‘lĒn ‘tĪm[z]

1/2HK

2011-04-24T00:00:00.001-07:00

uploaded some songs from my new band: 8 by halfhk zhou's歌 by halfhk 新one by halfhk

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Pangbianr launch

2010-06-01T06:22:00.001-07:00

I launched a site today. It's the first site I've designed and points in the direction of other upcoming projects.

Posted via web from Josh Feola

Speaking of Noise

2010-04-17T02:27:00.001-07:00

Thurston Moore and Bill Nace experimentally verify the "my baby could do this" argument against electronic noise.

Posted via web from Josh Feola

Bowed Piano

2010-04-17T00:30:00.001-07:00

This is cool. Reminds me of when me, Andrew C and Derek Vincent banged the hell out of a piano soundboard that was lying vertical in an Allston basement closet with our fists and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Our "performance" wasn't as versatile, but it was very noisy and confusing to those people who are in Allston basements past midnight on a Wednesday.

Posted via web from Josh Feola

Relocation, Changes

2010-03-20T01:58:00.001-07:00

Wallys & Pringles by Raekwon
Download now or listen on posterous

Wallys & Pringles.mp3 (3063 KB)

My address has changed to http://joshfeola.com

For now I've just plugged the domain into my posterous account but I'll get around to creating a website soon.

More changes to come.

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Slow Motions

2009-08-25T17:24:00.001-07:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Reluctant Return, or Go East

2009-08-16T18:51:00.001-07:00

Long hiatus, Beijing stuff:

This NY Times article about Americans finding employment in China has been making a lot of waves recently. Mostly because it's totally ridiculous. For one thing a lot of the expats I've met here don't have jobs, or at least not the 'real' jobs that this article claims Chinese companies are tripping over themselves to offer young Americans on the strength of being young Americans. Second, the individuals profiled in this article come from prestigious universities and in some cases graduated with half a normal person's starting salary in savings, which means they entered the post-graduate fray with a leg up on anyone, anywhere in the world, not least of which small businesses in a developing country with an extremely low overhead and cost of living. Not hating, as I exactly fit the profile of a career-confused graduate who struck out unanimously in my US job hunt and so took "go west young man" to it's logical conclusion (the Far East) to find work here, but reading the Chinese media backlash is pretty funny and makes me more cautious and aware of this scene I'm just starting to grasp.

Anyway, to spin the focus back around to the home team, I recently read this great article by Camille Paglia on Obama's early term missteps and why Sarah Palin is kind of a media genius. And China:

With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W. Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade. What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

I guess the point is you should seek work in China.

Well I'm pretty much phoning it in with this post but I should be back on my game here soon. For now at least you can enjoy this (no longer very) new Raekwon family reunion-style jam:

House Of Flying Daggers by Raekwon Ft Inspectah Deck,Ghostface Killah & Method Man
Download now or listen on posterous

House Of Flying Daggers.mp3 (5604 KB)

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate

2009-08-07T01:09:00.001-07:00

"Deng Xiaoping’s (1904-1997) program has now lasted longer than Mao’s, and it continues to move forward. Indeed, in almost all of the manifestations of the Modern, the pace of China’s grand project has accelerated. Mao had hoped that the Countryside and all that it represented would surround and finally destroy everything that the City was and what it represented — and not only in China, but throughout the world. But the City has more than fought the Countryside to a draw; it is now counterattacking and it will win. China will soon leave behind its past as a predominately peasant society, and most of its people will live in urban settlements. Soon, there will be no countryside at all. Of course, the countryside will be more than just a memory for a long time; Postmodern China will have within it hundreds of millions of new urbanites who carry the Countryside’s habits of mind with them. The world as a whole may not yet be configured in the way late Qing-era writers of science fiction imagined it, but China’s newest cities — indeed, all the newest cities around the world — resemble the projections of prescient fantasists and pioneering filmmakers. The World City is now more [than] mere metaphor. It is a thing called Megalopolis, and it does not acknowledge national boundaries in its unstoppable sprawl."

-Charles Horner

Posted via email from Megalopoli

HK

2009-07-23T20:32:00.001-07:00

been a ghost lately. here's some pics from hong kong, a megalopolis i recently visited. note: straight edge skyscraper, non-edge beerfest, construction, juxtaposition, and some art or whatever.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Megalopoli

Hong Kong long gone

2009-07-13T22:45:00.001-07:00

Shootout to The Batman

Get It (Feat. Cam'ron And B. Rossi) by Mase
Download now or listen on posterous

Get It (feat. Cam'ron and B. Rossi).mp3 (5392 KB)

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Shootout saturday #manimissmydogs

2009-07-10T21:41:00.001-07:00

Slow week, here's some things my friends write that I read in lieu of having any real friends in Beijing:

Two of my Boston friends are living the entrepreneurial high/low life, I like following their successes on that ADD realtime engine called Twitter. Check out Oak and Grillo's Pickles, also stay tuned for a heavy brand-evangelistic review of Grillo's from me coming soon.

Speaking of Boston, Matt S's new blog venture has allowed me to greatly expand my obscure worldpsych/diamond in the rough Americana musical vocabulary, as well as vicariously hang out with my beantown crew. Thanks, Matt.

My friend Jesse Spears from LA is on Van's Warped tour, where she's painting a new participatory mural every day.

Kat is digging Inka sites in Ecuador, as is Mike, who doesn't have a linkable name but might be moving to Ulaan Battur soon so hopefully he will start a blog.

Jeff is traipsing around Israel, making cross-cultural connections and wondering about authenticity.

Speaking of Jeff, I curate a science news reading list for him on that other ADD realtime engine called Facebook. Here's what I've lined up for him this week:

Speaking of weird science, did you know that Tesla and Twain used to hang out? I had no idea. This gets me so amped.

Back to friends: Matt, Jay Bil and I have been posting fairly regularly to our city blog, drop by if you're into cell phone pictures of Tokyo, Turkish book design, or whatever it is I write about Beijing. Also, if you're by chance interested Balkan trout restoration, stay tuned for the newest member of the crew, Ljubljana-based John Zablocki.

Speaking of megalopoli, I'm headed to Hong Kong tomorrow morning. I already did the two tourist things that everyone recommends I do, so I'm not so sure what I'll get into. Probably just focus on avoiding this tropical cyclone. Cheers.

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Cosmic wave

2009-07-07T22:10:00.001-07:00

One-off weird music nights are rapidly becoming the Gauze to my Jay Bil. I can't remember the last noise/drone/etc show I went to in the US (well maybe I can) but I've already made 2kolegas Tuesdays a regular thing. Last night was kicked of by this French dude with his floor-camp setup of various chirping and blinking devices. He had this one synth panel thing from Japan that was a 16x16 grid of little white dots that would display cool animations as he programmed along, very beautiful actually.

The highlight of the night was a Japanese-Korean band called 10 ("我们是...十"). My new kolegas-affiliated friend Michael nailed it when he described them as "Japanese Bjork meets Kraftwerk." I couldn't tell if the girl (on the left) was on drugs or just cool, but she gave off this infectious weirdo vibe that successively transformed the set from pretty good to really enjoyable to the most fun I'm likely to have this week. The musical setup was pretty complex, with the dude on the right running some simple 808-style beats and modulating/looping the girl's mic, into which she inputed her voice (which had a considerable range on its own), balloons, squeak toys, a kazoo, and various other economical noise-emitting items. The best parts of the set were when she would lapse into the kind of deskilled, transcendent shredding you can only pull off if you're a cute Japanese girl with red Kanye glasses and a red panda umbrella and a red plastic keyboard guitar.

After 10 was a set of fairly enjoyable 8-bit gizmodgetry from these four guys, but the place was pretty much cleared out by then. I hung with Yan Jun a bit and discussed the possibility of playing one of these sparsely attended events, now I need to work on my entry point. First I need to go back to work.

Posted via web from Josh Feola

Drums and drone

2009-07-05T00:58:00.001-07:00

Bm by Black Monk
Download now or listen on posterous

BM.mp3 (9584 KB)

Another weekend, another post-late night late afternoon post.

As everyone knows (see below) I did my best to celebrate July 4th from Beijing. This is the second straight year I've been out-of-country for the 4th. Last year I celebrated by acting obnoxiously and uncharacteristically "American" toward my dear English friends and fellow Indonesia volunteers Kelly and Kate (basically saying "awesome" a lot and talking about herding cattle and generally playing into whatever other stereotypes they could throw at me). This year I wore a red white and blue plaid shirt and went out to meet a new friend, Elaine, the graphic designer I hutong-ed with last Friday. Elaine had a new, equally interesting crew lined up for the night: a Swiss artist-in-residence visiting from Kunming, an Italian PhD-in-progress studying acupuncture for the summer, and a guy named Bai Wei who's currently filming a documentary on stem cell research in China.

Also in tow was Twist, a Beijing-born English professor who lives in Elaine's building. Twist is a very cool guy (with a very cool name). After talking about religion and vegetarianism a bit I was excited to learn that Twist is a Hare Krishna. I had no idea that Krishna consciousness existed in China, but I learned from Twist that there is a small but committed group of devotees in the city.

One of the things I did to celebrate my country's independence was to try one of the most thoroughly "Beijing" of consumables, dou zhi (豆汁). This literally means "soybean juice", but is under no circumstances to be confused with the soy milk you buy at Whole Foods in wonderfully processed and palatable flavors. Dou zhi is very fermenty. Definitely an acquired taste, and one that even most "new school" Beijingers don't bother to acquire. I liked it, but given that my resume includes several years of veganism, one year of strict macrobiotics, and more recently various episodes of dietary exploration I guess I'm not exactly the least common denominator when it comes to thresholds for culinary weirdness.

After dinner I went to Gulou (鼓楼), Beijing's famous Drum Tower. We'd planned on going to an "Old Shanghai" event that somehow translated to dudes in red hats and matching Adidas short shorts... ended up just sitting outside and mooching the ambient music leaking through the walls while enjoying cheap beers from the mart next door and a sporadic breeze. After his third nip of baijiu Bai Wei became passionately engaged in elaborating upon numerous subjects to which he has dedicated much thought, notably stem cells, Obama's greatness, and the virtues and vices of Chinese women. Nice to have atypical conversations that move beyond the "who are you, what are you doing here, how long are you staying" exchanges I've had with most people I've met.

I went home at around 3am. This was my first time to Gulou, which is about 5 miles from my house, and got lost several times on the return trip, but I didn't mind. Riding my bike here, especially late at night, is a joy. There was some initial roughness with my new ride but after convincing my seat to remain solidly horizontal I've really fallen in love with my scrap heap of a bicycle. The breaks don't work so well so sometimes I have to screech to a halt by dragging my feet on the pavement Fred Flintstone style, and the lack of a bell means I've had to whistle a lot (for some reason I've defaulted primarily to "Michelle" by the Beatles and "Jump" by Van Halen for this purpose, do not ask me why), but these are minor bumps in an otherwise stellar relationship thus far.

I woke up this morning with a bill in my door that I initially read to be 1,000 RMB, but later discovered was my 10RMB ($1.50 USD) water bill, so everything's good. I'm currently in my office, alone, jamming Black Monk at full volume, can I really get any more narcissistic than literally listening to my own voice (albeit chopped and droned) over loudspeakers? Anyway it's putting me in a good zone, I need to buckle down and get some work done for monday. I also need to work on taking more pictures, huh? Will get on that.

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Happy 4th

2009-07-03T17:16:00.001-07:00

Posted via web from Josh Feola

Lucky st

2009-07-01T20:22:00.001-07:00

Some weird architecture and street pics from my sunset ride to 2kolegas. One of those "it's a small world after all" streets featuring cuisine from such exotic reaches as India, France, Japan, Ethiopia, and, of course, Nashville. I neglected to take pictures of 2kolegas' cool sign or the ostentatious drive-in theater that envelopes it but yes, there are drive-in theaters in China. Question is: is it also a bike-in theater? TBD

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Megalopoli

Chinese noise

2009-06-30T17:55:00.001-07:00

Last night I met Yan Jun, a Beijing-based poet/musician/organizer. I dropped off some copies of the then new Black Monk LP for Yan Jun at a record store in 798 when I was in Beijing in 2007, but didn't end up seeing him in person. I got back in touch with him the other day. Luckily he remembered me, and told me about a weekly experimental music night at a bar a couple of miles away from my apartment.

I biked there solo and started talking to some Australians sitting out front, one of whom happened to be Aaron Hull, a touring field recorder/droner. His set was very good. Pretty atmospheric and amorphous but with some well-placed field samples and the slightest (slightest) hint of deep house rhythm to provide some structure.

Following Aaron were two Chinese noise bands that were virtually identical, except the second one had an additional dude to spit into a mic and flail around more than the others. These bands were ok, nothing special. I did like when this dude (above) started screaming into a tube. Wasn't moved by the laptop guy who looked like he was reading unimpressive emails the whole time.

And what should I pass on my ride home but 黑太阳酒吧... maybe next Tuesday.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Josh Feola

Snack rack

2009-06-29T07:33:00.001-07:00

Snack selection at the mart across the street. Far as I can tell they're open 24/7. Shootouts to Keara on the pocky and Jamie on the oreo stix. Myself I don't like sweets, I usually just get the steamed corn by the register (no pic because I think the lady who works there was already seriously bummed on me flicking the pocky).

Posted via email from Megalopoli

Another Beijing Bicycle

2009-06-27T22:51:00.001-07:00

I bought a new bicycle. It's an old bicycle, and it came with a great insurance policy: being shitty. I got it for 20 USDs, which included a superfluous U-lock that was almost as expensive as the bike. Little did the unwitting vendor know that the poor brakes, caked rust, and nearly vertical seat that I used to bargain down the cost were secretly assets in my mind. It doesn't have the same 'not riding a deathtrap' feel as the Khan, but it does have a certain charm and maybe it will last more than a week.

It also doesn't have a bell, which means I've had to reteach myself how to whistle.

Out with the new, in with the old:

Posted via email from Megalopoli's posterous

Chinese Name

2009-06-27T03:08:00.001-07:00

I have a new Chinese name. It is 巫明. My Chinese office manager says it means 'necromancer.' 巫 (Wu) by itself refers to shamanism and sorcery, and is also a traditional surname. 明 (Ming) means clear, bright, to understand. I like it because it reminds me of 昆明 (Kunming), the city where I first got to know China. Wu Ming can also be written 无名, which literally means 'no name.'

My old Chinese name was 黑太阳 (hei taiyang), 'Black Sun.' I picked it out for my Chinese class in Yunnan because I had a dream that that was my name. Hei is not a real family name and the phrase 'black sun' connotes the Japanese occupation of China for older generations, so I had to scrap it and go with 巫明 for my business card. I liked Hei Taiyang and was kind of bummed to have to get a new one, which is why I chose no name.

Posted via email from Megalopoli

I can listen, I can talk

2009-06-27T00:07:00.001-07:00

You Can Listen You Can Talk by Carsick Cars
Download now or listen on posterous

11 You Can Listen You Can Talk.mp3 (4769 KB)

Last night I got to see the one Beijing band I had previously heard of, Carsick Cars. It happened to be their major tour-ending, 2nd cd-releasing blowout show. Not much of a blowout actually, just two bands. The first one had a very atmospheric, shoe-gazey thing going on, which was fine until it was punctuated by weird guitar thrashes and high-pitched wailing, along with seriously obnoxious lights (not their fault). I wasn't too into it but I had no expectations and I was psyched to see anything with a general indie reference point.

The Cars, though, were pretty good. I've heard them compared to Sonic Youth from several sources, but I didn't hear that so much at first. They played a solid 45-minute set that sounded like an average of every SST record put out in 1984 except with an overall posi (read: saccharine) vibe. Nothing groundbreaking, but very enjoyable. After this first set they made one of the least subtle "ok we're done unless you really want us to play another song" stage exits I've ever seen. The obligatory encore literally started within 2 minutes. And I was much more into it. I started to understand the SY references, this was darker and noisier. They finished one song, played a crowdsourced hit, and then left again. This time I thought there was about a 50% chance of another return. They came back 5 minutes later and did a pitch-perfect cover of my favorite Stooges song, which sealed the deal for me. Big co-sign.

After the show I explored some abandoned hutongs with a group of people who all have very cool job titles: graphic artist, urban game designer, architect, filmmaker, Artforum correspondent. Got me thinking: can I still call myself an archaeologist even if it's just to sound cool? At any rate I did employ my archaeological skillset to date the abandonment of the hutongs we were sneaking around in to ca. 1999 as there were not one, but two Matrix posters hanging within. There was a weird high school bad kid element to the whole hutong session (jumping fences after midnight to drink warm beer in an abandoned lot?), but it was fun. Topics of conversation evolved naturally from architecture to cryogenics (I think MJ's passing was somehow the mediating point). I didn't talk much, mostly listened.

Woke up feeling a bit raw from the aforementioned warm beers and my day got a little rawer when my landlord came knocking down my door to inform me that my bike had been stolen. Several people I've never met confirmed this as I walked down the one flight of stairs separating my room from the outside world. That these people knew it was my bike that was stolen and aggregated seemingly for the sole purpose of informing me of the theft was weird and, to be honest, a little suspicious, but I'll write it off as community development and chock it up as a W. The bike was, in fact, gone, which sucks.

RIP THE MIGHTY KHAN: 6/21/09 - 6/27/09

Up next: Beijing Bicycle Lock

Posted via email from Josh Feola

在北京

2009-06-23T04:44:00.000-07:00

Someone once told me if you live in China for a week you can write a book about it; if you live there for a month, a magazine article; and after a year you struggle to form a sentence. So I better get on it before I'm at a loss for words.

I've been here for a week that's felt like a month. I landed at 5 am last Tuesday and in the proceeding 12 hours I passed swine flu inspection (twice), got a physical, attended job orientation, opened a bank account, and applied for a work visa. In the days since I've taken care of such trivialities as finding a place to live. I also have a bicycle.

This past Saturday I attempted to build my social network in a single day:

First I went to an opening at Three Shadows, a photography gallery in Caochangdi. The building is angular and Ai Weiwei constructed. I was actually really impressed by the curation, they make a conscious effort to do interesting things with the medium, like stack old filmstrip-looking things in corners against walls. I really liked these lightboxes containing photographs of miniature stage sets (above). Since my soon-to-be roommate Rosa Tu will be working at Three Shadows this summer I'll probably make it out there a few times.

Next I jumped a cab to Beijing's incumbent artistic hotbed, 798. I went to an opening for Kafkanistan, a Kafkaesque interpretation of tourism in Afghanistan. The exhibit came complete with mockup passports, photo opportunities with fake uzis and Afghani dress, and an inescapable Vice Guide to Travel vibe (read: Edgy Hipsters Do the Third World). Definitely a heavy American Apparel aesthetic that I was not feeling, much better was this exhibit of abstract acrylic paintings by Chinese artist Hu Shengping in the adjacent gallery. The highlight of Kafkanistan was a typewriter and of the 798 jaunt in general was these dinos and some cool graffiti, which I heard was made to order immediately before the Olympics:

Next was the ironic Texas barbecue, which was even more ironically (actually not) held on the roof of an Irish bar. Met the ex-pat network there then unfortunately rolled solo to see Mobb Deep. Bizarre on all counts.

Mobb Deep was of course short the incarcerated (but no less prodigious) Prodigy, but Havoc and well named fill-in Big Noyd played a few classics. By a few I mean two. Then a not so subtle segue to 21st century Deep. I left after the 50th g-unit shoutout.

