"I'm pissed because the green salsa wasn't the spicy salsa, so I had to get two salsas."

-man at flea market holding two tacos

Reperformance

On a plane to San Francisco I sat next to a blond boy who was about four years old. As our plane began its descent, the boy started nodding his head back and forth really fast. He would do it for a few moments, and then remark to himself, "That feels funny!" This went on for about five minutes. He would shake his head, stop, take note of the sensations the shaking would cause, and, having proven that it still felt funny, repeat, "That feels funny!" It became evident that the remarking that this action made him feel funny was as important as the actual shaking of the head. If I was to reduce this scene to a few words it would be: action - pause - study reaction - remark upon reaction - continue action. What was it I was witnessing?

In the dawn of consciousness, man looked about him self and remarked, "The world is pretty fucking awesome." He took note of everything that surrounded him, gave it all names, made representations of it, wrote theories on why things were the way they were, imagined what it would be like if they weren't that way, or if things had changed, or what was outside the realm of what he could see around himself. Having done this, then he wondered, "Now what?" Then man discovered properties of plants and named it, in English, drugs. Upon ingestion, man remarked, "That feels funny!"

On the plane, I had witnessed a reperformance of the discovery of feelings outside the everyday, sober consciousness. It's simple! he realized. Just shake your head from side to side and it makes you feel funny.

The Inquisition of the Owl

June 4, 2009

In the early morning hours the owl by my house began to hoot. Still in my dream state I understood why the owl has traditionally been associated with the virtue of wisdom. The owl's call is an unchanging sentence of three parts, beginning with an introduction crescendo: hruu-oohh-aah, forming the catholic inquisition encompassing all the questions that had arisen thus far in my dream. The call then answers itself with two "hoos" which express the duality of all life, that to every question two responses can equally suffice.

But I half-dreamt half-philosophized that still I was not satisfied. What did the owl mean to tell me? In my dream I hooted back, a call of my own: words, antonyms and synonyms, metaphors and analogies, a rise in tone and a final, vocal punctuation mark. A few seconds followed, as though the owl were considering my statement, turning it over in his mind. In that time, I realized why the owl conversed only in the morning, the only time of day when dream and reality are not yet separate and distinct: in the time when you may confuse what actually happened with what you dreamed, the owl has furtively gained its place into personification that seems superior to other creatures. It has gained its wisdom by subterfuge, perhaps simultaneously proving its own cleverness.

Now, the owl was ready for its final response. It answered in the same, three-part call it had opened with: hruu-oohh-ahh. But this time I understood what he meant: each answer can be found buried within its own question.

Atoms of a Lifetime

A night squeezed into a small bed brews vivid dreams. Clutching my body at different positions, the mind forces itself into a place it doesn't normally venture. There is physical evidence of this in the morning: two fingerprints below my shoulder where they rested for the entire night, soft scratch marks all over my arms and stomach. And beneath that there is the memory that contains the night. My peripheries where the blankets couldn't reach, for instance, can still feel the intense cold. Deep down bubbles of a dream still rise, expand and pop throughout the day.

It's difficult to grasp why any part of my mind would not question myself as a vampire. Drinking tea with two other vampires, who called themselves des gomps, I knew only that I was socially uncomfortable with them. In the public square, their French was rapid and unrelenting. They made no excuses on my behalf, though I understood almost everything they said. It was the one sentence directed at me that I failed to understand. It was a phrase I knew that I did not know. It was said quickly, so even if I wanted to look it up later, I couldn't. I muttered a couple of friendly curses at them, so as to feign comprehension. They knew, however, that I didn't know what they said. They yelled at me, "You can't understand us! Putain, you're good for nothing!" I do understand, I tried to persuade them. "OK, then what were we saying?"

I couldn't answer, but luckily two plump blondes came up to our table and distracted us from the conversation at hand. A few sentences later it was clear they were hitting on us, and it was understood among the gomps that because the girls were not good looking we would be able to feast on them later. This was the arrangement we had worked out then, before the dream had started: we could drink the blood of unattractive girls who hit on us, but the girls who we mutually understood to be attractive, we would leave for each to develop natural relationships: one-night stands, friendships, or they might even become lovers, girlfriends, or wives.

Somehow or other I had made my way past demilitarized zones into North Korea. A mighty cold-war style stadium stood before me. Inside, Bill Clinton and Kim Jong-Il were meeting before thousands of Koreans. I knew that to escape North Korea I would have to seek Clinton's pardon and not his Jong-Il's umbrage. But to do this I would have to approach the center stage. I went around the stadium only to find a mansion that brushed up against the elliptical walls. I went through a few French doors, windowed, empty rooms to the backyard where there were five American girls playing frisbee and barbequeing steaks. I asked them the way to the center stage and they said they didn't know it. I looked over the fence, which was more like a huge wall with ramparts and was about to make my way toward it when I thought to ask the girls: "What the hell are you doing in North Korea?" The answer seems to have escaped me now, but I do know that they offered me one of the steaks on the grill.

Dinner was just being set when I remembered my way back home. I scrambled towards the fence and climbed over it. The steaks were getting cold, but I knew I had to get to Bill Clinton or else I would be forever exiled in a country stricken by famine, poverty and international isolation. There, just over the fence, was a vast, emptied stadium that, at once, symbolized my depression. It was so large and empty as to be impressive. I saw the gray, worn-down stage, the entrances and the bleachers. Not even a piece of trash graced them. And, hopeless, I wearily turned around towards the five American girls waiting for me to eat their dinners.

Childhood and Drugs

On a warm Sunday afternoon, a mother lets her child move a toy car along the top of a low wall. As the mother stands there casually regarding her son, the child's face is full of bliss and expressive enjoyment. He is concerned with nothing else other than the car in his hand, which is a crude wooden handcrafted construction bearing no markings or elements other than four wheels. His intention, I gather as I pass the mother and son, is to run the car along the wall from one end to another. He is in no rush to hurry this process; rather, he savors the moment. His enjoyment possibly comes from playing out the act, perhaps, or recreating what he has noticed in the world. Perhaps he is reenacting a dream he had of a car driving impossibly along a small wall. Perhaps his enjoyment stems from the independence he feels of doing something without his mother's help. Whatever makes him smile in such earnestness, he is completely involved in the act with no knowledge of what else is going on outside of this moment with the car or how silly he seems to the outside world, deriving so much enjoyment from the car. He is so involved in this act that it makes me a trifle jealous.

Oh, to be this child. To find such wonder in such a mundane activity. I imagine being born is something like being extremely high. To burst through the womb with no knowledge of anything except warmth and nourishment and all of a sudden have outside elements pierce your skin and perception, you would feel in an intense daze. I've often tried to imagine what the world looked like in that moment, and I believe that the world spinning all about you so suddenly would not be as we know it, but rather embedded with magical, neon colors, like an animated film. Still wet from all the juices of a mother's body, in this moment, you resemble a crazy person on drugs in public in the middle of a dead sober crowd. Just like the stoned man, you have no idea how ridiculous you look: naked, unkempt, crying hysterically. You are crumpled and your digits don't work properly. Your private parts know no clothe and they look pathetic. And above all, in the face of all this you have absolutely no shame.

