foreign land, and yet all through this short but pleasant conversation on this warm and sunny afternoon, sitting on the newly-painted blue benches next to the Korean restaurant, I couldn't help but think of this friendly, Santa-shaped Englishman as anything other than an undercover C.I.A agent, sussing me out and hoping to recruit another possible asset to his growing portfolio of underground, illicit potential.
Of course, it didn't help my paranoia that the paperback book nestled inside of my blag bag slung over my shoulder was titled: America At Night: The True Story of Two Rogue C.I.A. Operatives, Homeland Security Failures, Dirty Money, and a Plot to Steal the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election -- by the Former Intelligence Agent who Foiled the Plan.
Written by Larry Kolb, who spent twenty years in covert C.I.A. operations all over the world (including the Philippines), the book is an absolutely fascinating account of how he accidentally discovered that two possible C.I.A operatives were planning to somehow link one of John Kerrey's campaign managers with a telecommunications firm linked to Al-Qaida, and thus decisively tilt the American election in the Republicans favor once and for all and forever.
I've always loved a good conspiracy theory; I just like them to be plausible. (I finally abandoned my decades-long belief in the J.F.K.-assassination-conspiracy-industry because I no longer could find it credible, possible, or, yes, plausible.)
This book is plausible.
It's also riveting reading, because it kind of underlines what I've slowly learned for myself, living in Cambodia and the Philippines -- that the government can be corrupt, that powerful people will lie, that money rules the roost, and there's so much more going on underneath the placid surface of public life that to actually uncover the truth is not only disheartening and disillusioning -- it's also somewhat frightening.
This story also pulses with the implausibility of life itself. Months after actually having helped unravel this whole dastardly scheme, the author actually bumps into John Kerrey in New York City, as Kerrey steps out of a hotel. What are the odd of this? Check the tape, Kolb writes. Somewhere, in some forgotten canister in the corner of a dimly-lit room, there would be video tape of a certain day in December (or November, or whenever it was), tape taken from surveillance cameras on New York City intersections, or video from the hotel security camera. Quoting detective writer Dashiell Hammet, Kolb notes that since matter always comes into contact with other matter, there will always be a trail. Anybody and anything can be found.
That's the essence of the book, essentially --- the boring necessity of following random or shady leads, checking mind-numbingly arcane legal documents, sifting through dusty, moldy files. That's how conspiracies are discovered and uncovered; that's how facts are found or forgotten.
It reminded me of Bob Baer's book Fear No Evil, a similar account of an underworld that few of us even imagine, let alone acknowledge actually exists. (George Clooney's C.I.A. character in the film Syriana was modeled directly on Baer.) Both books essentially paint a portrait of a secret world controlled by people doing things we'd really rather not know about, lest sleep itself becomes a cherished, nostalgic memory.
This is not to say these authors are advocating a secrety society covertly running the planet. (Or, as David Icke insists at www.davidicke.com, a secrety society of lizard-people covertly running the planet.)
No, it's more subtle than that.
It's a world where deals are cut and plans are made that are, quite simply, not told to people. Where different people in different departments of different government agencies do not trust each other and do not trust themselves, and are willing to do whatever it takes in order not to fail, and where simple human, moral concerns are suspect and irrelevant in the cutthroat realm of commece and politics.
Where author Larry Kolb can sit in a meeting with the first George W.Bush and Kolb's close friend, Muhammed Ali (!), and Bush can enlist Ali to secretly go to Iran to talk to the Ayatollah to help close a deal that would release American hostages, with nobody in the political world, the media world, the real world, being none the wiser.
No grand conspiracies; no massive modes of deception and deceit.
Just guarded conversations in brightly lit rooms, and agents being briefed in dark expensive cars as they circle around the city so as to make detection and observation all the more difficult. Just fake names firmly stamped on counterfeit passports.
All very orderly.
And yet nobody is truly looking at the whole, the big picture, the intersecting point where ambitions collide and outcomes are determined.
As Kolk points out, in my favorite, most astute line of the book: The people who are bringing you the War On Terror are the same people who brought you The War On Drugs. And look how that turned out...