So, that more or less catches me up. Of course there's an infinite surplus of tiny things that have happened I could write about. The last week has been dizzying and I've barely had time to decompress. More to the point, I'm in kind of an identity crisis with this blog. Sporadically traveling has been my MO for so long that I don't know how to write about staying still. I may need to repurpose this space. One idea I've had is to collaborate with other certified American friends in major world capitals. The result of that idea is a new blog called Megalopoli. In the mean time I'm going to get some food and learn how to use Grass GIS.

josh

On this road pt 2

2009-06-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

Road trip:

Drove through the South to move my sister out of her old and into her new apartment in Savannah, Ga. Unfortunately the trip was rather under-documented on my end, with the exception of my requested pit stop at the Georgia Guidestones, an azimuthally aligned monolithic entity shrouded in New Age conspiracy speculation and reactionary religious retaliation. A massive mantra in multiple languages (which at points sounds borderline eugenic) situated on a small hill in provincial Elberton, Ga, self-proclaimed granite capital of the world. An anomalous monument.

So, I got a job in China that basically looks like this. I'll be working at a software startup for the next two years. I'm relocating to Beijing in 10 hours. I was just reading this post from my last China pre-departure, it's funny how my life makes these circles. For my last night in the USA I visited some friends in Los Angeles' Chinatown. And I've just been invited to a Texas themed party in Beijing. Ha.

-Josh

Bye Boston

2009-05-19T18:28:00.000-07:00

San Bartolo por fin

2009-05-10T06:58:00.000-07:00

San Bartolo is a Maya site in the northeastern part of the Petén, the northern "panhandle" department of Guatemala. It was discovered in 2001 and has since been the site of a large-scale regional archaeological project. It has recently produced one hat, two Doctors of Archaeology, a handful of undergraduate theses (mine included), and more than a few amateur experts on Maya art and culture. It has been my home for the last six weeks.

The Petén is densely forested and when living in it one becomes accustomed to encountering two distinct types of landscape:

1. Jungle

2. Jungle with ruins

This is a subtle distinction that takes time to appreciate. It's sometimes difficult to comprehend there's anything for miles around even when you're standing at the foot of an enormous architectural complex. Though recent scientific breakthroughs (with direct connections to San Bartolo, incidentally) have made it possible for archaeological sites in the jungle to be remotely sensed from space, detecting Maya settlements in the Petén brush has been historically difficult and there are subsequently many un"discovered" (because it takes a licensed, typically non-local archaeologist to "discover"), unexcavated (though unfortunately not unlooted) sites pockmarking the jungle, visible only through a subtle rise in the earth and tiny dots of vertical inconsistency in the treeline.

San Bartolo is one of these pockmarks, about 1 km² consisting of four main architectural groups (including temples, palaces, ritual structures and administrative compounds), two large plazas, and a road running north-south for about half a kilometer between a ball-court and two residential groups. San Bartolo was discovered by chance and propelled to the forefront of Maya studies (and then thrust into the media limelight) because of its unique mural paintings:

The murals are significant because they index a fully articulated origin myth and cosmology (and attendant writing system) in place in the Maya lowlands at a date much earlier than was previously surmised for these cultural innovations (ca. 100 BC). If you're interested to learn more you can read my 80-page microtome on the subject (esp. Ch 2). If not you can enjoy my two favorite mural details. Above: The Maize God, having founded civilization at the world center and established the institution of kingship, dives into the underworld so that we (humans) might live, wrapped in this crazy abstract red-black-and-white death snake. Below: A slick jaguar hangs out on Flower Mountain (an iconographic motif with connections to Central Mexico, basically a topograph signifying the place of wild and beastly nature), where he snacks on an Oropendola (a weird-sounding, gold-tailed bird with its own Central Mexican connection: it was Montezuma's favorite).

As per Guatemalan law I can't reveal explicit details about the excavations I've done this season until these have been reported in full to the Institución de Antropología e Historia (IDAEH) at an annual Simposio in July, so instead I will dispassionately list the classes of artifact one might find in the course of excavating a lowland Maya site and maybe I will at a later date indicate what exactly I did and did not do in relation to these artifacts, which are at this writing only hypothetically related to San Bartolo:

A spindle whorl

Skulls

Polychrome pottery

Obsidian

Ceramic figurines

Ancient holes in the ground (not to be confused with Contemporary holes in the ground)

Benches

Bone jewelry

Mandibles

Friezes

Stelae. These last two are from Xultun, a large site to the southwest of San Bartolo. I was part of the first sustained mapping and excavation efforts at the site last year, and with full scale excavations set to commence next season, I may work up from the ground floor of Xultunian exploration. Which sounds kind of cool when I put it like that.

So I'm back in Antigua now, as evidenced by my favored motif of the omnipresent Volcán Agua, my constant reference point. It's an overcast morning and I'm slowly (2.5 hrs and counting) sipping away at a cappuccino at this super bougie cafe in the northwest corner of the Parque Central, which I was reduced to patronizing because my favorite wifi-friendly cafe (which is less bougie if no less "western", maybe the only difference is mean age of clientele?) doesn't have electricity and I needed to skype out to Beijing at 7am sharp for a job interview. Such is my life. I am of course and as always at a crossroads, but one that will hopefully be in my rearview within the next two weeks. Which way will I go? A note of suspense to tantalize my bewildered readership...

Regardless of what route I will take I am immeasurably satisfied with how the last few months have gone. I dug deep and got to the bones (yeah, puns) of the subject that I recently received a degree in, gained a visceral and spatial appreciation of time, made myriad little philosophical connections in a million different directions, became functionally fluent in Spanish, and had time to read a few good books. I realized how much I like archaeology. Archaeology is ethically useful because it encourages humans to think inclusively about humanity. Superficially (another pun) archaeology is a study of "the other," but so was anthropology until the ethical timebomb of regarding living, breathing, communicating humans as an "other" exploded and the discipline became "postmodern." The difference between anthropology and archaeology is that the people with whom the latter is concerned are neither living nor breathing. The similarity is that all people—past and present—communicate.

That said I'll terminate this particular communication. If you're going to be in Boston, Austin, Atlanta, Savannah, or San Antonio during the month of May, hit me up because we may cross paths. In the mean time, be good and make it a

-Josh

The Silver Palace R.I.P.

2009-05-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

21 Mt Vernon

9/1/05 - 5/1/09

Bonus: The Sleeping Eye

Iron Age The Sleeping Eye promo from Livin' Proof on Vimeo.

The Forest

2009-04-04T18:31:00.000-07:00

I've been in San Bartolo for a week now, and as predicted the limited bandwidth and 3-hour daily ration of gas-driven electricity has limited my connectivity, for the better. Which means no heavy photo uploads any time soon, mostly just words.

The trip from Antigua to the Petén was long and filled with a good conversation and a mediocre nap. The conversation, which took place during the wait for my overnight bus out of Guatemala City to Flores, was with Marwin De León, an anthropologist from G.C. who 1) conducts forensic work on mass grave sites from the Guatemalan civil war in order to create a historical record for a period that is seldom discussed here, as far as I can tell, 2) works with indigenous communities in Colombia to determine more economically efficient and environmentally beneficial ways to conduct agricultural practices, and 3) is designing a television program aimed at increasing public awareness of Guatemalan heritage through illustrating the aims and practices of local anthropologists and archaeologists. I got his contact information and will soon be asking if he needs an assistant or can spare even one of his jobs.

If you remember last year's injunction you'll know that I can't talk about what I'm excavating. It will have to suffice to say that I am excavating, which is a step up from last year in my book, when I mostly just wrote notes in a book (not mine). Actually the mentality here is that the archaeologists do more desk work while hired ayudantes do the hard digging, but personally I like the physical aspect of the work. It engenders a visceral understanding of how things are superpositioned in the ground, makes the verticality of time felt by the body rather than coolly comprehended by the eye.

A note on archaeology and the body: Archaeological digging requires varying tools and levels of refinement. A shovel is rarely used to break ground: it is an extension of the torso, a poor tool for comprehending the subtleties of the buried past. Better to use a pick, an extension of the arm; a trowel, extension of the hand; or, in especially fine cases, a dental pick or razor, extensions of the finger and nail. (Machetes are fun but unless you're properly trained tend to be at best inefficient, at worst limb-hazardous.)

-Josh

Māyā, Kāma, Kāla

2009-03-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about the past, as I'm prone to do, and reading last February's reflections on leaving for San Bartolo from Antigua, an action I'm due to repeat tomorrow. That was effectively my last update from Guatemala in 2008, and for good reason because the ensuing months were dense and difficult to decipher, much less write about, but it occurs to me that I owe some words about Copan and Tikal. So to employ a tricky timescale appropriate to an (amateur) archaeologist, I'll go back before moving forward. That is, I'll pay it forward with an overly packed entry because this time around I know enough to say I can't say when I'll have the opportunity to write again.

Copan is a Maya site in western Honduras, and one of that country's main generators of GDP. There are many things about Copan that I could write on at length, but, as my archaeological perspective is compromised by my art historical sensibility, I'll limit myself to the coolest-looking.

Copan's unique (among the Maya) artistic heritage is due in largest part to this man (above, in the bkg; and abover, in the foreground): Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil, sometimes referred to as "18 Rabbit" thanks to an early mistaken decipherment. UUK lived in the shadow of his father, which was considerable both because of the considerable territorial expansion accomplished by UUK's predecessor and the literal shadow cast by a monument his dad had symbolically erected on the top of large hill miles away from the site center. What UUK lacked in military prowess he more than made up for in aesthetic innovation, ushering in a completely new idiom of nearly 3-dimensional sculpture in the decades between his accession to the throne and his execution at the hands of neighboring rival site, Quirigua (see below), a glyphically-known act that effectively ended Copan's hegemonic control of the region.

Some glyphs on a weird monument

A two-headed turtle, half-living and half-dead, and appropriately enough bathed in light and shrouded in dark, respectively.

Copan's hieroglyphic stairway: the longest continual (albeit poorly preserved) Maya text that has yet been discovered

Some abstract gems from the Copan sculpture museum.

This building, called Rosalila, is another oddity in Maya archaeology: it was, like most Maya architecture, built over with successive phases of new temple construction, but was first covered with a comprehensive coating of plaster and then left entirely intact, ritually entombed within a new structure. Upon discovering it, archaeologists used razor blades to expose the vibrant colors beneath the plaster, then created a scale model in the Copan sculpture museum.

Some more strange sculptures, these from Quirigua, Copan's vassal turned conqueror. The last picture is K'ak Tiliw Chan Yopaat, the man who did UUK in and commemorated the deed by building the largest stela in the Maya area, complete with a text dipping into the deepest regions of mythic time (it records events said to have occurred billions of years ago).

A psychedelic view from the top of Tikal's Temple IV that my camera accidentally took back in 2007.

Tikal's history is too vast and hyped to do any justice to, and I'm already boring myself and probably you too, so here's some quick highlights:

Temple I

A long and particularly informative text

Worked bone

And the thing about time is it always terminates in today. So now after dipping into my and others' pasts I'll turn to the future. The future holds for me, as it did around this time last year, a trip into dense forest, but one I now at least partially know. If this meandering entry signifies anything, it's the fact that my conception of time is very cyclical, circular, though punctuated by linear leaps, tangential reasoning, a jumbled, semi-coherent geometry. Honestly I don't know why I think so much about the past, except that I like to recycle it into the future, which everyone does I guess but I attempt to do with a bit more self-consciousness. Maybe it's because I'm a reflective Cancer (though on the schizoid cusp with forward-thinking Leo). Nor can I explain my penchant for return, my seemingly infinite regress. My decision-making process is opaque to me, a palimpsest where will, coincidence, serendipity, fate, self-fulfilling prophecy, and a simultaneous desire for novelty and familiarity all coexist, coevolve, cancel each other out.

To avoid wasting many more words on the untranslatable (for me, at least) topic of my own cognitive functioning - and to beat one of my favorite tropes even deeper into the ground - I'll leave off with a contemporary and two ancient quotations that satisfactorily explain, in the way only oblique explanations can, why I'm doing what I'm doing at this moment in time:

2009 for the Cancer:

"You could be involved in some heavy research and digging on the job. Deep personal changes are ahead...Your attitude towards close relationships and partnering undergoes transformations. Depth of experience will be sought... Over the next few years, you will be ridding your life of superficiality in your close relationships. Lessons learned may not always be easy, but empowering in the end...Your biggest enemy now is resentment, which can act to eat away your confidence and healthy state of mind. In 2009, your eyes are opened to new experiences and belief systems...If you do get a chance to travel, which could come up quite unexpectedly, unusual, eye-opening experiences may be in store for you."

Dharmakīrti:

No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone's path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.

Bhartṛhari :

Why all these words and empty prattle?
Two worlds alone are worth a man's devotion.
The youth of beautiful women wearied by heavy breasts
And full of fresh wine's heady ardor for sport,
Or the forest...

Still life

2009-03-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

Slow few days. In my life stasis never lasts too long so it's a nice change.

Fried eggplant at Rum Bar, kind of an ex-pat spot opened by a Louisiana transplant who also makes good jambalaya and grows his own mint (hence the Mojito, a rare excursion into the mixed drink world for me). Also pictured: Paz's prose, my pale imitation

Went back to the Casa Herrera to link up with master cipher David Stuart and my friend/current housemate/El Zotz co-director Edwin Roman, who gave a talk on San Bartolo to a group of potential Casa donors.

My current digs:

-Josh

Food and drink and things

2009-03-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

My blog wouldn't be my blog nor Jay Bil-approved if I didn't talk about STREET FOOD.

Which I haven't been hitting up too much. On Sunday I indulged in the tipico breakfast buffet, which included beans, fried plantains, fruit, crepeish things, and this weird concoction with a fried egg baked into bread, all of which constituted both breakfast and lunch and a great (full disclosure:) hangover cure.

After which I did peruse the bustling SF scene outside La Merced. I was too full to partake and it was mostly meat stalls anyway, but I did hit up this mango stand.

Got this pupusa for lunch today, a corn tortilla filled with cheese, covered with avocado (peeled and pitted without any utensils, impressive), cabbage and hot sauce, + d. coke for < $1. We jam econo.

On Saturday, though, I hit what will probably be the highest note of Street Food '09: Hugo's Ceviches. This is bizarre. It's a pickup truck that drives fresh seafood up from the Pacific coast, only two days a week, only for a few hours on each of these days, which, along with the location of the truck, remain undisclosed until the day of. It's mostly local patronage. If you're hesitant to eat raw seafood from the back of a pickup truck, chances are you won't plumb the local rumor mills to go out of your way to find it.

And the fact of eating raw street fish isn't even the weirdest part about Hugo's. That honor goes to the "cerveza preparada."

1. Get a beer, take a few sips, return for salt and lime. So far so good.

2. Things start getting weird when they add the "salsa secreta," a brown sauce with a secret recipe that tastes to include fish oil, worcestershire and sugar.

3. Add green salsa and onions, why not? You already lost me with the brown stuff.

4. Equals this. Discretely brown-bagged to circumvent open container laws.

The sketchy meal in total. The sauce in the ceviche is the same as in the beer, so it works together with this completely mind-bending complementarity. And the cerveza preparada is great. I went back for another on Sunday.

Some things:

Antique scale and book press from Casa Herrera.

Some rather "modern" assemblages from the Hotel del Carmen.

Icon

Bonus round: projector from the planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science. I just found these pictures from my trip there last Fall, which somehow eluded upload until now.

Well, 4 more days in Antigua. What to do?

Antigüedad

2009-03-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

Busy few days in Antigua.

Soon after arriving I met Carolyn Porter of the Art History department at UT Austin. Carolyn led me and some other San Bartolo affiliates on a tour of Casa Herrera, an interdisciplinary research center for Mesoamerican art and culture. The Casa is relatively new, and will serve as a base for academic residencies, graduate projects, and lectures from visiting scholars across the disciplinary board. It happens to be an elegant space as well, a former hacienda and sugar refinery that is one of the few remaining establishments in Antigua to retain its colonial apportionment of a quarter of a city block.

What appeals to me about the Casa is its mixture of a rich and layered architectural heritage with a dedication to still emerging ideals of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and social and environmental responsibility. Walking through a back courtyard you encounter a pre-Columbian metate (grinding stone; above, above) that was found and left in situ; a rare and rather suggestive fountain sculpture of a merman conquistador (above, middle); a baby ceiba (above, below), which was regarded as the "world tree" by the ancient Maya and retains great cultural significance among contemporary Maya people; and a water collection tank that catches the rain and converts it to greywater suitable for washing clothes and dishes.

Plus: killer roof views.

Saturday saw a mini-market mission to check out wares for sale by Ruth (above with the ceiba), a Kaqchikel Maya weaver from the village San Antonio Aguas Calientes. The Kaqchikel have a vibrant but endangered tradition of colorful hand-crafted textiles, which take anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months to make on cumbersome backstrap looms. I'm not much of an aesthete when it comes to such things, but I have to admit the resulting designs are amazing:

This guy rolled through, seems like a good Proyecto. I guess Central American countries are pretty fuel efficient, we could take a lesson from them up north.

Caught this Lent procession through the Parque Central on my meandering way home.

I was gonna write about STREET FOOD but I'll leave that for tomorrow. For now I'll leave you with some night shots of the parque central.

Buenas
Josh

"On this road like a rolling stone"

2009-03-18T05:39:00.000-07:00

Well took me a quarter of the year to do this again. In a nutshell it's been two months of laying low at home and trying (and failing) to find a job and one month of having found a (part time) job and manically planning how to avoid getting another one.

The longer version is this.

This is mostly what I have to show for my time at home. I organized my possessions and made this installation to represent both the last few years of my life and the fact that I am an incurable packrat. I think I have stubs from every movie I've been to since I was 10.

I went back to Boston in February and promptly visited this much hyped Shepard Fairey show at the ICA (above). I didn't realize this guy was behind Andre has a posse/Obey/that ubiquitous Obama campaign image, it's pretty odd that a street artist has been on my cultural radar for so long but flown low enough to avoid name recognition until now. I think he would be disappointed by that. Despite Fairey's rep as a stencil vet, his New England punk credentials, and his heroic legal battles with the Boston PD and the Associated Press, I can't shake a suspicion that much of his artistic persona and some of his output is a cynical appropriation of the dumbed down mass marketing techniques that he explicitly imitates in his design and that implicitly, I think, contribute to his own personality industry. I'll stop myself before I start getting too banal or buzzkilling, I'd rather just show you some of the art in the show but in an unsurprising bit of irony I was told by an ICA docent that I couldn't take pictures because they didn't have the ©.

In any case after I saw the show I couldn't stop seeing Fairey's stuff all over Boston (which works were, I later learned, part of a promotional effort on his part), so I availed myself of the freedoms of that publicker space to snap a synchronic shot of Shepard Fairey in Boston in early 2009. (Note: as I'm writing this I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Antigua, Guatemala (see below) and across the way Fairey's Obama image is staring out at me from the cover of Time Magazine. There is something extremely laudable in the omnipresence of that design, which in itself qualifies Fairey as one of the more significant artists of our time.)

So I also got a job. Part time working at the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History (hereafter referred to as ICEAACH). I was primarily involved in scanning and seeking images of covers of obscure journals, which turned out to be an amazing trip through mid-70s social science publication aesthetics. So much gold here:

So what else... gripped this bad rider, which I guess makes me more credentialed than your average unemployed individual (sadly this isn't even true). But it looks cool. I've been working on a couple of projects, most importantly this China summer program at the Linden Centre:

More on this as it develops.

Odds and ends:

-homemade 阴阳
-my current jam
-cool non-Fairey Obama zine art
-some free advice

So as I parenthetically mentioned I'm back in Antigua. I have a penchant for returning places. Now I have a better camera and a functioning computer so hopefully I'll be able to augment my Guatemala reportage, which was notably lacking last year. But I'm only going to be in Antigua for another few days, then it's back to San Bartolo. I will be doing a lot of this, some of this, and none of this intentionally, but if I have a repeat encounter and it's equally docile to last year's I will not complain.

Enough of these epic posts. If I haven't already alienated my entire readership with my scarcity I guess I'll have to do it with my bombast. But if you're still hanging in there, I'll make the next one shorter, sweeter, and maybe prettier.

-JOSH

2008

2009-01-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

I do better in odd-numbered years.