But, unlike a high person in a crowd, to see you looking so pathetically, the crowd is beside themselves with joy. They all have taken part in a way in something even the most dedicated scientists have not yet been able to do: produce life where there once was nothing. They must feel like some sort of cutting edge biologists. Now they are given the task to instruct their being to understand such horrific facts of the world as genocide, natural disasters and overdraft fees. The child will one day understand the implication of paying $250 for a three night stay in a hotel in Upper West Side Manhattan. But if you tried to tell that to the pathetic being after just being born, it would be unheard of.

In a way, the child playing with his car was in the process of learning all of this. He had demonstrated his knowledge of automobiles and transportation. He was demonstrating play and pretending. He showed that he had noticed that to go somewhere requires four wheels and momentum. Maybe this is why he looked so happy and involved in the act: he knew that in moving the car from one end of the wall to the other, he had learned a vital part of the everyday world around him.

To age then and to learn is like the descent from a high. Coming out your stupor, you realize the world is a harrowing place and so to put this out of your mind, you seek once again the drug that got you high in the first place. To be sure, there are some good drugs out there if you can find them, but none are as potent as childhood, naivete and innocence.

"The dishes aren't even put away!" Because of the nature of the apartment I live in, I can often hear the conversations and ejaculations from the family that lives in an adjacent apartment. I have never seen them, but I have gathered some information from them. The family is african-american, I can tell that by the way they speak. There is a boy named Jamal and a girl named Maya. They leave for school at exactly 8 every morning. They have a small dog that the children sometimes torment.

Admittedly, my perception of them is probably a filtered view of their true lives because more than anything, I can hear the mother yelling at her children, and it seems to happen often. I don't mind the yelling because it makes me feel part of the world without leaving the confines of my private room. When the mother yells she reminds me of family life, and her expressive voice reminds me that, despite all the terrible news these days, mothers are still forcing their children to put the dishes away.

The mother's eye requires order. A mother in general categorizes and compartmentalizes the world. The dishes, after having been used, must be cleaned, then put away. To a child, the dishes are equally useable clean as they are dirty, and that they be "put away" seems superfluous. What matter if they are in the sink or in a cupboard. But a mother does not see it that way. In her point of view, dishes, when not being used, are to be clean and carefully stowed away in their places.

A child will play outside in the dirt with his friends and wouldn't mind to approach the dinner table without having washed. For him, there is no cleanliness nor filthiness: those two concepts are one in the same and therefore nonexistant. But the mother is the authority and she begs to differ. Wash your hands before you eat. So the child learns: cleanliness is good, filthiness is bad. And then, as an adult, that same person will perhaps live out the rest of his life without playing in the mud again.

There are many factors that go into making a person who he is. Raising two children in a similar matter might produce completely different people; one, for instance, a serial killer, the other a prolific writer. Take for example the loving mother who never once thought to yell at her children to put the dishes away. With the best intentions in mind, after dinner every night this mother clears the table, washes the dishes quietly and relishes in the sounds of her children playing. A child in this situation might then eventually age and become independent and move away and he would, not having been told to clean the dishes, never do it for himself and live in squalor. But another child in the same situation might have appreciated the orderliness and cleanliness that his mother maintained for him and, in his own home, follow suit.

Unfinished Treatise on Star Trek

June 1, 2009

I saw Star Trek last night and while I do have many things to complain about and praise, the only aspect that I feel worth mentioning is the difference between the star ships. I thought it was interesting that the Romulan ship is this intricately organic ship, like a petrified ivy plant, or a many tentacled octopus counter-intuitively moving with its appendages at the bow. There is hardly any sense of technology in there, and electronics seem like stumps and foliage buzzing with bright lights. At certain angles, it looks like the heroes might fall to the depths of the ship—which begs the question, who would build such a perilous form of transportation—and when one of the Romulans does disappear into the dark abyss, the depth seems so bottomless as to resemble the pit of a planet.

By contrast there is the USS Enterprise, whose shape, of course, is well known. The electronics in it remind me of a Swiss town: clean, with an emphasis on glass, light and soft angles. And--unlike the Romulan captain, Nero, whose face peers out so often from no-place in the bushes of his ship--the captain of the Enterprise sits dead in the center, at a contraposto as he makes his decisions. The USS Enterprise is classicism in its truest sense, with a postmodern sterile orthogonal look: you would be happy to wake up there as an invalid if this was a hospital, for instance. This is the architecture of the future. It is organized, clean and absolutely nothing is accidental.

Needless to say the organic shape of the Romulan ship embodies evil, although you can't deny it also captures the height of technology, though we're not sure why. Torpedos and lasers shoot from the ship, but we aren't sure who is pressing what button, or where the screens are located or how they are held into place. This ship is a dark place, much like the underworld of Blade Runner. The pit of the future L.A. where shops and storefronts and residence brush up against one another haphazardly. One man sets up his noodle store and so another man uses the adjacent corner to decide where the boundaries of his shop will be. There is no planning in cities like this; this is a shantytown, and it serves to set the tone of the movie so well, in a familiar yet displaced city. One we recognize but is somehow estranged from us because, yes, it is the future and Replicants do exist. On the other hand, the abode of the creator of the Replicants is geometrical, futurized yet so classic, a pyramid rising high above the ghetto. The perfect form of his building shuns the tortuous, twisted form of the city. As a pyramid could not be found in nature, as trees and animals tend to prefer asymmetrical shapes, the pyramid thus belongs to the hand of man and, possibly, the hand of god.

The ideal structure and the ideal city evidently is one that is mapped out completely. Everything has its place and nothing is accidental. The city began quite the opposite, one could easily imagine: someone builds a house, and someone else builds his next to it or even on top of it, with adjacent walls, and this continues until you have a city. It is no surprise then that one of the oldest known city Çatalhöyük, in modern Turkey, with around 10,000 people living there at one time, has no obvious public buildings and no streets. Does a city like that embody evil? Hardly, but it does seem outdated now (How could they not think of streets?). Then by deduction, the most modern town is the opposite, not haphazard, but planned and constructed and only then occupied. And indeed this is how houses are made, and sometimes entire neighborhoods. That's why Levittown was so great at the time, the first suburban town must have felt clean, perfect, ideal in some way to the families that first moved there. But now, not even a century later, it's outdated. Perhaps even the most ideal city requires a bit of organic growth.

In any case, sometimes this is how I feel about my house. Although you climb up a flight of outdoor stairs to reach the door, the rest of the house rises high above our corner. And scraped up against the side of our house, as though imposing and threatening our building, towers an apartment complex. In the evening, when the bathroom window is open, I go in there and turn the light off and open the blinds. A distant light pierces the window in split lines and a few voices can be heard in apartments not able to be seen from ours, but the voices drift into the room as though the bodies from whence they come are nearby, almost talking to us. My room, the bathroom and my roommate’s room share a common shaft and sometimes, when people in other apartments converse, it seems as though we are in the true underbelly of the monster that these buildings form, pressed up against one another, where voices can be heard muted and tampered by the skin and tissue of the monster’s organs.