The essential point being: There are people in charge, yes, of course, but each individual has their own agenda, usually separate from that of their ostensible employers, and when these agendas collide, as they essentially must, chaos reigns.
Because people are nothing if not chaotic.
Which brings me back to my original point, that of being possibly recruited by the C.I.A. in Baguio.
Absurd, of course.
And yet...
As I wrote in this space a few years back, a Canadian gent the same age as myself I met while dining with other folks at a cafe in Cambodia gradually inquired about my Japanese ability, and then smoothly tried to recruit me into the Canadian version of the C.IA., specifically its international-eavesdropping division. When I emailed the contact person's info he provided, just for the hell of it, just to push the process as far along the path as it could possibly go, the man wrote me back and literally asked: "How did you get this email address? Here's the application information, but don't tell anyone you know who I am or that you've been in contact with me."
After that odd encounter and its aftermath (which my Social Studies class at Pine Grove Public School in St.Catharines most definitely did not adequately prepare me for), and after reading America At Night, with its constant cavalcade of undercover agents, contacts, people-who-are-not-who-they-claim-to-be, can you actually blame me for suspecting the true intentions of a kindly fifty-year old British gent who tried to strike up a conversation with me in Immigration office of a middle-sized city in the northern part of the Philippines?
After all, another middle-aged teacher I worked with here recently informed me that he did a lot of work in Virginia, for a government agency, though he wouldn't tell me which one, and that he had lived on various islands in the Caribbean that I'd never even heard of, doing work for the 'space program', and that Baguio was positively filled with C.I.A. folks, but he wouldn't say why. (There's a substantial terrorist outfit working alive and afloat down in the southern islands, but I thought Baguio was pretty safe. I thought.)
I'm probably being overdramatic.
The day is warm, and the sun is bright, and why not simply let the light of spring guide my way. To dwell in the shadows of life is a dark and lonely business.
And yet.
As I left the Immigration Office, I noticed that the rather large British gentleman I'd talked with a quarter of an hour earlier was stilling waiting for his passport to be processed. In the meantime, wiping sweat from his brow with a white handkerchief, adjusting his black-framed glasses, he started striking up a conversation with the two or three Somali men sitting beside him. Where were they from? How long had they been in the Philippines? Africa, you say? Splendid!
I put my passport in my bag and hurried home.
Of course, it didn't help my paranoia that the paperback book nestled inside of my blag bag slung over my shoulder was titled: America At Night: The True Story of Two Rogue C.I.A. Operatives, Homeland Security Failures, Dirty Money, and a Plot to Steal the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election -- by the Former Intelligence Agent who Foiled the Plan.
Written by Larry Kolb, who spent twenty years in covert C.I.A. operations all over the world (including the Philippines), the book is an absolutely fascinating account of how he accidentally discovered that two possible C.I.A operatives were planning to somehow link one of John Kerrey's campaign managers with a telecommunications firm linked to Al-Qaida, and thus decisively tilt the American election in the Republicans favor once and for all and forever.
I've always loved a good conspiracy theory; I just like them to be plausible. (I finally abandoned my decades-long belief in the J.F.K.-assassination-conspiracy-industry because I no longer could find it credible, possible, or, yes, plausible.)
This book is plausible.
It's also riveting reading, because it kind of underlines what I've slowly learned for myself, living in Cambodia and the Philippines -- that the government can be corrupt, that powerful people will lie, that money rules the roost, and there's so much more going on underneath the placid surface of public life that to actually uncover the truth is not only disheartening and disillusioning -- it's also somewhat frightening.
This story also pulses with the implausibility of life itself. Months after actually having helped unravel this whole dastardly scheme, the author actually bumps into John Kerrey in New York City, as Kerrey steps out of a hotel. What are the odd of this? Check the tape, Kolb writes. Somewhere, in some forgotten canister in the corner of a dimly-lit room, there would be video tape of a certain day in December (or November, or whenever it was), tape taken from surveillance cameras on New York City intersections, or video from the hotel security camera. Quoting detective writer Dashiell Hammet, Kolb notes that since matter always comes into contact with other matter, there will always be a trail. Anybody and anything can be found.