Rods in the Fire

2008-12-28T14:56:00.001-08:00

Moving backward before I move forward. I moved back home. Reorganizing my life and mind. Clearly neither has been interesting enough to write about over the last three months but now that I have literally nothing to do I guess I'll try to fill in a rough sketch of what I did/what I'm doing/what I will do.

I finished my senior thesis on the murals of San Bartolo. This has been my primary vocation for the last year. Thinking about and ultimately writing a way too long tome on this subject, I won't bore you with details but you can bore yourself by reading the whole thing (without images, which are semi-classified, email me if you want to see anything specific) here: Ancient Art & Contemporary Agency.

The process of nerding out included presenting a short paper on the same topic at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November. This entailed a pre-Thanksgiving flight to San Francisco, unexpected engagement as panel chair, one mission mission, and numerous museum trips with Belize friend Emily Gable.

Saw SF Moma for the first time, checked out this ladder that's forever as well as an ad or two.

Then at the Asian Art Museum we saw this crazy exhibit on ancient grave goods from Afghanistan, heavily funded by National Geographic so somewhat sensationalized but actually worth the hype. Pretty much all that exists in terms of Bronze Age Afghanistani art, so if you're in the area you should check it out. No photos allowed unfortunately. Was able to flick this cool Zhang Daqian forgery and a strange collection of miniature bottles from Japan.

After that it was a maelstrom of writing over thxgvg break, then several weeks of presenting and tying up loose ends. Boring stuff. So to continue the theme I'll wrap up with some highlights from my most recent visit to the Boston MFA. Went with Alex Dow et al to check out this Assyrian exhibit, which was unfortunately already closed. Instead saw an insane exhibit of portraits by Yousuf Karsh, who photographed pretty much every significant figure of the first half of the 20th century. Wandered around some chambers of the museum I usually avoid, which was cool, I took a class on Baroque art this semester so I had a somewhat heightened appreciation for a lot of the stuff I usually visually tune out, though European art still kind of bores me. This painting of the 7th plague of Egypt (above) is insane though. The artist studied early drawings of French explorers in Egypt to reconstruct the architecture, weird re-appropriation of ancient art. Also this steam google maps is cool.

So I guess that's pretty much it. Oh yeah, and I graduated. It snowed for three days straight immediately before my departure from Boston, a nice sendoff I guess. For now I am laying low. Looking for something interesting to do in somewhere interesting to be, let me know if you are on the same page with that. I have NO PLANS and no loan payments for about six months.

In texas for now,
Josh

"Brand new city / Got my whole team with me"

2008-10-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

Already a month deep into classes. It's kind of weird to be back in Boston after roaming so much over the past two years, but when I stop and think about it my situation right now is not really so different, I'm only based here for another two and a half months and my wanderlust hasn't been curbed.

So anyway I haven't been up to anything too terribly interesting. Not that travel necessarily makes one's life more interesting but there is an element of constant mindfulness and novelty, spontaneity and uncertainty that I'm missing in my currently domestic state. Which isn't to say I've stuck around here the entire time.

A few weeks ago I went to Texas for my friend Matt Chesnut's wedding. Somewhat of a milestone, first friend's wedding I've been involved in. The service was nice and there was some great food and dance before the couple took off in their matrimonial chopper. Met fellow travel head Joseph Kluger and enjoyed in between time with my family, but a very short trip.

Boston stuff, and I shouldn't imply that I've been bored here, I've actually been quite busy. Saw Dan Rather speak the other week, mostly just implored young people to vote and trotted out a few thoroughly Texan truisms. Last weekend my dad came up to see a Red Sox game, which was unfortunately rained out but we hit up a half dozen record spots, watched the first pres. debate, and ate some killer food, undaunted. Saw the game the next night with my friend Steph, had to go to Fenway once before I graduate I guess.

And this past weekend I was in New York. The occasion was the release of Radio Silence, a new "visual history" of hardcore punk. The book itself is really cool, heavy on photographs ranging from your standard issue (but still incredible) live pics to almost every aspect of hardcore's material culture: old vests and t's, flyers, sketches, album covers, lyric sheets. Mind Eraser played the cavernous publishing house hosting the event. Good reconnect with a ton of people I haven't seen in a while, including a few recent NY arrivals from Texas. I haven't been on the photo grind as much as I should so I have no cool things to show you, imagine that scene in Manhattan when they're sitting by the bridge but imagine yourself on the other side of the bridge and then go to a weird techno party in Williamsburg at 1 am.

Most of my time this past month has been taken up trying to figure out my life post-2008. A few fellowships and grants I've applied for, which I won't talk about so I don't jinx anything. Started an application to do media anthropology at Harvard. Looking into internships and jobs in Beijing, New York, LA, Marfa, Portland, Buenos Aires, et al. At the moment no real plan and no commitments, suggestions?

I don't think I like writing about my life. I'll try to think up something more interesting. Well I have to buckle down and write my senior thesis so maybe it's finally time to get down to some Maya murals talk...

Hong Kong - Hong Kong

2008-08-31T07:08:00.000-07:00

I've had two simultaneous overnight flights, multiple delays, and previous and prior moving engagements, so I haven't slept much in the past 48 hours. In another 48 I start class. The day after will mark one year from the date I first stepped foot in Asia at HKIA before connecting to Kunming last fall. I've made some unexpected circles since. Weird concentricities and tangents.

The next four months will be intense. On top of a bunch of last-semester requisites, I'll be writing my thesis on research I did in Guatemala this spring (and will keep up the travel theme here with ex post facto posts). I'm presenting a redacted version of this at the AAA's annual meeting this November. Also working on fellowships and trying to find a job.

Good summer. I have to sleep now.

josh

Transit

2008-08-26T02:28:00.000-07:00

Kunming scene still good. The other day I ate some gut shredding hot pot near Green Lake Park (above) with Xiong Hui and another MinDa head, the sniper. Then we all went back to my dorm to watch "Laborn" and gang secure a semifinals victory. We were joined by the always flossing Xiao Hei ("little black," he is of the Wa ethnic minority), one of last year's bball kings. Good reconnect.

The next day the MinDa dudes all headed out to a new campus/dorm, 45 minutes away, as the old campus is being dedicated to graduate studies. Kind of bummed as I said goodbye to Xiong Hui in the basketball court, which was flooded with a sea of undergraduates preparing to load their possessions onto a fleet buses. I had my own journey ahead of me though, constant motion.

After meeting Tang Lei, manager of the Linden Centre, I killed a few hours then headed to catch an 8 pm flight to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province. The trip there entailed more adventure than I bargained for (and I did bargain copiously, for my plane ticket, taxi ride to airport, etc). The flight was initially delayed due to rain. We boarded about an hour late, then taxi'd around the tarmac for another 45 minutes before being told the weather was too bad to take off. In my experience Chinese aren't particularly courteous in crowded transportation situations, and there was palpable fury mounting as we all deplaned, got back on the boarding shuttle, funneled back into the gate and waited for the thunder gods to take it down a notch. I've mastered the art of airport calm so I just sat back and watched bemusedly. Another 45 minutes or so later we got the go ahead to get back on the shuttle bus that would take us from gate to plane. I got my ticket rescanned and stepped on the bus. And waited. For a long, long time. I'm not sure what exactly happened. Men were screaming. Women were crying. Babies were laughing. A couple of 8-year-old urchins kept creeping up on me, yelling "Hallo!" then running off in hysterics. At one point armed guards boarded the bus and curiously accosted an old man who had been patiently sitting at the front the entire time. We all had to get off the shuttle again. Wait another thirty minutes, then re-rescan tickets and rebus. I half-jokingly tell friends I like to play the dumb foreigner card at times to forego argument or embarrassment. In this case I had no other card to play. I just let myself be corralled from one place to another and hoped that I would arrive in Sichuan that day, in one piece. In the midst of the debacle was one good-natured Tibetan man, with whom I spent the majority of the time talking about the Olympics and Tibetan Buddhism. Eventually we were on the plane, in the air. When we landed in Chengdu everyone cheered and immediately ran for the exit.

I finally arrived at Sichuan University a little past midnight, where I was awaited by Yang Qingfan (above), a professor of Tibetan archaeology. Exhausted from the day's delays, I promptly crashed at the foreign students' dorm.

The next day was heavy rain, so I did minimal exploring. Sichuan is known for being a major player in Ye Olde Tea Game, so I started off the morning giving this place some business just for the cool sign.

Sichuan is perhaps less known for its Tex-Mex, but this wifi spot proved the ideal place from which to phone San Antonio and wish my dad a good bday. The Migas was actually better than any Mexican I've had in Boston, and this is the only place in Asia where I've seen Diet Dr Pepper (shoot out to DFJ). Backed!

The rest of the day was chill. Yang laoshi showed me around the archaeology library and pulled a ton of articles on Shaxi and Yunnan's Buddhist grottoes (almost none of which I can read). We went for a lunch of jiaozi and I retired to watch the US bballers win a gold and nap. That night I went out for Sichuan-style hotpot with Yang and her husband, an Inner Mongolian design teacher. Again got slayed by the pot, which in Sichuan entails dipping skewered foodstuffs into a boiling vat of chili oil. Into it though.

The next day was misty, not soaked, so I took advantage of the opportunity for some quick and dirty tourism. Caught a morning bus to Leshan, about a two-hour drive from Chengdu, and quickly negotiated transport to Sichuan's premier heritage attraction, Leshan Da Fo (Leshan Big Buddha). I've become a deft bargainer, in Leshan I literally quartered the tuk-tuk price with a reserved shake of my head, no Mandarin needed. On the ride there I checked out a croc surfer and gnarled guard. But for the most part I was strictly business.

Leshan DaFo is the world's largest Buddha since the world's largest Buddha retired. Another "biggest Buddhist _______" to cross off the list. I was impressed by the statue itself but also somehow unmoved by the serene environment. Just in manic sightsee mode I guess. Still I lingered for a while at the feet of this massive dude, couldn't touch him but I managed to sneak in a secret handshake before bouncing.

After exiting the park I wasted no time jumping onto a Chengdu-bound bus, getting back around 4 pm. I had grand plans to hit up another site in the city but it was closed by the time I got there. So I just wandered. Wound up at this riverside park with a chill taiji dude. If you squint in the background you can see a man getting a nice riverside shave. I was tempted...

It sucks to eat Chinese food alone so I got this cantaloupe milk tea in the place of lunch. Good pickup. Drank it sitting by this weird sculpture.

Spent a good few hours wandering around the Sichuan University campus, half-lost. It's massive. It takes a full thirty minutes to walk from the West Gate to the East Gate, and in my city meandering I never seemed to escape its periphery. I especially liked the the old-school school buildings and a nice artificial lake park/pagoda.

After returning home and getting bored I headed back into late night Chengdu. There were a lot of active clubs outside my dorm but I was just hunting down some midnight xiao chi and they seemed out of my price bracket anyway. I wish I had more time to explore the city, I know there's a lot there but in my short stay it left me cold compared to the familiarity of Kunming.

This morning Yang Qingfan showed me around the Sichuan University Museum, arguably housing western China's best ethnological art collection. Of course Yang laoshi was especially knowledgeable about the Tibetan collection, which was extensive (with political implications I won't discuss here), and the coolest thing I saw was this Tibetan skullheaded-out skull head. I was also feeling this ill thangka and this lil thangka. Honorable mention reserved for bronze drum culture. Apparently Tibetans are also into making horns from human bone. Wild.

Was this post boring to read? It felt too long in writing, my hand is starting to cramp. In any case, I don't know how much tourisming I have left in me. I'm back in Kunming now and it's pouring rain. Tomorrow is my last full day in China and it is dedicated to prosaic last-minutes and slow lingering. You can expect at least one more post from Asia, waxing nostalgic about the end of my days as a nomadic undergrad. Then we'll see if my life is still interesting when I'm rooted in one spot for more than 5 weeks...

Josh

On the Cheap with No Sleep

2008-08-21T00:17:00.000-07:00

I love Yunnan. I've been here for almost a week and the buzz of being back hasn't worn off. I'm glad to have arrived with the person who was my best friend during my Fall semester here, but perhaps more glad to have been on my own for the majority of the time, exploring old haunts with new eyes, new perspective.

After arriving in Kunming on the 15, we set about meeting up with some laopengyou. Stopped by the Minzu Daxue dorm and called Zhang laoshi (above), doorman, volunteer Chinese teacher and pro bono TCM doctor. Zhang came promptly and invited us back to his house for tea (he is quite the aesthete in this respect), dinner, and an Olympics hang sesh.

We also looked up our MinDa friend Xiong Hui. I always get the sense that he is dropping whatever he's doing to meet us, but he seemed to enjoy our company, and we ended up hanging out with him every day for the next few days. Xiong Hui is a certified religion head, making for interesting conversation: in the space of the three months I spent in Yunnan last year, he was successively obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. His newest phase is missionary Christianity.

And I ate it Cause I'm so at it, pt II: shared a couple of weird/great meals with Marianna's and my host families, respectively. Pictured: feast of bees and some kind of worm thing. The bees actually weren't bad.

On Monday the 18 Marianna and I met Xiong Hui at Minzu Daxue, the university where we lived and studied. It was nice revisiting the campus, which surprisingly hasn't changed much. I'm way into the colorful chalkboard drawings.

MEMORY LANE FOOD. Breakfast was some old school favorites: this weird peanut sauce/churro/burrito thing and a street crepe. My daily jam last year, I missed it, my stomach didn't.

Street food-->street dude. I swear I left this bleach blonde homeless musician (and his dog) in EXACTLY the same spot last December. Glad to see they're still holding it down.

On Monday afternoon Marianna took off for the greener pastures of Hong Kong, leaving me and Xiong Hui to mull over my future. After a conversation with Kyla Raetz, another SIT alum who's spent the last two months in Yunnan, my appetite was whetted to wander around the province. So I made a snap decision to eat my already-bought plane ticket to Chengdu, check out of my hotel, and head north to Dali. My eternally hospitable companion literally walked me to my bus.

Six hours later I was at the Linden Centre, a renovated Bai courtyard complex in the town of Xizhou, about 30 minutes outside Dali. I visited this place last year, when its proprietors, Brian and Jeanee Linden, showed me around the still very unfinished lot. Invited back as their guest, I was blown away to find it open, fully furnished, and breathtakingly beautiful. One of the nicest places I've ever stayed (see shower above), I am really starting to see their vision take form. The Centre is intended as a sort of cultural retreat, offering classes in traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting, meditation, and sweeping views of Xizhou's Bai-maintained rice fields. It is also an art space in its own right: the Lindens deal Asian antiquities and contemporary Chinese art at their gallery in Wisconsin, and have an impressive selection of their collection on display at the Centre. I only spent one night here but it was enough to become excited about watching this place develop and expand: the Lindens are already renovating a second complex elsewhere in Xizhou, which I visited, and plan to branch out to other locations in SW China. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

Shaxi. I missed this place so much. I've been upset about the prospect of not returning ever since my planned LE pilot crashed in March, and I can't believe I almost passed through Yunnan without making the trek out here. Another brief stopover (only one night!), but so worth it.

Upon arriving, I called up Afeng, the Taiwanese owner of the local guesthouse with whom I ate Thanksgiving dinner last year, and friend of friend Li Min Mo. Afeng not only agreed to let me change some USDs at her guesthouse (I was in a bit of a cash crisis upon arriving), but also gave me a room at a discounted friend's rate. I'm always astounded at the hospitality I receive in Yunnan.

After dropping my bags I immediately headed out to see my old friend Laozhang, patron of Shaxi's premier kafeiguan, and spent the rest of the evening chatting with him, his wife, and Zhang Xi, a Guangzhou newcomer to Shaxi's foreign-Zhang-owned cafe scene. I'm surprised at how much Chinese I've retained from last Fall with practically no practice in between, and how much I can express with such limited means. We stayed up for hours drinking tieguanyin and talking about Olympics, Chinese myth, religion, human origins, writing systems, and Shaxi news. Definitely one of the highlights of the summer.

The next morning I took a spin around Xingjiao temple, which is undergoing mural renovations. As this was the topic of my research paper last year, and something I'd like to continue studying in the future, I was interested to keep tabs on the progress. I also visited Lu Yuan and Sam Mitchell's Shaxi Cultural Center, a guesthouse-cum-educational resource on Shaxi's history and culture that was also under construction when I visited last year. It is looking good, if still a bit unfinished. I especially liked the bulletin board crammed with Shaxiren.

Also hung with some Shaxi bebs, my main crew last year. Word of my return must have spread quickly because in the space of the 12 waking hours I actually spent in Shaxi I saw loads of familiar faces, all greeting me with Ni hui lai le! and Ni meiyou huzi! So happy I came back. I already want to return.

Unfortunately that afternoon I was on the move again: another contemplative 12-hour travel day (my raison d'etre recently) by mini-bus, public bus, taxi, shuttle, plane, taxi, back to Minzu Daxue in Kunming, where Xiong Hui had been waiting for me through an hour-and-a-half flight delay. He'd booked me a room at my old dormitory, arranged for my bedding to be delivered, and accompanied me to cop a dinner of street fried potatoes (not pictured). What a dude.

The immense affinity I've felt with Yunnan these past few days has put me back in the mindset to pursue a Fulbright grant to continue my Shaxi research. So today I went to Cache Electron to meet with Shen Haimei, my host aunt and an anthropology professor at Yunnan University. I was beginning to drop the idea of applying for a Fulbright due to lack of Chinese skills and solid affiliation with a Chinese university, but today's meeting changed that entirely. Shen laoshi is currently researching gender, ethnicity, and identity in Bai villages around Dali, and has recently written several articles about pilgrimage trails uniting SW China with Tibet and India--precisely my research interests. She was extremely excited to hear about the report I did last year and my plans to continue with it, and was more than amenable to giving me a letter of affiliation with her department at YunDa. Funny how things fall in to place sometimes.

Also peeped some cool Kunming street art. Kunming has an active and diverse contemporary art scene, another factor drawing me to this place.

And this guy, Kunming's logo, a tiger untowardly approaching a bull. Shoot outs to Dian culture and Bob Murowchick.

OK so I have about 10 days left in Asia and I still don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of it. And domestic flights can be booked a day in advance so I still don't have to. Later!

Josh

Bangkok slang

2008-08-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

Five clouded days in Bangkok, with occasional rays of light. I arrived at my hostel around 3 am and met my old travel friend Marianna. Spent the first day mostly just wandering around, recovering from mini-marathon traveling. Hung out with a few Thai dogs and wily strangers.

The next day was dedicated to exploring the snaking riverine routes connecting my area to Bangkok proper. Crazy fish scene. We wound up at a temple that had some kind of strange New Age Buddhism exhibit. I walked around snapping flicks while my friend chatted it up with an old monk. Chill day otherwise, picked up a c0 and some sketchy street food, these rice balls with surprise octopus filling. Headed to Siam Center (the site of the previous night's failed attempt to meet international pal Jeff Dobereiner, sorry buddy) to end the day with Batman in Imax.

Spent Tuesday dutifully sight-seeing. Actually just went to the Grand Palace, premier Bangkok tourist attraction. This was a crazy place, filled with about a dozen of the most elaborately decorated temples I've ever seen. There seemed to be no aesthetic theme aside from ostentatiousness. Every facet of every building covered with faux-gems, metallic paint and glass. The golden stupa is the most famous, but my favorite was a gaudy pillared green mirror building (above). Others looked like wedding cakes and a few were guarded by bizarre chicken men. Marianna said it best when she described the scene as a giant playground, each building designed by the whims of children. Not to sound insensitive. I think the buildings were all quite beautiful in their unabashed flamboyance, definitely a different feel from the simple stone and wood Buddhism I'm been accustomed to in my Asian forays. We also happened to be here on the Queen's birthday, so there was a total party vibe. Not really, but it makes it seem cooler.