There are windows below, and I am not sure where they lead, but at times in the morning and late at night (always at the extremities of time) I can hear the hum and soft clicks—like the distant engine room of a freighter—of a washer and dryer tumbling clothes. The kitchen window over the sink shares another space and there are staircases and other anonymous windows that I can see from there. Black stains have dripped down the walls of this shaft and I wonder who, if anyone was supposed to clean this shaft. The conclusion I have reached is that it was never supposed to be cleaned. It was built haphazardly with cleanliness nowhere near in mind. Only perhaps 1. structural support, 2. ventilation and maybe, 3. natural lighting, though it is so dim, I highly doubt it. Over time the air shaft has taken on its own qualities and has gone way beyond what any designer or architect had ever imagined the original look of these buildings to be. I don’t imagine the house I live in was supposed to be pushed between two other houses, but they are. Much like the floor of a rainforest receives no sun light because the trees have over so much time grown, competed in height and, as a result, shaded sometimes completely the floor below, our apartment is bested by the proprietors above us.

And now sometimes, when I wake and my eyes first light upon the shaft, the belly of the center of darkness of the air shafts and I see a clouded light coming from the windows and I drift back into sleep I envision myself falling endlessly, like the doomed Romulan, into the depths of the earth.

Annals of an Old Religion

During his rigorous research in the early seventies to prove that all philosophies and religions could be classified as either East or West, the late Dr. Richard Brume, professor of comparative religion, came across a strange book detailing a religion hithero unknown. The practicers of this religion evidently went by no name, but Brume--having abandoned his original research and devoting himself wholly to documenting this new faith--began referring to it as Archacultus or, Box Worship.

The most enigmatic ritual of the archacultans, Brume found, was a lengthy sacrament in which adherents crafted a box which, once completed, could never be opened. Although examples of the box have never been found, the annals of this strange religion carefully instructed archacultans on how to build the box from distilling the small amount of gold required to hammering the box into its true form. The process took weeks, and archacultans understood that in creating their relic, they were also undergoing a form of worship in itself. Once the box was finished, they worshiped it as well. They believed that once the box was sealed up permanently it then held what they knew to be God. The archacultans, Brume was careful to note, were not so disillusioned to think that there was something in the box; they knew it was empty as they had sealed it themselves. But to them, God existed in the box's very emptiness, in its lack of content.

At first, Brume was baffled by this belief. The book he discovered seemed to have roots in no other religion he had studied. His early conclusions were that the book was a parody or the product of a sole person's insane visions. But as Brume peered deeper into the book, he came to the conclusion that this was a sort of hybrid atheism/theism religion. The box, Brume explained, for archacultans held nothing, yet in this nothingness it held everything that existed in the universe, and thus god. In the archacultans belief that God did not exist, God did exist.

Turkish Holiday: Part I

My slim knowledge of Turkey at that time was limited specifically to one man, whom we referred to as Monsieur Kebab. We happened haphazardly across a small kebab restaurant early in our stay in France. The fall days had just been receiving the surplus of a lengthy summer, and we were able to eat outside late into the evening. Monsieur Kebab sweated profusely behind the small counter that was his workspace, and, after taking our orders, quickly prepared huge, foot-long kebabs that dared us to finish them in one sitting. Back then we were able to do so because 1. we were younger, and could digest such a massive quantity of food while still remaining skinny and 2. we had little idea of how unhealthy the food we were eating was, even the vegetarians among us, it being so foreign and new to us, and 3. France, with no concept of a "to-go box," commanded us to finish the meals we had ordered.

It was the second day in a row that we went to eat chez Monsieur Kebab (I never bothered to learn the name of his kebab café, for though there were many in the city of Bordeaux, Kebaberies they all were) and perhaps for this reason, he sent his wife to pour us tea after we had finished our meals. The tea was served in small glasses, hot, just poured from the boiling samovar and it was saturated with sugar. Up until then I had naively believed sugary tea to be my own guilty pleasure. I had thought all tea by tradition was meant to be served plain and had expected that later in my adult life I would grow accustom to its natural taste. Never did I imagine that a whole country preferred its tea likewise.

We drank the tea thankfully--considering the donation of this tea an attempt at friendship--and from then on nurtured the limited kind of relationship that one can have with a foreign restaurant owner, being ourselves foreign. The conversations we had were short, and mostly practical in nature: sauce blanche, avec frites, et une tasse du thé. And Monsieur Kebab always remained distantly stoic. The one time I asked him about Turkey, from which I eventually learned he had emigrated, he demurred any sort of emotional response and replied simply that it was a big country, and strife with misfortune. He had aged photos of Turkey's best sites all over his small restaurant.

In that time I was surrounded by foreign countries and immersed in one, so my journeys would naturally be a matter of luck or chance: any country I visited would be as foreign and new to me as any other. I had a friend, Reid, who was studying in Cairo and, looking at a map, we decided that if we were to travel together over spring break, the best place to meet up was Turkey. We corresponded by various means of internet and eventually planned to meet on April 20, 2005 in a small square in Turkey. There was a new internet site called Couch Surfing which allowed people to find others who were willing to host them as they traveled for no amount of money. I myself was a bit hesitant about that, but Reid did all the legwork and arranged that we would stay in an apartment with some engineering students in a district of Istanbul called Beşiktaş.

A few nights before I left for Istanbul I went to see Interpol outside of Bordeaux in a small suburb called Gradignan. The big concert halls there were always on the fringe of the city. I went alone but knew I'd see friends once I arrived. On the bus ride there I noticed two girls drinking out of a bottle of Schwepp's tonic. I knew they couldn't be French, drinking so overtly. I approached them and found out that they were from Manchester. They let me drink their gin and tonic with an apology of appearing so bluntly English. The blonde of the two and I stayed outside the venue and subsequently missed seeing British Sea Power. We chatted about our lives and, then, I was just so fascinated by someone who fit this stereotype I had formed in my adolescent life about girls overseas. This one liked Manchester City and hated Manchester U. This one, back home, worked at a record store outside of Manchester. She liked the Smiths growing up, liked Blur over Oasis. She had seen them all in concert. It seems cliché to me now, but at the time I was thrilled to meet a girl like that. I had a mind to take her away from the concert, dispense of our 19 euro tickets and have her fill me in on every detail of her childhood and adolescent life. Instead, I never saw her even during or after the concert, just told her I would see her later and headed into the crowd and was lost.

Years later I would take up the oeuvre of Orhan Pamuk. In its totality, it is clear that Pamuk's plots are really background to the setting, a reversal of the rules of literature in order to play out his relationship with Turkey. Writing in New York, the idea of "exile" blossoms in his depictions of Istanbul, a city that has been ingrained so intensely into his memory that his relationship with it is borderline obsessive. In this sense, Pamuk is allowed to never resolve his murder mysteries, for the act of chasing a character who actually never appears in a novel is actually an excuse for wandering the city, searching its darkest alleys and most rundown cafés. Similarly, a lifelong love affair can be loosely referred to in a short story, since it is less about the love affair than the woman's boutique in Nişantaşı, where he grew up, and the lineage of the girl he meets there, how she is connected to him through family. Resolution and character development are cast aside; Pamuk's writing is more like a crazy old man who takes you by the hand in order to tell you truncated stories and conspiracy theories, then leaves you suddenly stranded in a street you have never been down before, and suddenly you realize the old man's intention was never to fill you in on his thoughts, but rather take you on the most in depth tour of the city you could have hoped for.