That's the essence of the book, essentially --- the boring necessity of following random or shady leads, checking mind-numbingly arcane legal documents, sifting through dusty, moldy files. That's how conspiracies are discovered and uncovered; that's how facts are found or forgotten.
It reminded me of Bob Baer's book Fear No Evil, a similar account of an underworld that few of us even imagine, let alone acknowledge actually exists. (George Clooney's C.I.A. character in the film Syriana was modeled directly on Baer.) Both books essentially paint a portrait of a secret world controlled by people doing things we'd really rather not know about, lest sleep itself becomes a cherished, nostalgic memory.
This is not to say these authors are advocating a secrety society covertly running the planet. (Or, as David Icke insists at www.davidicke.com, a secrety society of lizard-people covertly running the planet.)
No, it's more subtle than that.
It's a world where deals are cut and plans are made that are, quite simply, not told to people. Where different people in different departments of different government agencies do not trust each other and do not trust themselves, and are willing to do whatever it takes in order not to fail, and where simple human, moral concerns are suspect and irrelevant in the cutthroat realm of commece and politics.
Where author Larry Kolb can sit in a meeting with the first George W.Bush and Kolb's close friend, Muhammed Ali (!), and Bush can enlist Ali to secretly go to Iran to talk to the Ayatollah to help close a deal that would release American hostages, with nobody in the political world, the media world, the real world, being none the wiser.
No grand conspiracies; no massive modes of deception and deceit.
Just guarded conversations in brightly lit rooms, and agents being briefed in dark expensive cars as they circle around the city so as to make detection and observation all the more difficult. Just fake names firmly stamped on counterfeit passports.
All very orderly.
And yet nobody is truly looking at the whole, the big picture, the intersecting point where ambitions collide and outcomes are determined.
As Kolk points out, in my favorite, most astute line of the book: The people who are bringing you the War On Terror are the same people who brought you The War On Drugs. And look how that turned out...
The essential point being: There are people in charge, yes, of course, but each individual has their own agenda, usually separate from that of their ostensible employers, and when these agendas collide, as they essentially must, chaos reigns.
Because people are nothing if not chaotic.
Which brings me back to my original point, that of being possibly recruited by the C.I.A. in Baguio.
Absurd, of course.
And yet...
As I wrote in this space a few years back, a Canadian gent the same age as myself I met while dining with other folks at a cafe in Cambodia gradually inquired about my Japanese ability, and then smoothly tried to recruit me into the Canadian version of the C.IA., specifically its international-eavesdropping division. When I emailed the contact person's info he provided, just for the hell of it, just to push the process as far along the path as it could possibly go, the man wrote me back and literally asked: "How did you get this email address? Here's the application information, but don't tell anyone you know who I am or that you've been in contact with me."
After that odd encounter and its aftermath (which my Social Studies class at Pine Grove Public School in St.Catharines most definitely did not adequately prepare me for), and after reading America At Night, with its constant cavalcade of undercover agents, contacts, people-who-are-not-who-they-claim-to-be, can you actually blame me for suspecting the true intentions of a kindly fifty-year old British gent who tried to strike up a conversation with me in Immigration office of a middle-sized city in the northern part of the Philippines?
After all, another middle-aged teacher I worked with here recently informed me that he did a lot of work in Virginia, for a government agency, though he wouldn't tell me which one, and that he had lived on various islands in the Caribbean that I'd never even heard of, doing work for the 'space program', and that Baguio was positively filled with C.I.A. folks, but he wouldn't say why. (There's a substantial terrorist outfit working alive and afloat down in the southern islands, but I thought Baguio was pretty safe. I thought.)
I'm probably being overdramatic.
The day is warm, and the sun is bright, and why not simply let the light of spring guide my way. To dwell in the shadows of life is a dark and lonely business.
And yet.
As I left the Immigration Office, I noticed that the rather large British gentleman I'd talked with a quarter of an hour earlier was stilling waiting for his passport to be processed. In the meantime, wiping sweat from his brow with a white handkerchief, adjusting his black-framed glasses, he started striking up a conversation with the two or three Somali men sitting beside him. Where were they from? How long had they been in the Philippines? Africa, you say? Splendid!
I put my passport in my bag and hurried home.
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