The rest of the time was pretty uneventful, not necessarily in a bad way. I felt a bit uneasy about being in a new place with little previous knowledge and no language skills to speak of (with), and hanging out with a friend equally amenable to sleeping in, lazing around, and only venturing out for a few hours each day led to a very laid back time. No ambitious treks or trips. Mostly wandered around the city, checking out cool sites. Went to a crazy temple near the hostel covered with many-headed Ganeshas (above). Wandered by the riverside and jumped the fence to a dock housing a bunch of fancy boats. Wound up at one of the less-depressing zoos I've visited, scoped a giant anteater and spent some time in meditation with this Hermetic crocodile. "As above, so below."

On the last day we went to the Royal Art Museum, which was really cool, despite the fact that most of the royal objects were made within the last few years. More Thai opulence on display. Photos were prohibited but I snuck a few (no flash). Top: A tapestry woven from iridescent green beetle wings. The weavers have to wait until the beetles die naturally so their wings won't lose their sheen. And because Thailand is over 90% Buddhist, I suppose. Bottom: Silk embroidery. A huge deal here. A lot of the pieces were very "painterly" but they had an absorbing sense of texture. I especially liked the dark, colorless ones. Night creatures.

ODDS AND ENDS:

Street juice: some concoction of grape, dragonfruit, beet, carrot, and other unknown ingredients. Copped on two separate occasions. "where's the purple stuff again?/I can't get enough of it"

MANGOSTEEN: King of Fruits. Too fragile/FDA-unapproved to be sold anywhere outside of SE Asia. Ate a grip of these. "where's that purple stuff again?/I'm on some same color shit"

Streetcakes shaped like anime dudes. Did not cop but I appreciate this man's street food design skills.

Airport sculpture on the way out of town. Marianna, somewhat of a Hindu expert, explained the myth to me but I already forgot it. I'll ask her and edit this before you read it and realize my ignorance. Special shoot outs to Vishnu/Krishna, Gucci and Chanel.

ENDS AND MEANS:

Cool street sign. Street signs point directions. Tell you how to go from one place to another even if they don't tell you why. I am now in China. It seems like home. Kunming is one place where I somehow don't feel like a visitor. I've been reading books and signs to try to plan my next few weeks in China. I have some direction and some space to be aimless. Still a bit cloudy here so I'll keep going north...

-Josh

Ubud it

2008-08-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

My last day in Indonesia. It feels strange to be leaving. Especially now, when I feel I've really found my niche. About that:

I've been in Ubud, Bali for the last four days. Ubud is in the hilly central part of Bali, on the way to the mountainous interior of the island. It is definitely much quieter than Kuta. The landscape is dotted primarily with Balinese Hindu temples and rice paddies (above), and a long chain of hostels and restaurants in the center of town. It is the cheapest place I've been in Indonesia. I was stressed about not having a reservation when I arrived in town at 8 pm, but immediately upon stepping out of the shuttle I got hooked up with a clean, spacious single bedroom with hot shower and free breakfast for $6 USD/night (expensive by Ubud standards; there are more novelties than you might expect in that string of amenities).

Spent my first morning wandering around the "Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary." Chilled with the troupes and hung with these komodo guys carved out of tree roots.

Inside the park I checked this out, Pura Dalem Agung, "Temple of the Dead." Total Temple of Doom style. I guess it is called that because of the demon art and numerous statues of some bitter old woman eating babies. Also peeped this ill jaggertooth on the side of the building. Kind of a creepy place, but good hang spot.

Lunch pickup: nasi campur, Bali special rice with tempe, veggies, and some kind of salty paste thing. Also pictured: lemongrass ginger lemonade. Ubud has been the best food spot by far.

That night I went to a nearby temple to check out kecak, a Balinese traditional dance. The performance involved about 50 dudes sitting in a circle, rhythmically chanting and shaking their hands, while various elaborately bejeweled dancers went into some kind of fire trance. At the end this horse dude came out and started kicking around the embers, basically just getting in a fight with the fire. Weird. Think it had something to do with the Ramayana. I didn't have my audio recorder on me, my bad.

The next day I hit up some more requisite archaeological sites. If you know me you know I'm a sucker for creepy cave art, so Goa Gajah, or elephant cave (above) was highest on my list. I rented a bike from some sketchy dude outside my hostel and made the 2 mile trip, sweat about 15 lbs off. Once there I had to adopt a Hindu sarong and Buddha dot. The cave itself was sick, the whole entrance is carved to appear as the mouth of a demon. Inside is a lil Ganesha and some linga.

Then a hike through some more rice paddies and arty villages brought me here, Yeh Puluh, a cliffside with 13th-century Hindu narrative imagery carved into its face. Sick of ancient bas relief stone carving? I'm not (almost am).

I was thoroughly thrashed from the bike ride so I napped out hard when I got home. Then I woke up and wandered down the street from my hostel to a hippy macro/vegan spot with wifi and decent coffee. Creature comforts. Had to endure a fair number of spacey conversations in my periphery, New Age wonks and washed up salty dogs are the water jocks to Ubud's Gili. I hung out with an ancient Australian man who was working on his daily bottle of red wine, he was chill, that special type of ex-pat who ends up in SE Asia after Latin America becomes too expensive. We talked about the Inca for a bit, then I said goodbye and told him to enjoy the rest of his trip. He replied, "And you enjoy the rest of your life."

Later that night I rambled into a gamelan shop to catch some wayang kulit, a traditional Balinese shadow puppet show. At first it was cool, the music was really frantic and harsh and the singing was shrill and dense. Then after about an hour the puppeteers switched to wacky English dialogue in a vague attempt at humor, and I left. Videos to come if I can figure that out.

Small things:

Balinese offerings. I'm way into these little things. I think they have something to do with Hinduism, or represent some vestige of indigenous religion. They usually feature cooked rice, incense, banana leaf, a ritz cracker or two, sometimes some money. They are all over the streets, in front of every shop. Sometimes they are hung from power lines. Sometimes they are eaten by monkeys. A small, colorful part of Bali that will stick in my memory.

Caught Olympics opening ceremonies at a local bar, or what I could between annoying Indonesian commercials. Pretty standard "Chinese culture" fare but I thought it was pretty good, actually gave me chills at some points, at the risk of sounding ridiculous. And I'm quite impressed by China's ability to control weather.

"schemin with this keenen/aimin with this damon/i'm puttin that major pain in/my little man is on ya/marlon and shawn ya"

Now I'm in the Dewa Lounge of Denpasar International, waiting for a flight to Jakarta then connecting on to Bangkok. Spent my last rupiah to hang with some wifi, all you can eat nasi and an open bar (sorry dad, no Bali shirts; don't worry M, I'll sleep it off before I arrive). Ending my stay in Indonesia on the highest possible note. Sorry for the book, Ubud was that good. I hope to come back sometime. For now I'm headed north. I'm a bit anxious at the prospect of subsisting in a country in which I have absolutely NO language skills. I have to look up Thai for "thank you" and "excuse me." My plans are still thankfully unformed. I'll let you know what I'm up to when I do.

Josh

Bali pop b/w A Gili

2008-08-07T06:09:00.000-07:00

I was going to cram the last seven days into one post but I'll break it up for dramatic effect. Not really, there's just a lot that's gone down and my e-endurance is limited.

I arrived in Bali at around 12 am on Saturday, August 2, officially kicking off the second, responsibility-free month of my Asian summer. I was traveling with a crew of 5 other volunteers and my Indonesian friend Bayu. After touching down in Denpasar and catching a cab to Kuta, Bali party capital, we arrived at our hotel and to our surprise found that our reservation for two triples was actually only for one double. Undaunted, we dropped our stuff in the room and headed out to experience Indonesia's premier first-world club scene.

I got my fill in the 10 hours I actually spent in Kuta. After meeting up the other volunteers (all but one made the sacred pilgrimage) we proceeded to celebrate the end of five weeks in a predominately Muslim, predominately dry (my host family's raging tendencies aside) environment. Spent a few hours "clubbing," something I wouldn't deign to do anywhere else, and a word I hope never to use again. Almost got in a fight with some drunk dude who tried to pull me off the stage I was dancing on with my inebriated peers. Headed to a nice beach at around 4 am and waited around for the sunrise, then, following the advice of friend and fellow former Jaguar Jeff Pickett, made a snap decision to leave Kuta as quickly as possible and take off for the next destination promptly that morning. No hotel room = NO SLEEP.

After some buses and a 6-hr boat ride I washed up on this shore of Gili Trawangan, one of three Gili islands off the northwest coast of the larger island of Lombok. Some lost days here.

On the first day I walked around the island and hung out with some local fauna. The crab was chill (shoot out to cancerians) but the majority of the population was surfing Australians and drunken Europeans, with whom I didn't engage much. Not in a debaucherous mood I guess. I was walking through the western, undeveloped side of the island during low tide so I was able to wade out about 50 yards from the shore in the shallows, through a garden of dead coral and very living starfish colonies. The next day I went snorkeling and generally sunning, and I spent every night laying on sand and looking at stars. There was a sufficient lack of light to see the Milky Way in crystal clarity each night, unfortunately my camera isn't capable of 20-minute star exposures or I'd show you.

The night views led to a subsequent lack of island partying, but beaches aren't my scene. So I decided to leave the Gilis on Tuesday. After a quick morning bite at the colorful Gili Deli (above, above), I lugged my bags on board a small ferry (above, middle), and embarked on a 12-hr trip back to Bali, spending more than a few meditative hours on open ocean (above, below). I ended up in Ubud, the inland, beachless cultural capital of Bali, which is most definitely my scene. But more on that next time.

"You surfboard dudes get wiped out, totally"

Josh

Nasi yoo

2008-07-31T20:23:00.000-07:00

Last morning in Malang, and I want to leave on a good note. No more bummer introspection. Instead I will talk about one of the most exciting, important, and satisfying aspects of any travel experience: FOOD.

A vegetarian can eat like a king in Indonesia. Besides satay, a skewer meat dish, most of the local food is naturally veggie. This is Nasi Pecel, a regular breakfast jam of mine. Featured: rice, boiled vegetables, bean sprouts, peanut sauce. Usually comes with tempe (not pictured) and crispy wonton type things (I had to request the peanut variety, one time I got one with a bunch of tiny fish heads : X ).

GADO GADO. Lunch jam. Salad consisting of some kind of mushy root vegetable, bean sprouts, boiled egg, these compressed rice balls, tofu, peanut sauce. 4/5 stars.

Fried cassava w/ bbq and chili sauce and some c0's. Copped before a repeat viewing of Batman at the local (only) movie theater. When I saw Chronicles of Narnia with my host family I had fries w/ "blueberry sauce", which was actually blue mayonnaise. Would not eat again. Blue mayo: 1/5 stars. Cassava: 3/5 (good movie snack).

THE WORKS. My students threw me a big going away party yesterday and brought a smorgasbord of Indonesian treats. This gem has tempe goreng (fried tempe, TEMPE is an Indonesian innovation and the world thanks them), tofu, rice, mie goreng (fried noodles), sambeng goreng (a spicy mix of stir fried onions, garlic, chilis and tempe), pecel (boiled veggies), bean sprouts, and of course peanut sauce. Served in a piece of brown paper, street food style. 5/5 stars. Fully backed.

And the grand finale...

TERANG BULAN. A little background. Indonesians love cheese. But only in the context of dessert. When I first arrived at the Surabaya airport I stopped in the Dunkin Donuts there out of curiosity and was appalled to find donuts half covered with chocolate frosting, half with shredded cheese. A few weeks later my host family gave me this stuff. Terang bulan means "full moon" in Indonesian. It was described as "cheese chocolate cake." I tried it and was surprised to find that it was pretty good. I tried not to think about what was in it. I bought the fam a few boxes last night as a going away gift for our last dinner together, and watched it get made at the one and only Jointland. It is basically a cake with shredded cheese, CHOCOLATE SPRINKLES, and condensed milk. Still good though. π/5 stars.

And now some final flicks from Malang.

Going away party with the students. Special shout out to the bboys and punx in attendance.

One last rager with the host 'rents. The other day I was visiting with a friend from Surabaya who'd come to Malang for the day. I apologetically told her I had to return home by 10 to be respectful to my family because they probably wanted to go to sleep. I walked in and immediately got handed a BOTTLE of Johnny Walker Red and received instructions to pre-game because they were all going out to a club. This was a Tuesday night. I'll miss them.

12-year-old host bud Edo. Peace brother.

I'm out for the airport. See you in Bali.

Josh

Voluntourism

2008-07-28T01:59:00.000-07:00

I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class "American Way of Life," since that is really the only life you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it - the belief that any true American must share God's blessings with his poorer fellow men. The idea that every American has something to give, and at all times may, can and should give it, explains why it occurred to students that they could help Mexican peasants "develop" by spending a few months in their villages.

Of course, this surprising conviction was supported by members of a missionary order, who would have no reason to exist unless they had the same conviction - except a much stronger one. It is now high time to cure yourselves of this. You, like the values you carry, are the products of an American society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system, its universal schooling, and its family-car affluence. You are ultimately-consciously or unconsciously - "salesmen" for a delusive ballet in the ideas of democracy, equal opportunity and free enterprise among people who haven't the possibility of profiting from these.

This is an excerpt from a speech given by Ivan Illich (great pseudonym, or allusive parents?) to a group of missionary volunteers in 1968 (full transcript here). Back when I was planning to direct a Yunnan pilot program similar to the one I'm volunteering in now, a friend forwarded this to me to raise awareness of some of the ideological complications inherent in international volunteerism. The speech is quite dated, but as time goes on I find it increasingly relevant. This is my response.

I am performing a service. I paid for my own plane ticket here, and though I receive free room and board from a host family, I receive no reimbursement from the school in which I teach. I am here voluntarily. I am here because I want to teach, because I have a good understanding of English and I believe that, as English proficiency is a valuable and viable skill in underprivileged areas worldwide, I am in some way contributing to the future success of my students.

I am also critical of my own intentions. I don't believe that any act is entirely selfless, and certainly part of my reason for coming to Indonesia was to experience a different culture, to take advantage of my time here to increase my own understanding of an area of the world I previously poorly understood. Luckily, intercultural exchange is part of the mission of Learning Enterprises, the NGO through which I am working, and I think this is an admirable and worthy goal in itself. In this respect, too, I've certainly given as much as I've taken. My class has been eager to learn about American culture, movies, music, sports, and have humored my curiosity about Indonesian history and religion, giving me lessons on dangdut and wayang, even though they find these subjects incredibly passe.

In recent weeks I've discussed politics and economics, college life and interviewing skills with my students. Some of this was occasioned by the recent election of Malang city officials, and I was interested to learn of the political views of my students, many of whom are just old enough to vote. They were perhaps less interested in my lectures on energy crises, fuel costs, war, and presidential politics, but they responded to my prepared readings on the role of youth culture in the democratic process with astounding clarity and understanding. Real exchange occurred. (And don't worry, Indonesia is already a democracy, no imperialist ideologizing here. Maybe a little Obamanization but he was already their favorite because he lived in Jakarta and is "handsome.")

The discussion of college and career has been interesting. All of my students acknowledged that their reason for taking my class was to increase their language skills for a future career. Certainly speaking English is a huge asset for many jobs here, and many of my students, at this early stage, envision themselves as bankers, businessmen, and "big bosses." How am I helping them? And who am I helping? My school, as with most of the other schools in the Indonesian LE program, is composed of relatively wealthy, primarily upper-class Chinese students. It is one of Malang's best schools. Of the 15 students who have attended my class regularly, most of them already have a strong grasp of the rudiments of English. The most absorbing moments (on both ends, I believe) have come not from grammar lessons, but informal conversations like the ones I've described here and elsewhere in this blog. Four weeks of conversing with a native speaker is a great language lesson in itself, but I'm dubious of how much I've contributed to my students' pre-existing English skills. I've done my best, and maybe other volunteers with more experience or sterner lesson plans have had different results. But I can't shake the feeling that in the main, I have been contributing to the privileges afforded an already-privileged group, providing an advantage to the advantaged and doing very little to affect the status quo or the quality of life of the average (or, more to the point, poorer-than-average) Indonesian. In a best-case scenario, my students will use whatever they've gained from my class and share it, use it as an experience to grow from and (eventually) utilize their skills to provide an economic boon to their community. It is also likely that some of them will go on to study in the US, UK, or Australia, and parlay their foreign-language skills into a career that will take them around the world. I'm the last person that can criticize wanderlust or international travel, and I don't think these are negative goals at all. But the idea of providing skills to young people who will make their livelihood by seeking economic opportunities elsewhere has complicating implications for the "local empowerment" aspect of international volunteerism.

Before I go on I want to make clear that I am not criticizing my specific program, much less Learning Enterprises as a whole. Many LE programs are in truly remote, poor villages, and I cannot comment on the local benefits or ultimate success of these, or other programs run by similar institutions. I can say that my Yunnan pilot would have put cultural exchange at the fore of the mission, and my experience here has reinforced my skepticism in the idealistic view that a first-world volunteer (likely middle class, inarguably wealthy in relative terms) performs an ethically uncomplicated service by living and teaching in a developing country. I do think that I have done good, have performed a service, but I don't delude myself that I am performing a community service.

I am a tourist. I teach for two hours a day, which leaves 22 hours for eating, sleeping, and consuming. Even as I've spent months at a time studying in foreign countries, I have felt like an outsider, and realized that at the end of the day I am much less a participant than an observer. (This is in fact a topic on which I have commented before.) In my experience it has proven true, to an extent, that in any given cross-cultural context you are only likely to "dialogue with those like you - [local] imitations of the North American middle class." This is something I realized early on, and in my travels I've made a continual effort to break from the proscribed tourist track, to spend as much time speaking with Mongolian musicians as Han classmates, shamans as government officials, goatherds as much as the hordes of well-off onlookers that upon seeing me instantly trot out their 5 words of English, ask me to pose for photographs with them and try to include me in their future plans. Good-natured enough, this is not the cultural exchange I seek. That goes both ways. Either I am an exotic "other" to be photographed and hollered at (which I don't have a huge problem with) or an exoticizing other seeking my own pre-conceived notion of authenticity, inescapably stamping my experiences with the conditioned nature of my outsider's perspective.

I don't think I am a bad person for traveling, for studying abroad, for volunteering. And I'd like to think that I am a more sensitive and self-aware tourist/student/volunteer than most. This exorcism is an exercise in humility, a fundamental questioning of my own motivations for spending this summer and the last several years abroad, and a formulation of the possibilities and pitfalls of what I vaguely call "intercultural exchange." I'm optimistic, and I think now more than ever our world needs cultural representatives to create avenues of discussion and exploration across our increasingly interconnected planet. Certainly now more than in 1968, for with the advent and rapid development of bullet trains and planes, near instant global telecommunication, and of course the internet has come a need to take international volunteerism very seriously. Perhaps it still is not, and will never be, a purely ethical mission, and I personally think it should not be conceived as such. But I have, for my part, volunteered my time in the service of an ideal that I do take seriously. This is the need to learn from people in different countries and cultures by being with them, giving to them and taking what they offer in return, teaching and learning. This is one thing that I have taken away from all of my travels, and one thing I bring with me every new place I go.

Now for an epilogue, here's what I've been up to. On Sunday my fellow volunteers and I visited Kawah Ijen, another prominent volcano of East Java lore. I did much of the 3 km uphill alone, took in the breathtaking views in self-selected solitude. Ijen is inactive, and at its caldera is an unearthly sulphuric crater lake. When I say I walked alone, I'm excepting the numerous sulphur miners I passed on the way, men whose daily grind involves trekking up the mountain several times a day and returning to base with baskets loaded with the foul yellow substance (above, they are the tiny specks). Truly a backbreaking and malodorous job, and a visual counterpoint that drove home what exactly my role at Ijen was.

So, I have one day of teaching left, another holiday on Wednesday, a last day party on Thursday, and on Friday I take off for Bali to begin the next leg of my summer in Asia, which will at least be an ethically uncomplicated exercise in unadulterated tourism. (That's not really true, but I'm done preaching. That may or may not be true. At least next time I'll have more nice pictures.)