Having lived in one place for decades, a city takes on a new, fictive role once you cast yourself away from it, or are exiled. All of Pamuk's work resembles serial fiction, not in the sense that characters reappear and plot lines are picked up and end with "to be continued," but in the sense that throughout his books and stories, elements and themes of Turkey appear again and again: the Milliyet newspaper; the overprotective and controlling Turkish family; incest in Turkish genealogy and relationships; the umbrage of Atatürk, Father of Turkey, and how the Turkish people seem unable to tear themselves away from it; the lines for dolmas; and the "New Life" caramels, cigarettes, tabacs. As he says often, memory is a garden, and if anything, for Pamuk, the act of writing is his way of walking down the streets of his childhood, reliving the quotidian activities in Turkey that, as a child, he took for granted.

But for me, there has always been a second kind of exile. This type of exile happens before birth, and in a way it is just as tragic, if not more so. A new, fresh city can only be digested once you have left it and it has always struck me how, even a place I have only visited for one week can stay with me more indelibly than any memory I have of the town I grew up in. When you feel strangely at home in a setting that you never knew existed until you got off the plane, when you can almost see your younger self playing in the cobblestoned streets with the other boys of that region, when you feel as though a pastry endemic of the nation you are in has been the pastry you have breakfasted on every day of your life, just out of habit, then when you have to leave and return home, you truly experience a sense of exile. The most tragic part of this exile is that even if you decide to make that place your home by learning its language, taking up a job there and living your whole life there, even fully immersed in that place, you will never truly be a part of it, only the outsider looking in. While, like Napoleon, exiles can be pardoned and welcomed back, the second type of exile is eternally banned.

When the concert was over, it was raining. Outside the venue some of my friends were drinking whiskey and I drank with them. Then, soaking wet, I had to run as fast as I could to catch the last bus home, thinking how if I didn't catch it in time I would be stuck forever in the rain. I reached my stop and decided that I should call Reid in Cairo before he left for Istanbul, so I walked to a payphone nearby. The rain had stopped now and the soft ground beneath my feet felt content after being freshly watered.

As I dialed the numbers--which were strange series of country and area codes, and led to a strange dial tone--I thought of the girl from Manchester. I imagined briefly what it would have been like if I asked her to marry me, if I moved with her back to Manchester and how as a couple we would be City fans and share our hatred for Man U. I wondered if I would ever see her again, and if, years later, I wrote about her, then whether she was also thinking of me. Then Reid's voice came on the line in a manner that suggested he was picking up the phone in a vastly different setting than I was.

We talked briefly about our plans to meet. He told me to meet him in Beşiktaş in front of a grocery store called Tanşas. He said it was the only one in that district and that the taxi driver would know where to go. When I went home that night, I felt a kind of vertigo, as though I had momentarily touched upon multiple parts of the globe all at once allowing me to, in an infinitesimal amount of time, realize the vastness of the world.

Jimmy Aaja and His Silent Confession

In 1982 an Indian film directed by Babbar Subhash debuted, titled, Disco Dancer. In the years that followed, the movie became a cult classic, notably in countries as Russia and Turkey. Predominately because of the disco music featured in it, it is now an archetypal Bollywood film. The most famous song in the soundtrack was "Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja," which can currently be viewed on the link below.

Disco Dancer - Jimmy Aaja

Isolated from the plot, the musical number becomes enigmatic and it is interesting to speculate about what is going on. At first, there are two forces at work in the video: the puzzlingly immobile male figure, wearing white robes, and the disco belle with spectacularly long hair. They are situated on an intensely lit stage. The lights blink schizophrenically, as though to the rhythms of their own, internal song. Occasionally the figures on stage are even engulfed in these lights, as though superimposed over their person, and the effect is overwhelming. It is almost as if the lights are part of an organism overjoyed by the music, and could be possibly considered a subcharacter to the principal plot. They jump out from every object on the stage, often as pointed spears propelled from the disco ball, the electric background and the sequins on the lovely disco dancer’s vest. Jimmy, only, in his drab white robes seems to emit no electric-lit fanfare; although often neon lights dance upon his face, the same way flames stick their devilish tongues from a fire.

The song’s lyrics feature mostly the male’s name—Jimmy Aaja—which the dancer repeats as a bird chirps to its lover. The name is repeated so many times one cannot help but think that perhaps she is attempting to remind Jimmy of his name, and on a deeper level his past and history.

This theory becomes increasingly appealing as the video progresses, mostly because of the saturnine look on Jimmy’s face. His expression cannot be described in one word: it is at once bewildered, distressed, glum, deeply depressed, confused, disoriented and ashamed. His pose is statuelike—the video occasionally cuts to Jimmy’s face to show his reaction to the female’s singing and seductive dancing, but, as though playing with our expectation (“surely he has changed positions or emotions by now?”), his expression never alters, unable to be persuaded or even reminded by his counterpart.

Our Jimmy seems lost, confused, not sure why he is on stage with this beautiful woman who attempts in vain to remind him where he is, who he is—it is as though her words mean nothing to him; they even send him into deeper confusion and despair. And to the viewer, this is mystifying and even uncanny, for, out of anyone that this gorgeous woman could have decided to seduce and spend her time bewitching, it is this sad fellow.

Suddenly, during a bridge in the music, a third force enters the scene: the audience. Of course, we were aware that an audience might be watching these two people since the setting is a stage. An audience is also shown in the beginning of the video and often the camera pans past silhouetted heads gazing toward the stage, but one might assume that is just more setting the scenario than character development. We assumed just as any play--or film of a play--is depicted on a stage, that we were meant to use our imaginations to dissolve both theater and audience and imagine the torn lovers in any scenario we might wish: in a field, a private room, a ballroom or even in a discotheque. Very rarely during this kind of theatrical moment is the eye turned upon the viewer.

The first figure we are directed to is a medium-set male figure who is dancing glibly in his seat. Behind him a few females are also bouncing to the music, enjoying themselves. Meanwhile, the female on stage jumps around, performing a hybrid of western and Indian dance moves. She seems unaware that of all the males in the frame, her beloved Jimmy is the only downcast one. Yet her gaze remains steadfastly fixed upon him alone.

The point that allows us to speculate deeper into this, at first glance, simple music video, is that Jimmy’s stone cold pose, his peculiar glances and furrowed brow contrast so starkly juxtaposed next to the carefree female figure. She smiles and curls her fingers seductively at him as though she has taken no note—as we have—that Jimmy is not amused by her blithe movements. It seems unfair, doesn’t it, that out of all the males in the theater, the most beautiful woman has chosen Jimmy to dance around? Why does she not give up after a few seconds? How can she dance and sing for the whole song before realizing that Jimmy is just dead weight? And meanwhile, the rest of the male figures are left to watch enviously this lover’s scene. They are perhaps all thinking what I would if I was in the audience: “If I were in Jimmy’s place, I wouldn’t react so forlornly as he does. I would show her what a man I was and I would love her as such beauty deserves.”

Love is like that, isn’t it? For reasons known only to those involved in the relationship, people fix themselves to one another. The outsiders can view these two in their vacuum, they can listen to the conversations they have, they can watch them walk through a park, arm in arm, and yet, just as the audience would never dare overstep the bounds of the stage, you are completely incapable to transcend the role of the viewer between two lovers. Sometimes, as is the case with the disco dancer and Jimmy, you think, “I really don’t see what she sees in him” and often “why is she wasting his time on him of all people?” and even “he does not deserve her.” And yet these thoughts are more often than not useless, for nothing can convince a woman who has so resolutely chosen a lover, no matter how foolish, cowardly or depressed he is.

What we have tapped into at this point is the mysterious force of love. It is perhaps all just chemistry, and some might say foolishness and primitive baseness—and it probably is just that. That our bodies and minds can fall for some person who, for all intents and purposes, does not deserve our caresses. You can trace this back to a mammalian reflex to procreate; or it might be some unhealthy product of society today whereby a woman must choose one man and love him wholeheartedly, even if he does not return her love. To the outsider this is frustrating: one might be so in love with everything about our voluptuous disco dancer and, as we have said already, think “I would treat her as she deserves to be treated” and yet you can do nothing to persuade her that your love would be more fulfilling. For love has, perhaps haphazardly, latched the two together and there is some invisible force at work that defies all logic.

The male/female dichotomy is pointedly at issue in the video in many ways. Of course there are the two main characters posed at separate sides of the stage. There is the malaise of the male figure, and there is the happy-go-lucky sentiment of the female character. One has perhaps seen too much of the world’s woes to go on dancing, no matter if he is on stage before a huge audience, no matter what they expect. The other fulfills the role she is expected to play: as a dancer, a beautiful, made-up, joyful diva; and above all she embodies a feminine naïveté that is more a product of nurture versus nature, in that as a girl she was perhaps sheltered and protected from the horrors that Jimmy was allowed to see at will.

There is also the men and women in the audience, which the camera fixes upon occasionally. It is not at random, as we begin to realize toward the end of the video, for by the seventh or eighth verse of “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy/ Aaja Aaja Aaja,” Jimmy’s still confused and horrified look begins to influence his female lover. This affects no one more than the women in the audience, as they sing along with their heroine. You can see them mouthing “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy” as though with their help, by a some sort of collective female force, they might wake Jimmy from his stupor.

This leads us to another male/female difference here: whereas the males looked on stage lasciviciously at the female, wishing they were in Jimmy’s place, the females feel a kind of bond in the struggle of the disco dancer. They care less about Jimmy than the sadness that the female eventually adopts by the end of the video. There is a sisterly connection here, where, in contrast, a brotherly one could be described as a familial competitiveness. Jimmy’s cold reaction toward his lover’s words and movements affects the women in the audience as much as the woman on stage.

As the climax and denouement of the video approach the joyful singing turns sour. Unable to avoid it any longer, the female is either suddenly aware of Jimmy’s horrified pose, or perhaps she is gradually dragged down into depression by his consistent glare, unable to sustain it any longer. We might imagine that now she has seen the horrors of the world second-hand through her male counterpart, and this is perhaps just as harrowing if not more—a man she loved and admired so much could not defeat evil after all, and in her love, she probably assumed him to be invincible. All of a sudden the singing is no longer singing, but desperate shouting as someone might shout desperately into a cavern that his friend has fallen into, as though shouting and crying would bring him back. The final few “Jimmy” verses decrescendo and the tempo slows. There is an increasing amount of alarm in the female’s voice, why does Jimmy not react to her?

She calls to him three last times, “Jimmy,” then the face of Jimmy who looks at her hoping that she can remind him of his past; another “Aaja” and he realizes that the whole song has been performed in vain, nothing can bring him out of this chasm he has been propelled into; he begins panting, fretting he is eternally lost; a final “Jimmy Aaja” and Jimmy has lost all hope, his head falls crestfallenly toward the floor as the disco dancer’s singing turns into weeping.

At this point, the disruption in the belle’s singing throws a cog into the scene. Jimmy’s depression has weighed upon everyone else and as his lover weeps into Jimmy’s robes, the crowd grows restless. The woman yells something in Hindi and finally switches to English, “I hate you! You’re a coward!” she tells him and she runs off stage. A male in the audience stands up and yells something in a mocking tone at Jimmy. When the audience laughs, jeers and pelts him with shoes, Jimmy’s only action is to shield himself from being hit. His uncanny moping is barely disturbed by the ruckus of the crowd, leaving us to continue wondering why he did not just leave the stage in the first place?

The puzzling nature of Jimmy’s place in the video is twofold. Clearly, he once was a performer and now has either forgotten who he is or what he does. His forgetfulness seems to cause him pain, and seeing his beautiful counterpart on stage with him does not soothe his woes but only causes him more suffering. It is difficult to understand and we cannot help but feel so removed from Jimmy’s plight as to feel disgust for him. We are at a loss to feel sorry for Jimmy because his pain and suffering are incomprehensible, irrational and absurd. And that which causes him to suffer—the stage, the female before him, the repetition of his name, the song even?—he cannot tear himself from. The cure to his suffering--the song, a reminder--becomes the cause of his suffering, and from neither can he tear himself away. Yet, perhaps, given his evident celebrity status, even if he were to leave the stage, he might still be on view. He is like a pair of lovers who are aware that they are constantly in the public’s eye, with never a moment of privacy.

Through his silence and obvious suffering, Jimmy in this vein is communicating a sad reality: that all our actions and thoughts seem to be part of a play, that we are just characters in some bizarre Bollywood film and all our joys, all of our thoughts and observations, all of our loves and relationships are but for the enjoyment of the audience who, once removed, can only enjoy them second hand, either with enviousness or solidarity. Jimmy’s steadfastness in the face of blithe persuasion shows he is caught in this cyclical vacuum, never able to enjoy life’s pleasures, nor left alone to ponder life’s horrors, for the public is constantly attempting to glean these for themselves, and even when they have them, they can never enjoy them as fully as Jimmy could have.

In Jimmy's silence, he confesses what his disco dancer lover could not have said in an entire song: that all of a life is an unescapable stage.

Notebooks #1

Something about a summer heat that seems to be the catalyst of the spirit of a country. It's been chronicled as that, at least, so it has to be in some way true. Perhaps, in the same way that boiling water spearheads chemical reactions (water changing into steam, pasta becoming soft, etc.), the heat foments the interactions of everyday life.

Walking toward the launderette I see three girls dressed all nice in tight, form-fitting dresses. It is hot out and it's only 10 a.m. Immediately, it occurs to me that youth today has no boundaries in terms of night, fancy clothing and day, casual clothing. But on the other hand, what do I expect them to wear? Jammies? Well, what were women wearing in 1910? If they were privileged, they spent hours putting on dresses and make up. In fact, they couldn't be seen unless they had spent that amount of time on themselves. Petticoats and embroidered gowns require three maids to dress one woman alone. Is that true? And if so, were their true lives spent only indoors in private?

Why do some people just sit in the launderette waiting for the clothes? Do they look forward to the time to themselves? Or are they afraid their clothes will get stolen? Stealing from the launderette is a social taboo. It's just not done, although one easily could do it.

Shit, I left my wallet in my pants and it's too late now to do anything about it. It's evident that I am semi-out of my mind.