Josh

22

2008-07-21T20:20:00.001-07:00

Writing live from 22 July, it feels like too long since I've posted and to be sure much has happened.

Last Monday, after a 2 am arrival on a terribly uncomfortable bus ride back from Yogya, I rested up, cleaned up, and suited up for a wedding party (shoot out to my host dad for the kicks, my filthy white velcro Vans were definitely the weak link in an otherwise pretty tight impromptu formal getup). The marriage was between Ryan and Lepsi, affiliates of my host family, and we showed up just in time for the party. This was a classy affair by any standard, held at Kota Araya, Malang's high-class "golden gate bridge" resort. The reception actually wasn't too different from American analogs I've participated in, except for the notable lack of booze. I was just there for the family though, and I really felt like part of one, a great night and good excuse to look nice.

The rest of the teaching week went by quickly. In my class we talked about sports, the Olympics, cultural exchange, and on Friday we had our own miniature Olympic Games, complete with frisbee discus, water balloon shotput, and dodgeball. I also played "futsal" with my students, a kind of redacted soccer, and my team won, which wasn't nearly as enjoyable to me as hearing slang terms from the week's lessons being used on the field ("He's on fire!", "Hat trick!").

Then at 30 til 2 am on Saturday morning, we were whisked away by bus to catch sunrise at another major East Java attraction, Gunung Bromo. Bromo (the short one) is one of three active volcanoes embedded in a sea of black sand. The whole scene looks like some kind of surreal lunar landscape (above). After watching sun chase away the moon for a while and taking a lot of redundant photos, I trekked down to the crater itself. Bromo is the stuff of Javanese legend, and there is an annual appeasement ritual where the smoking earth maw is fed money and live animals. Unfortunately (or fortunately) we were not there for that, so I performed my own nondescript ritual, walking well past the limit of the restrictive safety fence to a high ridge overlooking the beast. I just sat there and luckily didn't fall in.

We got back to Malang at around 11 am, more nap catchup, then on Saturday evening some of the more youthful members of our Indonesian entourage took us out to Flame, Malang's premier night club. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I took no pictures of this. On Sunday we went to see The Dark Knight, which is the best movie of the year, all I'll say about it is I'm planning the rest of my summer around Asian IMAXs to get a proper view.

At midnight on Monday 21 July my host family woke me up with furious knocking and a burning black forest cake in celebration of my 22nd birthday. It was really touching. The rest of the day was very enjoyable, I slept in (til 9), gave a lecture on ancient art to my students, received birthday greetings from my real family and one Tu (I regret the inconsistency with this post's theme), and met up with the rest of the volunteers and a solid crew of Indonesian friends and family for a dinner and shisha sesh at Saboten, a local Japanese restaurant. I graciously received a midnight curfew so I even went out for a few games of pool afterwards. The best Indonesian birthday I could have hoped for.

Tomorrow Malang has city elections so I have a holiday from classes. Plans to visit a "floating temple", not 100% sure what that means. Then this weekend more nature, more youth culture, and preparing for my last week of classes. More later.

To a new year of life...

-Josh

505 Buddhas

2008-07-15T00:38:00.000-07:00

Packed weekend. On Friday, after wrapping up my first week of classes by teaching my students the components of Classical tragedy (for an assignment my student Pandu wrote a brief drama entitled "Kung Fu Pandu"), I napped, packed, and jumped to my friend Amelia's house to board an overnight bus to Yogyakarta, cultural capital of Java.

After a cramped 11-hour bus ride we arrived at Prambanan, a 9th-century Hindu temple complex just outside of Yogya. Since we got there at 7 am, there weren't many tourists, just a few locals and kids. Of course we had arranged a guided tour but my archaeologist's pride was diverting my attention so I struck off on my own about 5 seconds after our guide stomped on the stone stairs to demonstrate the site's "ancient sounds." Each of the over 200 temples of Prambanan were originally adorned with niches framing a panoply of Hindu mythological imagery, running the full gamut from sacred to profane (but mostly focusing on these two). At the perimeter of the site core there are also smaller groups of Buddhist temples featuring mostly headless seated Siddharthas and some gnarly armed guards. Overall I was quite impressed with Prambanan, and especially by the reconstruction efforts that have resulted in what I saw. Like parts of the Maya area, Central Java is a region plagued by earthquakes and volcanism; the site was discovered in (and in large part remains in) ruins.

Borobudur. This is one of the main reasons I decided to come to Indonesia, and one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist monument in the world, one gigantic stupa composed of nine platforms supporting an original count of 504 statues of the bodhi man (my jade Maitreya makes 505). Just a massive stone cosmogram. EVERY PANEL on EVERY SIDE of EVERY LEVEL of Borobudur is decorated with relief carving, depicting mytho/historical scenes from the life of the Buddha and a wide range of gods, demons, sinners, saints, and of course holy critters. Borobudur dramatically affected Ad Reinhardt's conception of human art-making, and though I've been preoccupied with the deep connection between images, religion, and stone for a while now, I was similarly overwhelmed. After circumambulating each level several times and pressing my hand to the Buddha's in one of the stupas on the top level for luck, I slowed down and sat stunned for a while. Just me and this guy, staring at space, letting a million thoughts and memories sift through my head and not letting myself attach to any of them.

I'm getting a little esoteric. It was not just me and him. It was we two and about a million more tourists, mostly domestic, mostly loud. I felt like part of the attraction as I got asked to pose for photos at least a dozen times by virtue of the exoticism of my skin and height. Or maybe they thought I was Nicholas Cage (one Indonesian woman said I looked like him, kind of a longshot IMO). Still, Borobudur is possibly the most amazing piece of art I've seen, and though there isn't much legitimate data on why it was made or how it was used, it nevertheless remains an ancient and timeless testament to the centrality of art in human culture. Truly a man-made mountain among mountains.

After an hour's drive back to Yogya, we checked into our hotel, exhausted. After a power nap and some vacillation I decided to join my group in heading back to Prambanan for a light dinner and some opera. That is, traditional Indonesian opera, a balletic performance of the Vedic epic the Ramayana, accompanied a gamelan orchestra. I'd heard of but never heard gamelan, it is beautiful, basically 15 people playing differently pitched bells and one lead percussionist on several variously sized drums. A lot of minor chords, minimal but powerful. And you can't beat the setting (above, yes those are the Prambanan temples).

Sunday was a half day in Yogya itself. Historically, Yogyakarta has been a bastion of Javanese culture, maintaining its traditional hereditary sultanate even in the midst of Dutch occupation and revolution, and today you can visit the sultan's palace, which we did. But what caught my eye was the graffiti, which Yogya is equally noted for, as it is the center of Java's contemporary art scene (see the gallery above, click any pic for a larger view). While my fellow volunteers were busy batik bargaining, I spent a good three hours hoofing it miles downtown, taking in the varied styles and sophisticated design of Yogya's street art and only stopping to rest my feet for a while with some gods at a small Buddhist temple I passed along the way.

That wraps Sunday up. I could write more, but I've already spent most of today uploading 150 photos (of the over 700 I took over the weekend) and formatting this post, and it's almost dark. Next time I'll talk about marriage and birth. Until then, let the sun hit ya, I'll hit you back soon.

Josh

86'ed

2008-07-10T05:08:00.001-07:00

Settling into Malang. This past weekend involved some group- and host family-bonding field trips.

On Saturday we went to Taman Safari, a half-cool, half-depressing drive-through zoo. Saw animals from all over the world, which was kind of gimmicky, but we also cruised by some locals, including a pit of lethargic Komodo dragons and a jungle gym of equally lazy orangutans. We spent a good deal of the time trying to remember everyone's name from the Jungle Book. I wanted to jump out of the car and get my Mougley on but the spitting alpacas (and pissed panthers) slowed my roll.

Highlight: Sitting spitting distance from my zodiac animal (but not spiritual co-essence, this is a Jaguar, one of which I got equally close to in Guatemala, but without the safety of steel and glass, but more on this another time)(see above)

Low point: Wandering around the zoo afterwards, which featured parrots with clipped wings and chained elephants. These reminded me of Sanchahe Nature Reserve in Xishuangbanna, another depressing elephant gawking park I visited in China, where I got much more out of human than animal camaraderie. I skipped the baby lion petting zoo at Taman.

On Sunday we visited the much more enjoyable Coban Rondo, a waterfall near a town outside of Malang called Batu Kota ("Rock City"). Coban Rondo means "widow waterfall", and it's said if you visit it you and your significant other are soon to part. Luckily I arrived in this country with the single-minded objective of 86'ing significant others from my mental, and at the risk of sounding like too much of a hippie I got a lot out of the water, got into the water that is to say, waltzed as close to the fall as I could without getting crushed and dipped my brain into the brook a ways downstream.

After the fall I hung out with this fire dude for a while while my crew caught a quick bite at the park entrance. I myself sampled the local street fare, a topic on which I'll write (MUCH) more later.

On Sunday night I met my host family, a wealthy Chinese couple with a twelve-year-old son. They were tired after two weeks traveling around Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, but over the course of this week we've broken the ice and started serious bonding. As I'd hoped, Chinese is the only language I have in common with Mei Fen, my host mother (my Bahasa and her English are like negatives of each other), and her constant appeal of "Ta shuo shenme?" at every utterance of my Western housemates has contributed significantly to our budding dynamic. On Tuesday she took us to a Chinese Universist temple called Eng An Kiong. It was the temple's 183rd birthday so there was a huge feast (above) and dragon performance, but unfortunately my camera died halfway through so I couldn't capture the impressive acrobatics (shoot out to my two favorite dragons, though). I received a Mandarin tour of the temple from an old Chinese man, and of the slightly more than 50% of this that I understood I was pretty psyched on the fo jiao, dao jiao, and kong jiao.

On Monday I also started teaching my high school class. I was apprehensive about this at first as I've never taught, but so far it's been incredibly fun and rewarding. This week we talked mostly about music and movies, but they're also interested in politics and I'm definitely looking forward to getting some help from my man here to illustrate my country's bright prospects for the future.

Tomorrow I take off for Yogyakarta, Java's cultural center and the town from which I will visit BOROBUDUR, an ancient Buddhist monument that I'm eager to see both because of it's historical significance and because in more recent times its timeless art has served as a great inspiration to my idol.

So more SOON. In conclusion, a few words about Tigers:

Because Tigers are urgent people and always in a hurry to get things done right, they usually choose to operate alone. Tigers like to work, they are hard-working and dynamic. If you assign a task to a Tiger, the job will be undertaken and accomplished with enthusiasm and efficiency.

Tigers are sensitive, emotional. They are capable of great love, but they become too intense about it. They are also territorial and possessive, if you are a friend of a Tiger, he wants you to take his side against the bad guys and because the Tiger is so adorable, you often do. As lovers, Tigers are passionate and romantic, but the real challenge for the Tiger is to grasp the true meaning of moderation.

-Josh

99 Problems

2008-07-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

Been a whirlwind week. Had a great going away last Friday: hung with Greg Williams in Inman for a minute, picked up Barthes for the flight, oscillated like a wild mug at a public dance party in front of Cambridge City Hall (seriously the second time I’ve danced in my life, shout out to Rosa for the free lessons), and bounced from bar to bar to bid farewell to various Central Square-crawling colleagues. Around this time last Saturday I was waiting to board a Newark-bound plane, clutching a caringly prepared Magnolia sandwich (shout out to Rosa for the free grub) and preparing carefully to perform in the clutch in a very unknown future.

I spent over 24 hours in transit, leaving Boston at 5:30 PM on June 28 and flying to Newark, to Stockholm, to Kuala Lumpur, finally arriving in Surabaya at 10 AM on June 30 (shout out to Jamie for turning 20). I was greeted at the airport by the welcoming Dunkin glow, which is all over Indonesia, who knew? Cooler than a Starbucks anyway.

I caught a cab to my hostel only to find that my group had just taken off to visit a university in a neighboring city. I was jetlagged and unwashed but ready to rage this new place so I jumped on Dian Natalia’s motorbike and cruised around the city. Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia, which is the 4th most populous country in the world. I don’t know what I expected but it was not this bursting metropolis. Luckily I had a down guide, and I learned much about the city and Surabayan youth culture from my new friend. This is the first time I’ve been oriented to a new country outside of the context of an official program, and I have to say zooming through crowded city streets perilously perched on the back of a motorcycle with a cute 20-something comes highly recommended.

The next day I met up with my volunteer group, 12 American and British college students including myself. At my request we visited some Lonely Planet highlights. First was Kong Co Kong Tik Cun Ong, a Chinese temple with mixed elements of Buddhism and Daoism. This temple was active, with older Chinese genuflecting and rolling oracle bones. It was quite beautiful, but it made me miss China and wonder what is uniquely Indonesian. I got a clearer idea of this when we walked up the street to Mesjid Ampel, the most sacred mosque in Surabaya. We were forbidden from entering as none of us are Muslim, but just trawling through the crowded marketplace and snapping some flicks of surrounding architecture provided a satisfying first experience of Indonesian Islam, a unique cultural formation I look forward to exploring in greater depth.

After only one full day in Sura I had to move on again, grudgingly, but filled with anticipation for the next destination. This was Malang, the city where I will be living and teaching for the next four weeks. I moved into my host house on Papaya Street, but will not meet my family until later in the week as they are currently touring China (I’m banking on a month of heavy Chinese practice). A few days ago we visited schools. I’ll be teaching at a private high school five minutes away from my house. Additionally, I am the only volunteer who will be teaching night classes. These will be at a vocational school for adults who can’t afford university, so I am extremely excited about this. I’m suspicious of the overall premise of international volunteerism (a subject for another post), but I feel that by teaching this night class I’ll be directly contributing to a truly underprivileged group of individuals for whom speaking English is an invaluable skill set. Plus, they already like me because I am in a punk band.

There’s a lot more I could bore you with but I’ll just leave you with abstractions for now. East Java is just south of the equator, the light is direct and pure, the day is from 6 to 6, the night is lit by a horizontal crescent moon that looks like the winking eye of black sky. And the light permeates everything and turns color into an almost palpable dimension of the environment, a mist through which I’m wandering and which permeates my reflections, blots out the minutiae that have been clouding my mind in recent weeks and allows me to be transcendently here, physically grounded and metaphysically ground into the fabric of what’s around me. For the first time in a long while I feel free, I feel now. And it’s winter here with nightly lows in the 70s and I can deal.

Next time: Jagger meets a Tiger, water saves me again

-Josh

Forgive me for running off to find the 1 thing I have to do

2008-06-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

What has happened in my life since last I wrote? I'm not sure myself. My computer died in Guatemala. I mooched other people's for emailing and stayed too connected to the world for where I was at the time. The excavations were interesting and engaging but I still can't talk publicly about them until the findings from the season have been officially reported to the Guatemalan government (July). So without making any hard promises I'll pledge an effort to reach back in my brain at a later date and unpack the still packed, undigested gestalt that is San Bartolo, probably the most unique, intense, and mentally challenging experience I've ever had.

On to the next thing.

I've been in Boston for the past five weeks, after a five day re-acclimation in San Antonio. I've been occupying myself with fruitless and fruitful pursuits, in relatively equal measure, and I don't know where the time has gone.

Fruitful: BU summer math class (numbing), researching my senior thesis (coming along), formulating post-graduation plans (coming soon)

Fruitless: walking too much, chasing my shadow, smoke and mirrors

I've also been active musically, something I've missed in my constant motion during the last few years, and something which is neither fruitful nor fruitless, but just raw experience, which I suppose everything is when you strip it down. Last Monday I played with my friend Chris Corry's band Mentally Challenged. The show was with Total Abuse, my good Texas friends, and it felt like a strange culmination of my experiences in hardcore punk, which has structured my life in a significant way from high school through my first few years of college. I felt culturally at home for the first time in a while, and it was bittersweet, because I think it will be the last time I'm so intimately involved in a scene that has had such a powerful impact on my life.

But constant motion is my life now, like those babies in Brave New World who are conditioned from birth to move at high speeds so that they get motion sickness standing still. This past weekend I went to New York to hook up with Robedoor and Pocahaunted, Not Not Fun friends from my LA summer 06. Another nostalgic experience, memory of a past life.

In New York I also visited Jeff Koons on the roof of the MET and Olafur Eliasson at MoMA with my friends Rosa and Ryan. The MET was full of skyline, sunset, reflection, but mostly sunny yuppies gripping $8 Stellas. Olafur was full of light, and not much else. Two typical NY contemporary art encounters, well-packaged experiences that now exist as a few photos and an already fading point of light on the dark screen of my short-term memory. I'm just glad I was able to hustle my way into both exhibits for a grand total of $1 USD. And I got to spend a minute with my hero.

On to a new one.

So of course I'm not sitting still, even as I write this I'm looking at plane tickets. I take my "applied math" final on Thursday and on Saturday evening I fly from Boston to Surabaya, Indonesia, where I will attend 2 days of orientation before beginning a six-week volunteer English-teaching term in the town of Malang on the island Java. This will be my first time living in a predominately Muslim country so I am excited for this new sociocultural experience. My itinerary after August 4 is ambiguous, and time could find me in Bali, Bangkok, Angkor, Kunming, Hong Kong, Texas, all of these or some of them. Let me know if you're around any of them and maybe we will meet.

Shoot out to JAY BIL, from whom I stole the title of this post (click the link to see some things I missed about Beijing, yes I am Jaggermouth). I have a new online mixtape, sparse right now but I will try to get some field recordings I did in China up before I leave. And as always a continually updated photo set documenting my summer in this Year of the Rat.

"I'm certified."
-Kevin Garnett

I'm out.

-Josh

Jungle malady

2008-03-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

Long silence from my end... I have been in the jungle for three weeks, and have avoided some great opportunities to catch you up on my various adventures in Honduras and Guate en route to this isolated tent burg, and now my computer has caught jungle rot and no longer functions! I'm trying to remedy the situation but the likelihood is that I won't be writing much until I'm back in the States, or if I do, my posts will be photo-less. In the mean time you can check out some of the photos I've taken since my last post here. If a picture is worth a thousand words these should be worth at least one overly verbose blog entry...

Talk to you later??

-Josh

Mayan, Maya, vaya

2008-02-16T07:57:00.000-08:00

Spanish classes are wrapped up and I'm leaving tomorrow for the densely forested unknown. Here's what I've been doing for the last two weeks, the last month, the last few days, from my last day in Antigua.

Last weekend we went to Lago de Atitlan, a 1,000'-deep freshwater lake in the mountainous/volcanic Guatemalan highlands. The lake abides in a caldera formed by an ancient eruption, and has since human time observable been a site of great significance to the Maya who populated the region in the pre-Columbian era. There are actually archaeological sites beneath the water, but to observe these you must be high-altitude deep-water dive certified, a task for which I am doubly unqualified.

The purpose of the trip was to relax for the weekend, but I was keen to imbibe the distinct local Maya culture. There are over 20 Mayan groups living in Central America today, with distinct languages and cultural traditions. The villages around Atitlan are comprised of predominately Kaqchikel and Tzutujil Mayans. In a neat bit of colonial treachery, the Kaqchikels were enlisted by conquistadores at the dawn of Spanish conquest to defeat their then neighboring faction, the K'iche Mayans, before themselves falling victim to subjugation. Now the Kaqchikeles and Tzutujiles enjoy relative cultural autonomy, maintaining a more or less traditional way of life in the villages around the Lake, such as the one I visited, Santiago de Atitlan.

During my one full day in Santiago I took the opportunity to visit a Cofradía, a meeting hall where an interesting amalgamation of Catholicism and the shamanic Tzutujil religion is practiced. A few other students and I witnessed the blessing of an American philanthropist (and funder of excavations at San Bartolo). Two Tzutujil nahuals, or shamans, presided over the ceremony, one swinging incense around those to be blessed and the other (pictured above) playing guitar. In this picture the elder nahual has just inundated his guitar with incense from the Copal tree, floating a generous amount of the fragrant smoke into the cavity of his instrument. He played with his guitar nearly vertical and as he did a stream of smoke slowly trailed out around his hands and engulfed him in a pale, sun-inflected cloud. Cool image.

After the Cofradía we visited this guy, Maximon, a rather enigmatic Tzutujil god. Maximon is a local legend, and spends each year at a different house, making his annual trip during Semana Santa (the week at the end of Lent). On his way to his new home Maximon spends a few days at a Tzutujil temple adjacent to the Catholic church in the center of Santiago. The Tzutujil equate Maximon with Judas Iscariot, and when he is placed in his temple he is simultaneously viewed as hanging on his suicidal tree and jeering at the imposed religion of European others. Local legend has it that Maximon fights Jesus on Easter. When I saw him he was accompanied by a lit sculpture of Jesus in his sepulcher and two attendant nahuals. Maximon gets by on donations (such as those I paid just to visit him for a few minutes), and he puts the money to good use, "consuming" 40-60 eighths of liquor and a few packs of cigarettes a day (he smoked two cigarettes while I was there). I was told by our translator that while he's drunk he is taken advantage of by witches, who take away his curing power. However, when he wakes up to the holy nahuals he sobers up to his mistakes and regains his supernatural efficacy. Interesting guy.

To conclude our day we visited a Franciscan church where the Catholicism was a bit more clear cut. The main claim to fame of the church, however, was a fantastically intricate carved wooden altar, a towering masterpiece that took its craftsman eight years to complete. The iconography of the altar complicated a completely Catholic reading of its symbolism, as it featured such undeniably Maya adornments as the maize god and nahuals dressed as Maximon surrounding and ascending such expected imagery as Christ crucified and the mournful Mother.

My weekend concluded back in the unambiguously Catholic Antigua. There is an elaborate church procession every Sunday during Lent through the streets of town, featuring two marching bands, giant lit floats, and innumerable purple-robed Padres and altar boys. I managed to catch a lull in the motion long enough to capture this image of Jesus. He is attended on this float by lilacs, a tree, Greek columns and very Western angels, perhaps a no less conspicuous admixture of divergent cultural elements than what I saw in Santiago.

Now that I'm leaving Antigua, a quick word as to what exactly I've been doing in between all these disturbingly vacation-like side trips. Besides Spanish class, I've also been working in the laboratory that houses all of the artifacts unearthed from San Bartolo for two hours a day. As I've mentioned, San Bartolo possesses now-famous spectacularly preserved Maya murals dating to around 100 BC. Over half of the murals, however, exist in the state visible here, that is, in the form of over 9,000 (and counting) fragments of destroyed stucco wall. One of the main objectives of the archaeologists working here is to piece together, literally, the amazing imagery of the murals, using as a rough guide the art of both Preclassic maya predecessors and San Bartolo's iconographic descendants, notably illustrated manuscripts of the 16th century K'iche Mayan creation myth the Popol Vuh and the numerous lived Mayan religious and artistic traditions practiced today, one small part of which you have glimpsed here. In fact, the nahual guitarist pictured above has been to San Bartolo, making the 8-hour trip with full religious paraphernalia and a small orchestra of traditional instruments after hearing about the murals in 2004. My professor, William Saturno, described the ritual to me, which involved the burning of Copal and playing of guitar and drum. It moved him deeply, he says: "this is the first time these walls have heard this music in 2,000 years."

I know this is terribly long, but it's two weeks and many introspective days-worth of images and observations. The next week might slow my roll a bit, as I'll be on the road. Three nights in Copan Ruínas, Honduras, where I'll visit the country for the first time and see the artistically sophisticated Maya site of Copán. Then three days in Flores, Guatemala, where I'll revisit the most monumental Maya site, Tikal. After that, it's off to San Bartolo for two and a half months of mural-gazing, hard-digging, hammock-sleeping, no-running-water-but-somehow-constantly-internet-connected tent living. There will be much more to write.

-Josue

Active

2008-02-03T06:12:00.000-08:00

Another week deep in Antigua. Here´s some background on the ground around me.

city + volcan
Originally uploaded by endtimes

This is Antigua as seen from Cerro del Cruz ("Hill of the Cross"), a small park on a hill to the north overlooking the city and the monster Volcàn de Agua to the south, which has come out from hiding behind its clouds. Agua is inactive except as a navigational beacon and subject of innumerable street artists´painted views of the town.

yellow / sun
Originally uploaded by endtimes

This area´s main claims to fame are volcanoes and churches, old colonial missions such as this one, La Merced. This one is particularly lovely and yellow, part of the same complex as the previously mentioned arco amarillo. La Merced is located a block away from my Spanish school so I have the privilege of viewing it in the early morning and afternoon every day on my way to and from class.

Pacaya
Originally uploaded by endtimes

And here is Pacaya, another volcano near Antigua/Guatemala City, but one that is quite active (view here its steaming top). I hiked up here yesterday with a small group of new friends, wasn´t too arduous and definitely worth it when we got to the bank of the lava river. I poked the beast with my walking stick, which became instantly aflame, I was expecting something viscous but it actually feels quite solid, being liquid rock. It didn´t get too mad and wasn´t moving nearly fast enough to overtake my escape on the sharp pumice rockscape but even getting near enough to shake a stick at the flow nearly singed the hair off my face. Pacaya´s revenge.

This week in my Spanish class I talked about human evolution, extraterrestrials, Maya archaeology and seismic activity with my teacher. In the future I will discuss some of these things with you (specifically the Maya and what I´ll be doing in relation to them in the coming months), but for now my life is sun and lava so that´s what´s hot at the moment. I plan to dedicate myself to Spanish for the proceeding week, taking a personal "language pledge" that will preclude me from speaking any English in an effort to dial in my reacquired skills. So until then,

Hasta domingo pròximo
-Josh

Yeah the place you've been the last two weeks

2008-01-27T08:02:00.001-08:00

Been in Guatemala, Central America for the last week, after a lazily productive and ideally snow-filled week-and-a-half-long Cantabrigian vacation. Still have a foot in both worlds mentally but I'm adjusting to the cloudless 70-degree days and it's not so hard. So here's some background on my situation. WITH PICTURES.

I arrived in Guatemala City last Saturday and took a bus with the other students in my program to Antigua, a UNESCO World Heritage spot and site of over 20 Spanish schools.

arco amarillo
Originally uploaded by endtimes

We checked into our hotel, which happened to be right inside Antigua's famous "arco amarillo" (yellow arc). Not pictured due to clouds is the monstrous Volcan de Agua which looms large to the south and has already proven a navigational beacon during early lost walks through town. I'll post up a flick of him later. Not pictured due to not being visible are the church bells that are ringing at this very moment near the hotel, one of the many reminders of Guatemala's pervasive Catholic culture and the small size of the town.

turtle drum
Originally uploaded by endtimes

I myself started Spanish classes last Monday, which will last for a month. I'm living with a host family, but with two other Americans and three Dutch so it's more like a host hostel. I have a lot of free time during which I've been roaming around the city. On the weekends wealthy domestic Guatemalan tourists come to Antigua because of its high elevation and subsequent coolness, and general charm. Last Sunday there was a small band of Mayan musicians playing a traditional marimba and turtle shell drum, recordings forthcoming.

sand temple
Originally uploaded by endtimes

On Thursday we had our first "field trip," which wasn't as much educational as sea-soaked. We headed to the Pacific coast of southern Guatemala to a resort area called Monterrico. Since the region is volcanic the sand is black, I'd never seen anything like it. The beach had pretty fierce waves, which crested in thin sheets of curling clear water that resembled obsidian blades as they pulled the arena negra from the sand floor.

So I got beat up by the 5-foot waves, napped in hammocks, read with my feet buried in the burning sand, burned in the sun but not too badly, just enough to coax some complexion to the fore of my pollution- and winter-paled skin. Now I'm ready to go back to class?

More about Spanish and Maya murals later, signing off, just saying

shout out
Originally uploaded by endtimes

Stateside, on the late side

2008-01-07T01:47:00.000-08:00

Been back in the US for a few weeks and it took me a few minutes but I finally figured out how to get this webpage back into English and how to stop my blog titles automatically transliterating into Hindi. Writing in transition, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a move. I'm leaving for Boston in half an hour. Wanted to hit you with some quick boring updates:

I've managed to throw most of my China photos up on Flickr. While I'll probably prove uninclined to update my previous posts with photographic evidence you can peruse at your leisure here.

I'm bumming around the bean for about a week and a half but soon enough I'll uproot and leave the country once again. If you've stayed posted during 2007 you'll remember my trip to Belize last semester. Well I'm returning to the jungles of Central America with Boston University for another archaeological field school, here.

So I'm soaking up the American soil through my travel weary feet for another two weeks. Getting over this reverse culture shock in time to reverse and repeat last spring's Mayan mission. Too tired to waste more words on this post! See you in Guatemala.

TWO THOUSAND EIGHT

It's cold but it's cool

2007-12-22T05:09:00.000-08:00

I leave Beijing in 11 hours. Following the advice of a good friend I've taken my last few days here slowly, letting my obligatory last-minute holiday shopping, sight-seeing, and city slumming unfold at a pace that has allowed me to re-experience the small minutiae of Chinese life and culture that I long ago began to take for granted and will soon begin to miss the most.

It took me a few days to get a feel for Beijing. I practically experienced as much culture shock coming here from Yunnan as I did stepping of the plane in Kunming. Here I've seen modernized (and modernizing) China, a sprawling metropolis in the process of stepping up to the world limelight in preparation for 8/8/08. I didn't know much about Beijing besides Tiananmen Square, where I saw Mao's paternal, satisfied grill surveying the small troop of overt and covert police guarding the Chinese flag and breaking up any and every public "demonstration," including my friend's short-lived performance with a yo-yo he'd bought at the Summer Palace. In the middle of the Square I saw Mao again, here a waxy (likely wax) body interred in a massive mausoleum filled with silent tourists and businessmen visiting the spot for good luck. Mao's omnipresence was only matched--exceeded even--by that of the "Specially Licensed Olympic Commodity Merchandiser". Beside the countdown ticking away in a government building opposite the Great Hall of the People I of course encountered an endless stream of hustlers grinding to get mascot keychains and "official" t-shirts into my hands and foreigner funds out of my wallet. I wonder if Mao had a grave that wasn't guarded by two armed military personnel around the clock whether he would turn in it.

My first impressions of Beijing were not positive. All I saw was a giant, thoroughly polluted and ostensibly cultureless mass lacking the charm (and killer street food) of Kunming, which had begun to feel like my home base between my sporadic trips to farmland and frontier. After I got my feet on the ground and my head in the right place (i.e. into a winter hat) I made an effort to get to know this city for what it is. I visited the 798 arts district and for the first time saw a large, international contemporary art scene in China, splitting my time between a noise record shop called Sugar Jar and Galleria Continua, where I saw an interesting Anish Kapoor exhibit. I did some excellent hikes on the Great Wall, which allowed me to cross a World Wonder off the list and scope some spectacularly ruined, decrepit, and unpopulated sections of the planet's largest man-made structure. The most fun I've had here has been at the indoor markets, however, where all the Mandarin I've managed to learn in my short time here has culminated in an expert admixture of humor, flirtation, and pure will power aimed toward the end of garnering my last-day pickups at the "enlightened foreigner" discount.

And I am a foreigner. I've spent many hours in dimly lit internet bars writing posts like this, emailing you all, planning my future, pining for the familiarity and comfort of home. I distinctly remember each time leaving the wangba with the sun a little lower in the sky and thinking how leveling the internet is, allowing me to follow certain patterns of life that are my rote at home and that I can more or less maintain anywhere in this increasingly interconnected planet. Then I get yelled at by a 90-year-old woman furiously trying to sell me a steamed bun and a bootleg Adidas backpack, or led by the hand by a concerned onlooker who knows I'm lost and swears by the Buddha that it's much too far to walk back to my dorm on my own, or taken to dinner by the family of a friend of a friend I made on the basketball court, and I realize I could only be in China. Then I realize this is what I'll miss the most.

Time is Life

2007-12-06T07:52:00.000-08:00

I entered this internet bar in the full bloom of afternoon and now it's 11:30 in the evening and I've been here, minus a one-hour break to inhale food and be bummed about the dying of the light. I was so tempted to not come back but I'm "in the zone" as the referees say and I'll take this opportunity to inform you of my recent exploits.

I arrived back in Kunming yesterday, after a week and a half of general lurking in Shaxi and three days of sick relaxation in Dali. The slow pace of life in rural Shaxi was a breath of fresh air (as was the very unpolluted air) and I'm not exactly sure where all the days went. I know that on both of the two Fridays I was there I checked out the weekly market, a Valley-wide affair where one can procure anything from bootleg Nikes to batteries to laundry machines to medicine-man-made potions to any variety of freshly slaughtered meats and newly uprooted vegetables. Ironically the one thing you cannot buy is traditional Bai or Yi ethnic minority textiles, which happened to be the only items I was "in the market for," as they say. Nevertheless it was nice to feel like I was in Circuit City, Target, Whole Foods, and a Peruvian shaman's hut simultaneously while enjoying sunshine and a spectacular mountain view and being regaled by pre-adolescent calls of "Hei Taiyang!" (Mandarin for "Black Sun," the name I received in a dream and which has stuck on the tongue of every Chinese I've met, both because of its ridiculousness and because a six-foot bearded American is not a sight soon forgotten in Shaxi.)

I also did several hikes, one of which was a 4-hour trek to a remote mountain village called Mapingguan which can only be reached by horse, and the horses I encountered were usually encumbered with so much lumber and produce that their proprietors had to ride sideways with both legs hanging off the side of the neck. (That is until they excitedly jumped off and offered my friend and I cigarettes.) You might think such a removed burg would be totally off the map, but with Shaxi's increasing tourist development has come the need to sate the indefatigable feet of dreadlocked European backpackers and even sometimes-lazy American college students, so we were far from the first Westerners to strike out for these hinterlands. I personally was interested to see the town as it was once a major salt processing center, producing a valuable Tea and Horse Caravan commodity, and because I was growing listless spending my days people-watching in front of Xingjiao Temple at my favorite of Shaxi's two coffee shops.

Of course somewhere in there I also conducted interviews with Swiss architects and engineers, Shaxi government officials, international tourists, and local farmers who didn't know much about their own cultural heritage at all. I was so taken by the town that I also succeeded, with the help of my friend Marianna Tu, in setting up a volunteer English-teaching program for the Summer of '08 through the American NGO Learning Enterprises. This was a major undertaking for me, and it took a few translated and not meetings with a government official and such diplomatic tactics as Gan bei'ing (see 9/15/07) the Director of Education of the region to assure myself and my colleagues that the program would meet with the enthusiastic support of the local community. I'm extremely excited about returning to Shaxi to direct this program this summer and putting into practice some of the evolving ideas I've had about effective strategies of empowering the local people against the political and economic disenfranchisement that has accompanied Shaxi's development as a tourist site.

In Dali I relaxed, sick for much of the time. I've gotten at least six good colds in China, which tops my count for the last few years. On Tuesday Marianna and I met Brian and Jeanee Linden, a Wisconsin-based couple who are renovating a compound in nearby Xizhou village as an upscale hotel and "cultural think tank." I was impressed that Brian and Jeanee were so interested to show us around and solicit our input, tapping our thinking tanks for ideas on how to develop their business and provide a meaningful cultural experience to a wide variety of foreign and domestic visitors. Later that day we met Xiao Tian, a friend of one of the artists we'd met in Kunming, at a Western restaurant called Cafe de Jack. We were met for dinner by Jack himself, a Hui Chinese who is renowned in your Lonely Planet guidebook for producing a kind of herbal whiskey, along with a woman we'd met working at a cafe in Jinghong (Xishuangbanna) and who turned out to be Bai and from Xizhou. Small country.

Today I spent the better part of my waking hours in this very wang ba, sorting through my competing thoughts about Shaxi, culture, art, architecture, economic development, intangible heritage. I have a few days to write this paper, present, and buy a winter hat before departing for what promises to be a very cold Beijing. In Shaxi I went with a Bai traditional doctor to collect medicinal herbs on the side of a mountain. We booked the two kilometers from Sideng to Diantou village; he explained, "I walk fast because time is life." Now I have 7 minutes to walk 10 minutes home before my dorm's door is U-locked at midnight, so see ya,

Josh

Center of the World

2007-11-22T22:20:00.000-08:00

Quick (?) update on my life.

I spent two weeks in Kunming, reading, researching, writing, and happily coffee shop bumming. My main concern has been learning all I can about Shaxi, the small farming village where I harvested rice and became entranced by the town's ancient architecture. Shaxi is located in a valley that boasts a ca. 500 BCE bronze culture and a centuries-long tradition of international cultural and economic exchange with Tibet and India via a number of trade routes alternately named the Southwestern Silk Road, Tibet-Burma-Yunnan route, and Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan. I've been interested in Shaxi's history, as well as its developments in the 21st century, which have consisted mainly of sustained material heritage preservation efforts spearheaded by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Shaxi has an old market square which was a major hub for the Tea Horse Caravan; the square includes an old Confucian theater and a Ming Dynasty temple called Xingjiao, which was used until the last 100 or so years for the practice of Azhali, an esoteric sect of Buddhism based on Tibetan tantric practices but locally and culturally specific to the Bai ethnic minority of Yunnan province. The temple was converted into an administrative building by Communist officials during the Cultural Revolution but has been restored by the joint Swiss-Chinese Shaxi Rehabilitation Project and now once again enjoys pride of place in Shaxi's market square, a site of tourist visitation fronted by two imposing demonic "guardian king" statues (pictures forthcoming, if I ever remember my Flickr password).

I did have some much needed decompression time in Kunming, during which time I thought a lot about cultural heritage preservation. As an Art History/Archaeology double major, I study aesthetic objects in their ancient and modern contexts. Since I've been in China, I've realized that I am very interested in the contemporary uses that such objects are put to, the various "agencies" they reflect. China is development-hungry, and in most places where the Cultural Revolution did not totally destroy ancient art and architecture, these are being restored mainly to serve the purpose of attracting domestic and international tourists. In the interviews I've conducted with government officials and the head of the Jianchuan County Cultural Relic Preservation Institute, there has been no distinction made between "cultural relics" and "cultural heritage." Both are used to refer to the materials left from a history that is distant not only in terms of the time that has passed, but also the ideological turns that have made the Four Olds of Chinese antiquity an object to be destroyed for the Communists and an object to be developed by contemporary entrepreneurs intent on collecting tourist cash. Little attention is payed to the indigenous populations whose history this is, the minorities and rural people who have a direct lineal connection to these cultural artifacts but who are being displaced by the business-savvy urban immigrants who have swooped in on towns such as Shaxi, attracted by the economic prospects of development and at best only marginally interested in the cultural ramifications of heritage revitalization. I came to Shaxi two days ago, and I am in fact writing this on a laptop borrowed from Allen, a Chengdu native whose English skills were honed in Switzerland and whose bar in the market square is only the most recent link in the chain of non-Shaxi, non-Bai development of the town.

So that's where I am and what I'm doing. There is one other American here, a student on my program who is studying traditional Bai medicine (the Bai ethnic minority composes the majority of Shaxi's very poor rice farmers). Last night in this remote farm town we ate Thanksgiving dinner with our Chinese friend Nancy, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Hong Kong banker and a Taiwanese hotel owner. Afterwards, we enjoyed fine Chilean wine with a group of Swiss delegates and an Indian civil engineer who's been working in Zurich for five years. That's globalization.

"This person, these people, I can not know where they have been"

2007-11-06T00:54:00.000-08:00

I think it's been a month since my last post. You all have had at least one daylight savings shift, not me. I spent a few days in the town of Dali recently and it feels like the clock is melting.