A family of african-americans enter the laundromat. The mother, who can't believe her children are so incompetent. The daughters, who don't think to come into the laundromat with a bin of clothing. A mother in this scenario must be tired of her incompetent children; her manner is so bitter and pissed off. The children react childlike, happy, carefree, naive in a way. Happily they realize their stupidity and run back into the car. I wonder how long they'll have to endure life before they become like their mother, or what seems to be the antithesis of themselves. Perhaps they have to experience motherhood first.

A kombucha seems the cure to ails as these, lately. But I have to wait for the washer to finish to get my money. I am literally useless at the moment.

"Do you have anything else? This is all wet." The attendant of the liquor store throws down my twenty as though it is trash. "Excuse me?" I am shocked out of my stupor. I wonder if this is one of those moments where I have to be assertive. "This twenty, it's wet. Do you have something else?" "This is all I have." I am thinking about how I should assert myself in a situation like this, so much that I don't even mention that the twenty had just been through the washer. "It still works," I say. I wonder if I should suggest, maybe snidely that I exchange the bills for him so he doesn't have to touch it. "I know it works. I just don't want to touch it when it's wet. It freaks me out." This catches me off guard and pondering the meaning of his statement, I laugh and put back the bottle of kombucha. It's not too much trouble to go one block down to the next liquor store, I know they have kombucha there. "Ok," I chuckle earnestly.

Halfway down the block I realize perhaps he thought I did something sinister to the twenty. The first possibilities that come to mind are obviously: semen, urine. Perhaps he thinks he is the butt of my sick fetish. Could he have really thought all that in the time that it took for him to feel that the twenty was wet? Evidently this pet peeve of his goes back further than that. But why didn't I mention it just went through the wash? It's an earnest mistake, and if anything, the bill was cleaner than he might have suspected. Was it me or was it him?

I also think that a good way to have responded would have been: "Here's how you fix this wet bill. Take it, wait, and then it's dry."

At the second liquor store there is the spirit of the summer again: the attendant is lounging in the middle of the aisles, watching CNN. Jesse Jackson is eulogizing on Ted Kennedy's life. I immediately mention to the attendant that the bill just went through the washer, so it's wet. He seems caught off guard too--I have to repeat myself. "Oh," he says, "as long as it's green, it's good to me."

The man behind me says that "that stuff" is good, referring to the kombucha. He has a cut on his face and looks a bit crazy. But I wonder if I too look crazy, having literally just woken up thirty minutes ago. Perhaps I always look crazy to some people in liquor stores. I think, in this heat, we are all a bit crazy.

Why does Jesse Jackson feel the need to speak after Ted Kennedy's death? Does he really wake up and feel that need or is just CNN? It seems that a person only enters our collective consciousness when he is dead. Otherwise, we pass through reality in a dream-like state. I think this state is necessary in going about our day-to-day business, or else we might lose our cool. When a person has died, we can sum up his entire existence soberly. It is a closed statement, ready to be examined. It is there in front of us, and there is no danger of being shocked or surprised. Ted Kennedy can do nothing else now to surprise us. If he was alive he might have done something utterly horrifying and arguably, had.

A bumper sticker reads, "Drink and Drive" in big letters. Below, in smaller letters, it says, "lose your license." But since the first statement is larger, it seems to be at first telling you to Drink and Drive. At first I thought it was a bumper sticker in defense of drunk driving. But, in their right minds, no one would willingly heed the advice of that kind of statement. This puts into question the nature of bumper stickers in general. No bumpersticker could really convince a person to do something, he must ponder the consequences first. In such a short statement, no one will be persuaded to vote a certain way or go solar. In other words, if this bumper sticker failed to convince me to drink and drive, won't other, more reasonable bumper stickers all fail in their purpose as well?

If I can go home, take a shower, fold my clothes and get ready all in the time that it takes for "Sister Ray" to play, I will be content. It strikes me that if I can conduct all of my daily chores in the time that "Sister Ray" can play, I will feel successful. "Sister Ray" will be my measurement of success.

Success is such a evasive feeling perhaps because the ways to measure it are elusive and subjective. Perhaps I might spend more time figuring out how to feel successful, rather than worrying how to be successful. I wonder if the idea of success, which seems to drive everyone to get out of bed in the morning, is what sets us apart from other animals. Or, I wonder if a cat who has thoroughly groomed himself, and has just perched himself atop a stairwell to survey the land before him, momentarily feels successful.

The african-american mother, bags under her eyes, has truly left her children to watch over the clothes in the laundromat. The kids wander the street outside and occasionally monitor the clothes in the washer. They don't play, or converse with one another, but rather seem to each be talking to themselves. They regard me peripherally, only when they happen to capture me in their field of vision. Once, I see the younger girl looking at me in the reflection of one of the dryers, but it does not bother her that I also can see her.

I do look insane.

The clothing follow a lose sense of gravity. They seem to be chasing each other, as though the best, most alluring position is to be at the bottom of the dryer, rather than the top. As soon as they fall, they are back at the top again. If the dryer was spinning slower, they would have a longer time to spend at the bottom and their flight would be farther. If the spin was any faster, they would have no time at all to fall to the bottom. At this speed, they have just enough time to, at the peak of their ascent, fall at an angle before they are swept up by the rotation. Their movement seems restless, never sure about itself. In a way I think poor people might feel about themselves. Perhaps this is how we are all holding on to the world: loosely spun about because of the earth's rotation, we may as well be clutching the equator with our backs to the ground.

The only decor in the laundromat is a framed puzzle. To be sure, the puzzle is unique and pleasant. A home with a straw roof in a Balkan peninsula setting. My mind is drawn to foreign countries, the countryside, the open landscape. I am temporarily taken outside of this shitty laundromat, but then I think how strange it is to see a puzzle framed as a picture. But what is a puzzle really? A passtime, a diversion? It is a puzzle in the sense that you have to put the pieces together, and not all of them fit because of their shape. It isn't a puzzle in the sense that you have to figure something out, like a word problem or a crossword puzzle. It is a physical puzzle, and not a mental puzzle. Because of course there on the box of the puzzle is the picture that the puzzle eventually forms. What kind of success, then, can you feel, having put together all the pieces? You might as well frame it and keep it forever. Perhaps whoever framed this puzzle did not mean to divert our attention from the mundane act of cleaning clothing, did not mean to call our attention to this beautiful domicile, but rather meant to proudly display his accomplishment of piecing all the pieces of this puzzle together. His sense of accomplishment required a calling attention to, to feel genuine.

Sometimes, when I am full of thoughts, hung over and fresh from a sleep, I feel like I have to grip the earth's surface, just to hold on to everything.

Marxism and Drum N Bass: Converging Paths

Nov 16, 2008

In the evening when the people set their feet out the door, I crossed the Bay and fell into lights. X had just been babysitting and since she owed me some money, she gave me a small percentage of her earnings. R took us down the hill, around the lake, to this Caribbean-themed bar surrounded by painted palm trees and corrugated sheet metal. The place was sparsely populated and for the short time that we were there I watched the people facing the DJ booth moving to their own rhythms, in spite of the bass that enveloped us. When it came time to purchase a drink I understood the ghostly role that money plays in our consciousness.