I've been in northwestern Yunnan for two weeks. It's a very old place. In fact I've been in at least four "old towns" which here means architectonically traditional places designed to sell tourist hordes virtually identical symbols of polyglot culture. I truly mean polyglot as I've heard and seen a slew of languages used in the region, both living and dead. Yesterday I witnessed a ritual performed by Dongba priests, Naxi minority shamans with an ancient tradition stretching from time immemorial to the precise date of Communist presence in the region. At this time Dongba was officially decreed a superstition and all but eradicated to the ideologically immune Naxi villages of the extreme rural hillside. Dongba religion was reconstituted as "culture" and moved from the realm of elite masculine pedagogy to the realm of still masculine urban intellectual tradition with the foundation of the Dongba Culture Research Institute at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The performance I witnessed was by an ancient man with a picture-perfect white wisp beard who blew into hollowed cow horns and danced around sculptures that looked to be made out of some sort of pastry with a large blade in his mouth. Our lecturer, a polite apologist from the Institute, informed us that since he is old he may have "forgotten" some of the traditional ways. In fact our Dongba was a forgery, one of the many similarly dressed and bearded men who pose for photographs with tourists in front of clothing shops in Old Town Lijiang (a UNESCO World Heritage Site and tourism megahaven). Still Dongba is fascinating to me, and the Naxi Dongbas have the only living pictogrpahic script in this whole panorama of human experience. The script was traditionally only read and written by the shamans (often the only literate members of Naxi society) but is now the province of scholarly research not only at the Institute but also at Harvard and European universities. I'm not in a position to question authenticity as I'm not sure if I believe in the authenticity of the very ideological construct of "authenticity". I've taken all of my experiences in Old Town Yunnan with a large grain of salt. Often this grain of salt comes with crystallized ginger and a healthy dose of "numbing pepper", a local herbal favorite which as the name may suggest has lead to a number of half-tasted meals.

I've met three "living buddhas" in the past 5 days. Living Buddha (Ch.= "huo fo") is a bad translation (from Tibetan to Chinese) as none of them believe themselves to be actual buddhas. Maybe bodhisattvas. In practice reincarnated Lamas chosen from the tender age of five years old to enter monastery in Lhasa and embark on the 28-year process of attaining a Tibetan Buddhist "PhD" (bad translation, from Chinese to Latin abbreviation). The most famous Living Buddha is of course the Dalai Lama, believed by Yellow Hat Vajrayanists to be a walking avatar of the peoples' favorite bodhisattva, Guanyin (Skrt.=Avalokitesvara , Japanese=Kanon, Tibetan=Chenresig). I've met less famous provincial LB's, who were keen to instruct us on the metaphysical ramifications of electricity and the finer details of how to achieve and be liberated from future incarnations as a plant. Two of the Buddhas were monks living in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in the towns of Zhongdian (name now officially changed to "Shangri-La" by the Ch. government, no doubt another tourist ploy) and Lijiang. The third was the mother of a friend I've made at Minzu Daxue in Kunming. She was chosen as a Living Buddha at the age of 5 and entered the monastery, only to have her monastic life revoked during the Cultural Revolution. Now she works as government official and gracefully sipped at her glass of beer over dinner. Practicing Lama or not, she did exude a kind of spiritual knowingness I could never emulate and I felt true warmth from her as she embraced me before taking me out to dinner last night. All this hospitality from someone who merely knew I knew her son.

Hospitality. I must have gained at least five pounds in the last month. My Kunming host mother was an excellent cook and felt personally slighted if I didn't eat three persons' worth at every meal. She is an English teacher so while our conversations didn't do much to improve my Mandarin, she was eager to learn (as was I) of the cultural differences between Chinese and Americans. Our conversations often revolved around food. She was shocked to learn that Americans love bread so much that we even eat lunches that consist of nothing but bread with things placed in between. She seemed particularly repulsed by the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and chided me when I attempted to drink coffee with my morning noodles since "sweet and salty do not mix well in the stomach." I had a short 3-day homestay in the rural Bai minority village of Sideng. My homestay mother there spoke no English and really not much Chinese either. She graciously accepted that I was vegetarian when I declined to eat a piece of the unidentifiable slab of "salt meat" (bad translation, Bai to Chinese to English) that was hanging on the kitchen wall for the duration of my homestay. She proceeded to feed me a succession of noodle bowls that only ceased when I had to grab my bags and catch the bus to Zhongdian. The food is predominately starch, carbohydrate, and grease, but the people are healthy. In Sideng I experienced why when I assisted my homestay family in the harvest. After a few hours of baling and hauling rice my body was aching, my arms cut and sore, my excess caloric intake sufficiently burnt away.

Sideng is an interesting place. It boasts an old Market Square that was a lively center of cultural and commerical exchange during the heyday of the Tea and Horse Caravan that connected China to India and the West via Tibet in ancient times. Sideng is downhill from Shibaoshan, an ancient Buddhist mountain with numerous temples and grottoes. These grottoes contain spectacular sculptures (carved into the mountain itself) of ancient regional kings, Buddhist deities carved in the style of Indian art, and an enigmatic vagina statue whose significance scholars and locals have conflicting ideas about. The grottoes encapsulate in a visually comprehensible form the syncretic and shifting construct that is Chinese antiquity, where kings turn to gods, gods turn to beasts, and raw stone is transformed (either by humans or Mother Nature's own entropic agency) into a symbol of sexual fecundity.

Now I'm writing from Lijiang, about to take a fantastically inauthentic "Western" meal and spend the evening visiting many of the not-so-cultural attractions of the old town's "Bar Street" (good translation). I don't know what my tone is in writing this, probably a mixture of disenchantment, enchantment, philosophical confusion, linguistic profusion, visual oversaturation, core intercultural appreciation. Please know that I've loved every second of this trip and as I work to sort through this bewildering morasse in my mind I will express my emerging thoughts more articulately and cogently at some unspecified future date. I return to Kunming tomorrow, where I'll begin researching cultural heritage preservation efforts in Sideng and Shibaoshan and have a quick week to decompress. Time to reorganize my life and if and when I do I will keep you POSTED.

Toasted,
Josh

Never sleep

2007-10-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

Major update planned right now, let's see how far I can get.

Wednesday before last after class I met a BU student named Chris Rosenkrans with whom I've been emailing and who also happens to be studying in and around Kunming for the semester. He's a fellow undergraduate but he is currently undertaking a 5-year BA/MA thesis project that has had him researching in East Asia, C. and South America, Africa, and the Middle East; I'm envious of the clarity of vision that has allowed him to form such an ambitious project at this early age and I hope to take a page out of his book in the future. I met him at the anthropology museum of Yunnan University (the megalithic structure across the street from my more unassuming institution, Yunnan National Minorities University, aka MingDa), where he and a grad. student at Yunnan U (YunDa) were in turn meeting with a Professor Chen of the visual anthropology department. Chris interviewed Chen Laoshi about the Chinese Hui minority of Muslim traders as this is the topic of his research here. I also spoke with the Professor, asking him more general questions about the anthropological field work conducted by YunDa. I was intrigued by pictures of various ethnic minorities on the walls surrounding his office, particularly by images of the Wa minority, a transnational Burmese/Chinese group who in the past have been infamous for head-hunting, drug smuggling, and performing elaborate dance rituals involving gigantic drums made of hollowed-out tree trunks. My personal research interest at the moment is SW China's drum culture, including the ancient bronze drums (oldest in China) of the Dian culture that inhabited Kunming and surrounding area at the turn of the first millenium AD as well as the contemporary cultural significance attached to drums by the Wa, Dai, and Jinuo ethnic minority groups. This topic will likely comprise the independent study project I'll undertake in November. The Wa are rumored to have the world's largest drum in a village in Southwestern Yunnan, so I'm already planning a pilgrimage there. But more on this (way) later.

Chen Laoshi told me of a weekly film screening at YunDa on Wednesday nights, so that evening at 7:30 I went with some of my American classmates to check it out. We saw two short films made by Yunnan Arts University students. The first was a very "modern" stop-motion clay animation short dealing with the pressures that academic institutions place on young people; the youth were represented by amorphous clay androgynes who, fed up with school, run away to the city and encounter a Buddhist-looking statue bearing two kinds of fruit (a moment of comic relief came when the first intrepid sexless being ate both types of fruit, grew female and male genitalia simultaneously, then bid goodbye to his/her friends, following a sign pointing the way to Thailand; the four remaining clay blobs became one or the other sex and thus a suitable harmony was achieved). The second film was an amateur but charming and very touching documentary about a vivacious grandmother. I didn't understand much of the dialogue (in the films or subsequent short talks given by the filmmakers) but I enjoyed watching, and was grateful for my first real taste of a contemporary artistic community in Kunming.

On Thursday (9/27) morning we visited a drug clinic located in the Western Hills about 45 minutes outside of Kunming. This trip was of great interest to me as I've had several friends in similar institutions at home and one who recently died of an overdose. Overall the facility and treatment methods didn't seem too different from those in the U.S. People charged with drug possession and abuse in China must serve a mandatory interrment in the center, and many choose afterwards to live on-site, where they work and learn professional skills. The most interesting aspect of the clinic was that it incorporates a scientific research laboratory where alternatives to heavy narcotics are developed. Several years ago the lab came out with a pill they call the "June 26th Capsule"--the formula consists entirely of specially treated Chinese Traditional Medicinal (TCM) herbs. The capsule is non-addictive and has proven so effective in combatting remission cravings that the clinic has ceased to use Methadone or any other dependence-forming substances in their treatment. The doctor who gave us our lecture said that the June 26th Capsule is now being used in many drug rehabilitation centers nation-wide. I wonder how much of this is scientific fact and how much is propaganda; I'm very intrigued by the prospect, however, of an herbal treatment for hard-drug addiction, and would be curious to track its success in China over the next few years. Such a solution would be a huge breakthrough in the States, where heroin addiction often merely gives way to an equally nefarious dependence on Methadone and painkillers...

On Sunday (9/30) my new friend Marianna and I took a plane to Jinghong, the primary (basically the only) urban center in the southern Yunnan prefecture of Xishuangbanna. We had a week off, as did the majority of the nation, to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong on Oct. 1, 1949. We didn't do much celebrating: on the 1st we found ourselves in a dusty village called Mandian, where we stayed in a local Dai minority guesthouse and trekked through the jungle to an unpolluted and thankfully uninhabited waterfall. Banna is densely tropical, a completely different ecological and cultural environment from the more cosmopolitan Kunming. We experienced the immense ecological diversity in Mandian and at Sanchahe Nature Reserve, a nationally protected park famous for housing about 150 wild elephants. We didn't see any of these, but we did "experience" the tropics here, hiked around the bush bordering a small tributary of the Mekong river, picked small leeches off ourselves (no socks, bad idea) and declined to have ourselves photographed with muzzled bears and lizards. In busing around the region throughout the week I noted that most of the environment has been transformed by China's recent economic boom: in most places the giant, broad-leafed arborescent flora has been displaced by the far more profitable rubber tree, now a major force in the Banna economy. We also visited a tea plantation in a small village called Nanluoshan, about 20 km west of Jinghong. Yunnan is the only region in the world that produces Pu'er, an earthy black tea that is very popular (and given its rarity, expensive) in China.

For me, the highlight of the trip was an excursion we made to the town of Damenglong. To get there we rode a bus on an extremely worn-out, decrepit dirt road 4 hours south. Damenglong is only a few kilometers away from the Burmese border so that added an extra dimension to the already ethnically diverse character of Southwestern Chinese village culture. In Damenglong and the neighboring hamlet of Man Fei Long (a 2km hike away) we visited several Buddhist pagodas, complete with statues of the reclining Sakyamuni and overlarge footprints left from a mythohistorical visit the Buddha himself made to Xishuangbanna somewhere around 500 B.C. It was interesting to note the differences in Buddhist practice here: in Banna, Dai and Bulang peoples practice Theravada Buddhism, a form of the faith that predates the Mahayana school that predominates in China. Indeed, Damenglong had the cultural feel of Southeast asia: almost every sign in the town was in Dai characters, closely related to the Thai language, and some of the people we encountered didn't even speak Mandarin Chinese (virtually no one spoke English). I valued this short visit not only because it allowed me to grasp party of Yunnan's diversity, but also because I came at a time when Damenglong and the surrounding region are in transition. The atrocious road in and out of town is currently being converted into a modern superhighway that will connect China, Burma, and Thailand, an infrastructural development that will undoubtedly precipitate irrevocable socioeconomic changes in the town and the region as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised if the next time I'm in Damenglong I encounter, rather than a refreshing void of English-speakers, a battery of backpackers freshly arrived from Bangkok, taking a brief respite before seeking the greener pastures of Northwestern Yunnan.

Marianna and I arrived back in Kunming at around 1:00 am on Monday (10/9) morning, and as we were U-locked out of our dorm until 6, we killed the early morning hours at a (speaking of irrevocable socioeconomic changes) 24-hour McDonald's. Caught a few hours of shuteye then jumped back into the day, writing my paper on Banna (dwelling mostly on my disenchantment at the ecological degradation wrought by economic expansion and the gross commoditization of "ethnic" culture I witnessed at Sanchahe and a Sunday morning market in the town of Menghun) and packing in preparation for leaving the dorm. Yesterday afternoon I met Mrs. Shen, an English teacher at Kunming College of Science and Engineering and the homestay mother with whom I'll be living and sharing all my meals for the next two weeks. I grabbed my bags, the small Han drum I picked up on a semi-drunken mission to a local music store, and my SIT-loaned bicycle and headed for my new home, already slightly nostalgic for the freedom of MingDa dorm life.

On to the next chapter: badminton with my new Chinese little bro, increased isolation from the comforting retinue of American English-speakers I've enjoyed thus far, a tighter curfew, and the anticipated charms and pitfalls of receiving hospitality CHINESE STYLE.

Zaijian (later),
Jsh

The Daily Grind

2007-09-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me I've been in China for almost a month and I've yet to write what I'm doing here and why I'm doing it. The truth is I'm not 100% sure of this even now but nonetheless here's some background info on my daily and what exactly it is I'm learning (in & out of class).

Though we keep pretty busy with small field trips and longer overnight excursions, I've settled into a more or less solid routine. Monday-Friday I have an "intensive" Mandarin class from 8-12, with a 30-minute taiji break thrown in for balance (pun). I use quotation marks around -intensive- because unlike similar programs in Beijing and Shanghai, we students are not forced to take a "language pledge" that precludes us from speaking English to fellow Americans. In this sense the language aspect of the program is less rigorous than other immersion programs. Rather the focus is on "experiential learning," a seemingly paradoxical concept uniting academic education and practical experience. So as we learn how to introduce ourselves, we're assigned to make friends. We learn how to order food, our homework is to dine alone. Etc.

The other aspect of the curriculum (for now) is a series of seminars addressing contemporary Chinese issues. Our first seminar was on Chinese history and religion-- thus the copious temple visits. Chinese history is one of the most absurdly expansive topics one might try to pack into a 2-week seminar, and our focus was more on modern and contemporary Chinese history than the earlier part of the multimillenial span Chinese culture enjoys. Our current seminar is on "social issues and humanities": we've gotten recent lectures on AIDS, family planning policies, traditional Chinese medicine, and the Chinese economy. Once again all monstrous topics condensed into (dense) 2-hr presentations. I've learned a lot obviously, but the main thing I've taken away from these seminar lectures is the unfathomable grandiosity in scale on which all social issues operate in China. The apparent contradictions not only from lecture to lecture (e.g. the disparity between a lecture on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution vs. this Monday's lecture on family values when the 1950s-80s were characterized as a period of "stable happiness") but also WITHIN lectures makes each topic as unruly and difficult to grasp as it is fascinating and worthy of careful consideration.

China's social policies are still pretty staunchly relegated by an authoritarian government, but I'm surprised at how logical and practical some of their solutions to major social problems are. For instance you've probably heard of the "one family, one child" policy that prohibits a family from having more than one child except in special circumstances. Though this policy may bring to mind horror stories of forced sterilization, it must also be regarded as one of the only solutions to what could prove to be a major social and ecological hazard not only for China but also neighborhing countries, and eventually the rest of the world. The policies have become more lenient over the years, but through incentive programs I believe China is effectively addressing this critical issue. I'm also impressed at how China is dealing with its growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yesterday we received a lecture from a representative of an NGO called Family Health International; as Yunnan province is one of China's worst in terms of HIV/AIDS cases, she spoke specifically to the programs her institution is implementing in the region to address the spread of the virus. FHI gives clean needles to injected drug users; conducts meetings discussing the possible business advantages of protected sex with female sex works; and sets up information stations in public bathrooms and tea houses frequented by homosexual men. It's ironic (and really kind of tragic) that in a country like China where drug use is more harshly punished, prostitution is completely illegal and barely even acknowledged to exist by the government, and homosexuality is more roundly stigmatized, organizations like FHI are actively pursuing progressive means of HIV/AIDS prevention that are not really (or at least not widely) considered in the States.

Of course experiential learning means that every waking second is technically part of the curriculum. This past weekend we did an overnight at Stone Forest, a group of ancient (geologically speaking) clusters of sharp, fossilized rocks that once thrived as coral beneath a long gone ocean. It was cool to walk around during the day, I climbed some steep staircases and crossed some intense Indiana Jones-style stone bridges (none of which would pass US safety regulations) to get to a crowded but cool peak affording a nice view of neighboring mini-"forests". I went out again at night with a few friends, it was creepy seeing the shapes and shadows of the rocks by moonlight--definitely must have been an enchanted, ritually efficacious place in ancient (anthropologically speaking) times. We are one of the last groups to enjoy such an experience: Stone Forest has recently attained UNESCO world heritage site status, so in a few months all of the hotels in the vicinity will come down, presumably to make room for more of the overtly manicured "nature" that already characterizes the spot.

So that's WHAT I've been doing. WHY may take some more time to articulate. In the mean time, here's some other things to expect in the future:

-THE DAILY BREAD: I review the several foods I eat and love and pay next to nothing for

-Q&A: I answer questions about art, youth culture, drug smuggling, the weather, et al

-NOTHING FOR A WHILE... on Sunday I take off for Xishuangbanna, the subtropical southern region of Yunnan, where I'll have one week off to celebrate the 58th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, make field recordings of ethnic minority drummings, trek to sparsely populated jungle villages, peek over the Myanmar/Laos borders (shoutout to protesting monks), eat fried river moss, and of course do NOTHING FOR A WHILE.

-Josh

"And I ate It Cause I'm so at It"

2007-09-15T04:43:00.000-07:00

One day last year at Brighton Center's notorious Dragon Chef I received a fortune that read "Write the events of your life in a journal." I've never kept a regular journal in my life and I didn't take this to heart at the time but for some reason I've been compelled to write daily while I've been in China. It feels like a good thing to do and I think in retrospect I was just being lazy. Paradoxically, the daily dose of writing I get has made me less disposed to additionally sweat out a blog post in one of these packed, tea soaked internet cafes. But here I am and I'm just going to pop off some recent events and impressions kicking around my mind. (Also I apologize for any repetition as I can't read my previous posts, China has banned blog READING but evidently not blog writing.)

The day after I flew into Kunming we took a 2-day field trip to the smaller southern city of Tonghai. On our first full day there we visited a small village where old women with traditional bound feet performed a dance for us. I've seen pictures and read about foot-binding but to see these women in person--and to see them move so gracefully--was an intriguing and slightly repuslive experience. To think that these women endured such pain for the pleasure of their future husbands made me wonder if it hurt them still to dance in old age. But they seemed happy and represent the last vestiges of a culture where having 3-inch "golden lotus blossoms" (the traditional euphemism for expressing ideal foot size) is still a matter of great pride.