I started the night with six dollars. After purchasing a large Tsingtao at a Chinese restaurant in the Mission, I had no money. I borrowed a dollar or two for an ice cream cone later on. When I crossed the Bay I had no money in my pocket, save for that tricky thing that's hard to categorize, the Debit card--often times it's as good as money, others it's completely devoid of value. By a turn events, as I mentioned, when I arrived at my destination I came into the possession of a twenty dollar bill, whose value, if you're used to carrying around a wad of twenties, feels physically equivalent to one dollar. So it was that we arrived at that Caribbean-themed bar and we were swallowed whole by drum 'n bass music. The bar charged five dollars entry fee, and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, R paid for both X and me: a total cost of fifteen dollars. I recognized the gesture and as we approached the bar I ordered a gin and tonic, which R and X ordered as well, and handed the barkeep the twenty dollar bill I had just come into possession of. The other two proceeded to dig through their respective purses and wallets and produce the five dollars that their drink cost, but I waved both bills off. Now R's gesture of paying for our entry into the bar had been recognized, returned, and arguably negated by my purchasing of the two drinks. It is American custom of course to tip, and since I tend to tip well, being in the tip-industry, this reduced the single twenty dollar bill first to five one dollar bills, and then to three as I laid out two bills on the drink-stained counter top: a sixty-seven cent appreciation per gin and tonic. The waving off of the five owed dollar bills was met with gratitude and uncertainty, including statements such as "Thank you" and "Are you sure?" These statements blanketed a tacit agreement that the purchase was my obligation in return for the favor of paying the cover charge. And although my gesture was met with a bit of uncertainty--whether out of concern for my lack of twenty dollar bills or perhaps as a suggestion that I didn't owe anyone anything--I personally felt as though I lost nothing. Perhaps because the twenty dollar bill came into my possession so easily, trading it for cocktails felt almost negligible, or, as they say, "Easy come, easy go." Had the twenty dollar bill been hard-earned, I might have thought twice about buying the drinks. Although if that was the case then the bill would have had friends, and I wouldn't mind losing it either.

As we imbibed the gin and tonics, I started to think about the lightness of money, how easily it is gained and lost. In this instance the twenty dollar bill almost felt inconsequential; in some other reality might I have not been simply paid in gin and tonics? Cut the "middle-man" out, so to speak. And yet not everyone prefers to drink gin and tonics, others like wine or beer or Campari and sodas. So in fact the money is necessary as a kind of pivot point to aim earnings, or work, at an infinite amount of goods. Meanwhile, now that I had made one purchase for each member in my party, since I'm not exactly on the greatest of financial terms, my sense of duty to purchase others' drinks had disappeared. In any case, I only had three dollars left, which is more or less worthless in a bar setting. We left after finishing the gin and tonics and we walked down the street to a more populated bar, featuring a dark interior and a wall of rustic stones that reminded me of the outdated decor of 1960's Californian chalets. It was so dark and crowded in there that I wondered if a normal living room could be turned into a bar simply by filling it with people and turning the lights off. Of course the customers would be searching for the place to buy alcohol, but if it was dark enough and they came drunk enough, they might not know the difference. R became despondent, and after a while, the void of despair was filled with delirious happiness and she offered to buy us drinks for the rest of the night, handing the bartender her Debit card and instructing him to "keep it open," which in bar terminology, suggests a potentially infinite amount of drinks, and very often, because there aren't the limitations that cash provides, especially when the cardholder in question becomes increasingly drunk, ends up costing more than originally intended. I, however, did not refuse the rest of my drinks to be purchased since a. the crowded bar and sisterly affection that R and X had for each other left me to myself and b. indeed, I even felt now a new sense of duty to help R get over her despair as though allowing her to spend money on beers that I alone would drink would somehow translate into her renewed good humor. So we spent and drank and were content.

Notes And Words

Nov 6, 2008

For so much of my life I've struggled to close the gap between thought and word. When I indulge in thoughts and when I am inspired to record them, they seem to have all but disappeared by the time I find a pen and paper. Listening to too much music has spoiled me. I partly assume that, as a skilled musician knows exactly which keys to press on a piano for the desired chords, the words will be there when I want to describe an emotion. But so often, when I attempt to write it's as if the chords that I used to know so well produce a horrendous cacophony, and it leads to a kind of anxiety in me, like I never know what's around the corner, a kind of paranoia maybe. Then when words fail us more often than not singing is the mask of our emotion. It's all too easy to turn to a song to represent the emotion we are feeling. But then, when you listen to music professionally, what happens? That's when I start to wonder what if we lived in a completely textual world. What if every word meant one thing and one thing alone and to walk down the street you literally, in some kind of literally-figurative way, would have to climb over letters, words, accents and punctuation marks? What if looking at a set of directions was the exact equivalent to driving to the grocery store, and then, what if the printed receipt in your pocket was truly the bag of groceries in the trunk of your car? Perhaps in this completely textual world, we would keep journals in arias and shanties. We could choose to send emails in chants or percussive beats. But I am truly neither musician nor writer, and instead I walk a delicate line in between the two categories, a pariah to each. So, falling down on the sidewalk's curb to hold my head in my hands, I heave a sigh that in some universe is both literally "sigh" and a d flat chord.

The Various Architects

1. The Dreamer

I've always assumed as bizarre as dreams can get, there is still some part of them that must be based in reality. Upon waking and having analyzed and considered this dream I was surprised that at no point while dreaming did I consider that this to be ridiculous. It begins somewhere in Europe. In France I am assuming, although the building in question was called The Parliament. The Parliament was a set of many, which made the act reasonable, if it could at all be called that, perhaps I should say "considerable" instead. The Parliament was not neo-gothic like the Houses of Parliaments along the Thames, but rather a Beaux-Arts style with a kind of Mansard roof--a typical French federal building, with the foyer at the front and two wings that expanded symmetrically on either side. Nonetheless it was well known that this building once belonged to the United States, somewhere in the midwest, such as Detroit, or perhaps Washington, DC. Yes, now that I think of it, the heist had to have its end in an easterly city of stature of the United States. Of course it was Washington, DC.

Somehow my friends and I came across the idea that this building could be unhinged from its foundation using explosives appropriately placed at several positions in the back and on either side. With enough force, we could uproot it and launch it from its de facto quarters of Paris, France to its original birthplace, Washington, DC. There were a few problems with the idea, although the thought of unhinging the building with explosives was, in my mind, unquestionably sound. For one thing, this was no doubt illegal. But here the heroic quality of the deed outweighed its illegality, as I reasoned. It was illegal, but so are many other acts, and although they are against the law that doesn't mean they shouldn't occur or that they don't take place. If the building was returned to its rightful home successfully--and it was imperative that we be successful--then all question of law would be absolved in the fact that we were heroes and a wrong had been made right.

The other problem with this was the question of success. As I said, I was without doubt that we could release the building from the ground and catapult it into the air (it never crossed my mind, for instance, that by using explosives, the building would simply crumble); the difficulty was getting it to land in its true birthplace, Washington, DC. If it were to land in, say, Detroit, then our efforts would be in vain and surely we would receive a maximum prison sentence--one of those sentences that almost seems laughably, impossibly long.

Nonetheless, the risks were not so great as to stop us from attempting this feat, and finally the day came that we had the explosives in place. We parked ourselves toward the top of the ceiling of the building, using the clerestories as our windshields. Once the building became unhinged, we could use the architrave as a steering wheel by gripping certain parts of it. What followed was not so much the actual event, but the video that had been taped, edited and later on viewed many times while reminiscing about this heist. The video was in color, but the quality had that old-timey feel so for instance, car chases were humorously sped up almost as a reminder that the viewers are not watching reality, but perhaps "taped" reality. There were long shots of silence that gradated into the sound of increasing RPMs of an engine as the building sped past the camera, down avenues and boulevards, skirted trees which exploded in a mist of foliage and, turning corners, nearly careened into other buildings. As was expected, the police and the military were eventually involved and we were trailed by not only government agencies, but angry French citizens protesting the heist of their beloved Parliament building. Our explosives were effective however, and though we came dangerously close, we finally reached the Pacific Ocean without being apprehended.

The car chase video was over and now, as evening set in and a full white moon lit the calm waters, there was a feeling of imminence. Our course and destination had been determined in two ways: the building was headed for its final resting place and it skipped gleefully over the ocean as a flat rock skips over a calm river with long, graceful bounds ; secondly, we were also bound for either imminent doom or legendary status. Once the building landed, there would be no more avoiding apprehension, and it was just a matter of how we would be perceived by the public, as heroes or grand-theft criminals. If the majority of the public thought what we had done was right, regardless of the law, by returning the building to its rightful owners, then we would be free and celebrated. If not, we would certainly spend a lifetime in prison, the more likely fate which I was now carelessly resigned to. I considered all this as we moved up to the roof to look out at the ocean beneath us.

Still, I became increasingly frightened as we neared our destination. Day came with troubled thoughts: I was now convinced that the idea that we could return the building with explosives was folly. If anything it would land in some random spot in the midwest. Even if we landed in the city, it certainly would not land in its true home, where the foundations remain buildingless. But then, it happened, and we landed, tinkered like a penny circling its final destination, and settled just a few feet from the original foundation. For all intents and purposes we had succeeded!

In my dream, weeks went by and to my surprise we were hardly covered in the media, neither as villains nor heroes. Except for a short, unimportant article in the San Francisco Chronicle, we were largely ignored. I made vain attempts to reach out to the New York Times, until finally someone contacted me and said they had already covered our story the day it happened. When I searched for it, I could find nothing. My dream ended as I was left to sift woefully through the stock footage that had now been long shelved and archived, the video that documented the chase through the French streets. Those times seemed long gone and now I had realized the ultimate punishment, not three lifetime prison sentences, nor hard labor, nor exile--but obscurity...

Gutter-life Motherhood

This older African-American man at the bus stop, then bus, who was talking aloud. I attempted to jot down what I could:

This was before your time, it might have even been before my time; there's no way to prove it. There is no way for them to prove anything. There is no proof. So what they're saying is, "We don't need you. We don't need the black people; we can do everything without you, without your kind." They can up and walk away... She's got to take it from me in that cradle. See, the African mother she could do it. She could do the job. She's not able to do it. But the whole world of Africa: 1,000 years. The cradle of white has nothing to give to that child from the land from he comes. They never had a motherland like that... Our mother who made that possible. Mothers make it possible to do what now? Go to jail and smoke the crack pipe. Is that first-class mother hood? No. Is it second-class? Third-class? It's gutter-life motherhood. That's what it is. Our mothers, they living in the gutter and evil perpetuates evil. You grow up fed with a silver crack pipe in your mouth, that's what. And then it's mighty difficult to curb that kind of addiction. An addiction from birth. See, our mothers they cared for us. They cared what we was going to do with our life. Not just piss it away. But no, she can't give it to him. She got to feel sorry for them now... What if they had the Bible, the language? What if they ahd been that way, huh? No...

and he descends from the bus.

Kids These Days

Y: I love how beautiful the ocean is. Look how beautiful... You missed that, also that, where Villy, where Villy lives. You should go there sometime it's fantastic. In Delaware.

A: The ocean's blue like that?

Y: Well, it's the bay, you know, I didn't see it that blue because it's more extended, you know. And everyday those freight boats going, it's like a highway there, I don't know where they're coming. Big, big freights. You know, ships, they transport things from wherever, China, wherever. It's like a highway, everyday, night and day. They go very slowly, you know. I think he's there this weekend.

A: I think, didn't he just get back from the Andes?

Y: Yeah.

A: He went back to Delaware already?

Y: Well they, you know they just bought the house, so they are anxious to go, summertime, wintertime you can't, right? And it's good, they're relaxing, for them.

A: And you spent a lot of time with the kids when you were there?

Y: In Argentina?

A: No no, you when you went to Delaware.

Y: Yeah I did. Very much.

A: What'd you think, what were your impressions.

Y: Stefan I think is doing good. Nicky has a long way to grow up.

A: He has to turn another leaf.

Y: He has to get out. Nicky is very smart, he's too smart for his own good, you know how I mean by smart, not intellectual smart, but he, smart smart, but he plays too many games, I don't like that at all. He doesn't have a life.

A: I think the best thing for Stefan is to let him, give him some freedom, let him breathe a little bit.

Y: Stefan is OK.

A: No but I think he needs more breathing space.

Y: Steffy?

A: Cause otherwise he's going to rebel.

Y: He's already rebelling. I don't think they give him any, I don't agree with that, Alex, about Stefan.

A: Cause right now what you need to do is trust that you, that they've raised him properly and that he'll make the right decisions. It's not about policing him.

Y: Well I don't think they police him. Actually, I tell you one thing, he's, if anything else, I think--well, that's stupid things, but he has freedom to go wherever he wants. Finally I got out of him to bring his girlfriend over he didn't even want to admit he had a girlfriend.

A: Did you meet her?

Y: Not--

M: Did you meet her?

Y: No.

M: Oh she wouldn't come?

Y: Well, I asked him, but well you know like I said, he, he had a hard time to admit that it was a girlfriend in the meantime he spends all his time over there I said, "I'm not saying you have any relationship in the other way it's a girl it's a friend, right?" What's wrong not to bring her over? So finally he said he said--

A: It's all semantics, yia-yia.

Y: Yeah, so he, anyhow, it takes him a little, he's not sure of that. He's young, he's only fifteen, Alex.

A: I'm not--

Y: You know, when he was, remember when you were fifteen, how would you react?

A: I know, but people, people are maturing faster these days.

Y: Oooh, they all were, you were not [laughing].

A: No I think they are.

Y: Nah, how you mean "these days," how far are you, how much older you think you are? Centuries older than them?

A: Well I mean I don't know. With technology and everything.

Y: The same generation like you, Alex. It's just in the genies [sic] of a person I think.

A: People are more, exposed to things differently.

Y: Well Al, xha-xhi was maturing in that direction at that age. Oh, are you kidding? Oh, at that age when you, when he was eleven? But even younger. It has to do with his genies.

A: The genies?

Y: Yeah how he, you know, how his body aged. And his brains too.

M: It's so beautiful, guys, the water, did you see? Do you see any whales, Alex?

A: No.

Y: Now, right now?

M: No I guess not.

Y: I think it's too late isn't it, honey?

M: Although this is the time you can see a blue whale on occasion. A big one.

Y: Uh oh. You see them around over there too, no?