It was also in Tonghai that I climbed my first temple-filled mountain (see above). China is packed full of these. Being an fan of mountains, Buddhism, and exercise I'm very into these excursions. I went to a site in Kunming called "Golden Temple Scenic Spot" that was heavily touristed and so less appealing, but most of the temples are sparsely populated, serene, and mist-shrouded like exoticized accounts would lead you to believe. I've never been a practicing Buddhist so I wouldn't say I've been properly meditating but certainly walking around in such places has put me into a meditative state. Also the healthy amount of walking and fresh air (Yunnan is extremely underpolluted as China goes) I've been getting has facilitated a lot of introspection that spills over into writing and of course meandering blog posts.

Anyway another random highlight: we had dinner with some state officials in Tonghai and they encouraged (rather, enforced) us to drink with them, handing us shots of baijiu (rice liquor) and yelling "Gan bei!" which literally means "empty the glass" but in practice means "We're going to keep this up til you pass out." After a few gan beis I steeled myself up sufficiently to eat one of the sauteed wasps that had been passed around on a barely touched plate all night. Of course I'm vegan and wasp doesn't exactly meet the criteria for what I usually choose to eat but in the heat of the moment I decided that since I've been stung by one wasp I can eat one wasp. Kind of a selfish rule but now I think if I come across any fried scorpions four of them will go too. Otherwise I've found it very easy to avoid meat, dairy, and eggs. I've learned how to say "I don't eat meat, I eat vegetables" in Mandarin but I've yet to finesse "does this suspicious broth by chance come from mutton"? The food is great and very inexpensive (as are the 23 cent fake Nike socks with reverse swoops I'm wearing as I write this, incidentally), lots of fresh vegetables, leafy greens, tofu and bean-paste cakes. I haven't yet entered my homestay so I've been moderate my own food intake; I may need to stretch my stomach in preparation for the stubborn hospitality I've been told to expect.

The other day we received a lecture from Mr. Huang Cheng, an 88-year-old man from Kunming. This actually isn't the first lecture we've received from an octagenarian and like the venerable Professor Guo who lectured on Taiji, Mr. Cheng's English was perfect and his anecdotes confusing. He was to give us an oral history of his life, an interesting one as he was born the son of a powerful general and came of age at the beginning of the Mao era. He served as a translator for G.I.s in Japan during WWII and so valued the opportunity to "practice my English with young Americans once again." He was a jovial and humorous man, and he spent most of his lecture telling us stories that seemed only tangentially related to his own life. It was only after some direct questioning that we found out he was imprisoned for 19 years during the cultural revolution. This was because of his American affiliations and because he suggested openly that China should "pay more attention to technology." Some of our questions about his time in prison didn't translate well. He answered us by saying that we're too young to understand the desparation of China at this time. Perhaps this is true; I'm not in a position to question a man who was in prison for nearly as long as I've been alive on this point. But Mr. Cheng's talk reinforced the impression I've been getting of the incredible resilience of the Chinese spirit. I'm almost desensitized to the atrocities committed during the last 50 years in this country after reading and hearing about them so much but still the people seem indomitable, industrious, and content. How much of this is an inherent cultural characteristic and how much is the result of a seasoned state propaganda machine I have yet to discern. (Not likely to any time soon.)

That was all over the place, I'll try to make my next post more organized and interesting. I don't have the patience to put pictures here but I've managed to upload some onto my Flickr account, username is End Times. Hope you're all well and enjoying the Fall... I've been good about responding to email so don't hesitate to write if you have a minute.

-Josh

फ़ीट ओं थे ground

2007-09-06T01:31:00.000-07:00

OK I'm not sure how long I'm going to be here at this internet cafe, or what language this computer automatically translated my post title into (Sanskrit? go figure; says "Feet on the ground" if you're not Matt Lundin), but here is a quick update after 3 days that have felt like a week.

I flew into Kunming via Hong Kong on September third (Sept. 2 was lost in the Pacific) but already on the 4th we took off for a short orientation field trip to the smaller town of Tonghai in south Yunnan. The town was very nice and rustic. The highlight was a trip to Xiushan Mountain, which had about a dozen Daoist/Buddhist temples built over the last 4 dynasties. I broke off from the group and did most of the climb by myself, stopping in various temples to light incense, toss coins, and exchange the three phrases of conversational Mandarin I've managed to pick up so far (Hello! Thanks! Goodbye!). The largest temple (and my favorite) was near the top of the mountain. "Emerging Lotus Temple" had a wide courtyard with large Buddhist paintings in the middle and three gargantuan golden Sakyamuni statues toward the back in a large hall. There was also a smaller tower that contained the largest bell in Tonghai; after negotiating a donation of 2 quai (<50cents) and taking off my shoes I climbed to the top of the tower and struck the bell very lightly so as not to offend anyone (it will ring for 3 minutes if you really bash it). I tried to get a sound recording of it on my camera but I'm not sure if that came out. As soon as I leave here I'll be looking for a better audio solution; I've already heard so many wonderful musical and non- sounds that I want to record and reflect on later, and perhaps incorporate into my own musical output.

I greatly valued my solo time on the mountain but it really drove home how difficult it will be to travel and experience things on my own here. I've already been able to pick up some basic phrases but I still rely heavily on those with more Chinese knowledge to let me know what's going on. I look forward to the challenge but I fear that I won't be able to communicate in any real depth with native Chinese. But I've taken the plunge and I'm not looking back. Right now I'm living in a dorm on the campus of Yunnan Nationalities University, so hopefully I will start to make some local friends. I also saw a billboard for "Kunming Museum of Contemporaneity Art" so that will be a good mission. We're getting bikes soon and I look forward to exploring on wheels.

There's so much more to say but I can't even sort through it all now. I'm keeping a journal so the minute details of my experience are there and may filter out over the next few months. Also I've been taking a ton of pictures so hopefully I can throw those on here soon. Until then please substitute stock photo of "pensive wanderer on lonely mountain peak" in your mind's eye. Failing that, "confused foreigner looking lost."

-JOSH

Lunar phase shift

2007-09-01T17:53:00.001-07:00

gcm
Originally uploaded by endtimes

Above is the full moon of August 27, 2007, cultural signal of auspicious beginnings for Native Americans who call it the Green Corn Moon, and incidentally also of significance for students of solar/lunar conflict as this night also saw a total lunar eclipse (though I didn't witness this due to clouds and encroaching city lights). If you've seen this blog before you'll be aware of the sparse modifications and frequent regenerations it's undergone over the years. Previous posts are still available to anyone who can remember a snatch of words with which to search for them (alternately some can be found on paper here).

This most recent rebirth has taken place so I can use this as a part-time travelogue during my forthcoming 3.5(+?) month trip to China. I'll be based in Kunming for the majority of this time, but will also travel extensively around Yunnan province and in the later part of this year will visit Xi'an, Beijing, and other as of yet undecided locales. Check in to see if I make good on my promise to keep the world apace of my linguistic, philosophical, gastronomic (et al) struggles through a culture and land I've heretofore idly dreamt about and into which I am now (it is just this moment occurring to me) about to plunge headfirst.

see you on the other side
Josh

OUT

Blues

2006-05-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

mitt, originally uploaded by endtimes.

two, originally uploaded by endtimes.

vals, originally uploaded by endtimes.

void, originally uploaded by endtimes.

cloud, originally uploaded by endtimes.

dontsee, originally uploaded by endtimes.

fuji, originally uploaded by endtimes.

Gathering Cloud

2006-05-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

seerhear, originally uploaded by endtimes.

Pre-Launch Launch

2006-05-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

strands, originally uploaded by endtimes.

I I I, originally uploaded by endtimes.

authority figure, originally uploaded by endtimes.

parade, originally uploaded by endtimes.

beard, originally uploaded by endtimes.

Submissions

2006-01-19T05:41:00.000-08:00

1. Command Psychology

Throw everything into your mouth, wear patches of all you've ever done and embroider 50 out of 512 friends' comments onto your sleeve. From your bed pretend. Make pretend plans with pretend friends. Pretend rock, pretend sing songs sung in keys of kitsch and irony. Live in a pink punk bubble floating above your head. Go get around. Pour more and more into your open maw until your brain must reconsider what normal conditions are. Keep pretending. Every night, until you are doing nothing if you're not pretending. Have fun in fat times. Run a hoop along your waist, sunglass smiling cokebottle love. Roll in the sand. Shave your hair into cute shapes.

Learn how to write. Just learn how to write I don't care what it IS just learn how to write. Know more than you let on. Memorize up to 700 digits immediately. Tell me about prosody and pertinence. Tell me about 20th century fiction masters. Tell me if you're getting off. Do you like the way that feels?

Don't you like the way that feels in your mouth?? Rolling around in its natural juices your face is smiling. Your brain's shooting bolts that say more more more. At the same time it's saying faster faster. There is a small voice that's muted in the fray coming from somewhere in the space between your head and your heart, from an island in a lake. Is he looking at me...

Elegant circles, not quite infinite since terminating but ever-growing, add you among their numbers. Are you loving it?

2. The Unknown Becoming Louder and Louder

There is no enemy if you must see to believe. That is the invaluable source of power for all things invisible. It helps never to personify the various forces you perceive to impede your set path. Leave them forces, natural but not insurmountable barriers to progress. You are born, you spend your time and you are gone, all within a compact hundred-mile radius. This is the fact, despite heretical claims to the contrary. Stay skeptical. Never dare to drop your guard, never be so rash as to assume this or any other thing has been afforded you by your own efforts as much as by the will of some benevolent mover. You have at times felt enmeshed. You’ve spent all your time until now on the surface, disregarded and overlooked, and you’ve managed lasting contentment with that fact, the same contentment holding all things in their proper places, the invisible lines keeping the surface from suddenly moving. All is maintenance. The rock, when peered beneath, becomes an insidious obstacle rather than a pleasant intermediary between the known and the unknown. You say you’re motivated by Truth, a capital abstraction clashing with the vainglorious half-truths peddled in the smiles and gestures of each new person you meet. Truth is at the bottom. The underground calls you. You begin to see. You hear the wail of grinding gears rising from the street. You feel the thin electrical and magnetic waves keeping things in their proper locations, keeping the machine running smoothly—in an important way, directing the course of the universe as each day unfolds on the rigid schedule of indomitable time. Your ear is to the ground.

3. No Note

He’d always imagined that at this moment he’d be hailed with some triumphant flourish, a fierce string section blazoning his personal sense of worth in service. As he packed thirty-six years down into the single box they’d given him to transport his property out of the building, no such flourish echoed in his mind. On top of the box he placed a mahogany case containing the commemorative firearm and six silver bullets he had received an hour ago at his retirement ceremony. His name sat impressively on a small silver plate lining the gun handle’s spine.

That night he went walking in the city; in every man he saw a monster. He knew this was unfair, but the years had made him hard, necessarily harder, if only by force of law, than the hardest-boiled criminals in the state. To last a week in that place, you had to learn to see the worst in a person first. Thus he’d been rung dry of every shred of sentimentality. He stopped suddenly in front of a music store and addressed his reflection in the window. He saw a monster.

At 65 he was an old retiree, but still in good physical condition. You could last forever in that job if you were cut for it. Up until his last day he was looking strong, one of the best men there.

On his last morning at work a thick murmur surrounded him, the kind you hear when there’s been a suicide. He sighed at the prospect of having to begin his day by lifting a two-hundred pound corpse off its wire hanger. As he searched for the body, he noticed that the atmospheric murmur had a different character than he was used to; today there was a malevolent glee behind it, and though he’d gained the hard-earned fear of each convict in that institution, he could sense a carefully restrained sneer behind the silence each prisoner adopted as he passed. Finally, in the last block, the sight of a gaunt man slumped against the bars of a cast iron prison bed ended his search. On the dead prisoner’s shirt was pinned a note reading: “Behind every great man’s a greater woman.” When he went to pull the note off the shirt to read it, a mock wig fashioned out of the blonde-grey straws from the prison mattress fell to the floor.

Later that day, he was stabbed. The prisoner didn’t make it far, but the stabbed guard fell to the floor apathetically, and for some inmates that sight alone was more of an escape than they’d ever imagined themselves experiencing. Now the guard couldn’t walk without a limp, which for him meant retirement.

He put his keys on the counter next to the monster. Six silver bullets stood in the line he’d made of them earlier.

He adorned the small shelf above his fireplace with the impressive steel commemoration of his service to the state, the sum of a celebrated career of mental and physical submission to a strict, stern end, a piece representative of his entire life’s terminal direction, his bullet course. He stood and admired it from a distance. For the first time in thirty-six years there was no one who would listen to him talk out his anxieties, no one to make feel what he felt, no one to unload upon. He needed someone to take it all off him. The new realization that so pained his moral sense was that it took the complete subjection of another to make him feel human in such an inhuman place. He made men less than men to aid his own survival. He stood there a while more, his eyes glued on a giant piece as thirty-six years weighed down on the mantle with all accusatory intensity of a forgotten anniversary.

He unwrapped the package of guitar strings he’d bought that evening and hung himself with no note.

Postindustrial Art

2006-01-11T13:58:00.000-08:00

I read a really interesting article in the December I.D., which you can probably still pick up if you hurry to your more lethargic neighborhood newsstand. The article was called "A Manifesto for Postindustrial Design," written by Jamer Hunt. Here are some memorable quotes:

"Industrial culture needs to be obsolete not because it is evil, immoral, profligate, toxic, or gluttonous (though it is many of those things), but because it no longer reflects the facts on the ground."

Hunt argues that as opposed to the singular "one-size-fits-all" readymade produced by the modern industrial machine, the "product" of future design will be "a code and a set of parameters" that allows for infinite variety.

Hunt recognizes four loosely connected aspects of postindustrial design:

Formless: "Products will shape-shift internally to the point that we can only celebrate the system of their creation, not the thing itself... Design will evolve from a process of turning natural resources into static shapes into one of distributing codes to be constantly rematerialized."

Free: "Software, soft tooling, robotic manufacturing, and smart databases will draw participation and variation into the old, clandestine fabrication process... Animated by the intelligence of thriving networks of collaborative possibility, designs will also get optimized in the infinitely iterative process of their distributed creation."

Metabolic: "Design and production that are sentient, aware, adaptive, and able to live off their own or others' waste will not only be powerfully efficient, they will be environmentally, culturally, and fiscally sustainable."

Decentralized: "...imagine the possibility of creating design solutions appropriate to you or your family neighborhood, or tribe... new kinds of products, companies, and brands—labile, fluid, and protean—will challenge the hegemony of the global superbrands."

Hunt's thesis, if a bit optimistic, is energizing and exciting to the 21st century designer, and, I'd argue, artist. Though Hunt fails to include fine art with the areas of societal endeavor he sees to already incorporate the methods and ideology of postindustrial design ("fashion, architecture, engineering, software, the Web"), there are obvious parallels between his manifesto and some of the art theoretical and cultural developments that have taken place over the last 40 years. Hunt's dematerialization of the product into sets of "codes" and "parameters" reiterates Sol LeWitt's wall drawings—artworks comprised of a set of directions written on a piece of paper. Maybe postindustrial art will bring 60's conceptualism full circle: after Lucy Lippard's "dematerialization of the art object" comes Hunt's process of generating "rematerialized" product from the ever-adapting, democratically available source code he sees to supplant industry in the not entirely too distant future.

I'm not sure where exactly, if anywhere, this will lead today's fine artist. The fact is that in Hunt's future world, the line separating artmaking from product design itself dematerializes; "fine art," meaning non-utile, non-practical, non-industrial art, becomes an obsolete term. It's a little utopian, but maybe not inconceivable. The close similarities that Hunt's idea of "decentralization" bears with the decades-old indie/DIY aesthetic suggests a good starting point for determining the artist/designer's role in postindustrial society.

Modern Bresson

2005-12-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbors, the only LaBute film I've seen besides The Shape of Things, which I caught randomly on HBO a year ago. It's a credit to LaBute's style that I kept thinking about Shape during Friends, since I didn't know anything about him before reading up on him last night. I guess there are still filmmakers with voice besides Tarantino, if you want to call his palette of ironic ultraviolence a stylistic trademark.¹

LaBute's is a bleak, realistic world to which asinine existentialism and simple-minded Rousseaism are equally foreign. His characters speak and act with a desperate solipsism characteristic of the modern age, but their Machiavellian pursuit of power and pleasure links them closer to Sade than it does to Sartre. In the most jarring scene of the film, one of the main characters--an amoral physician--recounts his best fuck upon his friends' urging. An unabashed misogynist, the doctor tells his friends that his most memorable sexual experience was the rape of a male classmate in the high school gym showers. His story is all but uninflected, told with the deadpan candor of a mundane nostalgic remembrance.

LaBute's script is intricate and dialogue-heavy. As a writer he's a pathology-infused Mamet, although free of the latter's high-gloss hucksterism. As a director, he's a modern minimalist. Ebert aptly compares LaBute's characters to Bresson's "models," the term the French director used for his actors. Bresson forced his actors to dispel emotion from their performances; he created tableaus of frank uninflection in which subconscious pathos are churned to the surface of the viewer's mind by way of a dialectical imposition of meaning on an otherwise blank slate. In the same way, LaBute's characters pursue power and sex (often the same thing in this movie) without any attendant sentimental involvement: they are constitutionally devoid of the emotions Bresson intentionally sublimates. (We don't even learn their names until the end, when the main characters are wryly credited as Mary, Barry, Cary, Terri, Jerry and Cheri.)

The location of the story is left intentionally vague. It was shot in Los Angeles, but LaBute carefully avoided recognizable landmarks and even digitally erased palm trees in order to set the film in a non-specific, universally urban environment. As a result, Your Friends and Neighbors feels more like a myth than a story. It is an archetypal parable of modern self-involvement, peopled by characters you probably know and driven by urges you probably have. It is a film about our sublimation of the brutality² that lies beneath the veneer of civilization in a society that unconsciously lauds sexual profligacy as an accurate benchmark of cultural virility. LaBute neatly removes the tenuous moral safety-net we think will catch us if we fall to the depths inhabited by his film's characters, but he refuses to pass moral judgment on their actions: his indictment of modern culture is entirely created by our reactions, our prejudices, our inborn refusal to believe that the reality he presents to us could mirror the secret lives of our friends and neighbors.

¹ And I do.
² Sublimated brutality not unlike the film's soundtrack of Metallica covers by the cello quartet Apocalyptica.

Fan

2005-12-02T21:36:00.000-08:00

As the eternal kid walks to the park to see the kids on the block knock the ball around he thinks of old times. He remembers standing outside with the popcorn vendors, spitting in his cheap plastic mitt like it was made real and awaiting the thrill of a ball falling from the sky. He never caught one. Regardless, that was the feeling he’s been chasing ever since. Now he sits with the boys, sits so long he needs skilled hands to knead his back back after. He went for the home team.

End Times 1

2005-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

cover, originally uploaded by endtimes.

universe, originally uploaded by endtimes.

poezy, originally uploaded by endtimes.

help, originally uploaded by endtimes.

Email me for a pdf.

Do it with your eyes closed

2005-11-30T05:21:00.000-08:00

Go and get your meat wrapped tight in a plastic bag for preservation (of whom don't stop to ask). You do as you're told soft boards creaking underfoot each corner cutting out a piece of skin without breaking it. The world and its ways you thought you'd solved hide in layers over layers, skin over bodies thrown over a secret that the secret is If you cry alone how can you go out there in the wide You can only guess what else it throws while you talk yourself down with eyes closed sweating. She calls you for dinner. Buy one plastic bag for vegetables then make a vegetable (small perforations) Close your eyes. Don't talk so much.

2005-08-22T02:10:00.000-07:00

He's dead because he has vacated the planet. He's left a hole big enough to be filled by possessions and unfulfilled aspirations. He's beautiful and just wants to be appreciated for who he is by someone who will take the time to decipher this by reading in between the lines of who he tries to be. Someone who can see what he sees in the mirror at 3 in the morning after pissing. Someone who'll fuck him.

This is how he deals with death: He forms opinions on the subject until he experiences it firsthand and can say pretty much anything about it and still sound cool.