World Eddy

And then I get this role and I end up in East Africa. I go out to the forest in Uganda. There's this woman. She brings me deep into the forest, to this cave made from the roots of a tree – the entrance is made from the roots of a tree. You go inside and there's a well in the ground, a little well. This is where they say the first man lived. And I'm sitting there. I've got my shoes off and I'm thinking to myself, Touch the ground, man. Touch the wall, feel your feet, smell it, don't forget it. Let it be inside of you.................... Forest Whitaker, Esquire interview

[worldeddy]

The Logical Endpoint is Violence

So, it's another one of those deadline nights and I'm taking those internet breaks that are gonna cause me to stay up till 4am. But this is also when I catch up with the news.

Anyway, Israel. It's become pretty hard to avoid confronting the lack of good intentions there. And that's a shame, because I'd really like to believe there's a future situation that's better than the one that exists now, but I can't see it. There's a lot more there than a right / wrong dichotomy, but the current trajectory is disappointing.

There's another string that's running through these articles I'm reading, or at least alongside them -- how this connects to Jews worldwide. Some see this as a cop-out, a smoke screen, but as a Jew it's on your mind. And it's a bit disturbing how much this connects in the minds of others as well.

I'm thankful I haven't had to represent or repudiate people out there with some difficult choices to make, but damn depressed that the anti-Semitism that drove my family to the US three generations back is making a resurgence. And a bit rocked by this paragraph (in http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/opinion/david-brooks-how-to-fight-anti-semitism.html ):

"There are others who see anti-Semitism as another form of bigotry. But these are different evils. Most bigotry is an assertion of inferiority and speaks the language of oppression. Anti-Semitism is an assertion of impurity and speaks the language of extermination. Anti-Semitism’s logical endpoint is violence."

In another paragraph he talks about the way to combat this -- solidarity, presumably amongst other people than Jews as well. But it doesn't seem that there are many people willing to fight that battle these days.

This devastating article reads the same signs and reaches another conclusion -- http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/03/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/. One of the writer's -- Jeffrey Goldberg -- editors, Leon Wieseltier, was the editor of the New Republic when the Bosnian War was being fought. His basic conclusion was that, after the Holocaust, Europe had pledged never to let another genocide happen on its soil -- and, in the Bosnian War's mass displacements, concentration camps, rape camps, and ultimately UN-legitimised ethnic cleansing (forceable relocations, murders and cultural erasure of Bosnian Muslims in ethnically mixed areas, eventually earning the Bosnian Serbs 49% of the Bosnian territory divided in the peace settlement), exactly that had occurred.

And Goldberg's conclusion? "I am predisposed to believe that there is no great future for the Jews in Europe, because evidence to support this belief is accumulating so quickly. But I am also predisposed to think this because I am an American Jew—which is to say, a person who exists because his ancestors made a run for it when they could."

[from-saigon]

213 Đồng Khởi Str.

If you pass 213 Dong Khoi today, you’ll see temporary wooden walls postered with pictures of Reunification Palace, the People’s Committee Building, the Opera House, Ben Thanh Market, a blooming lotus. Many of Saigon’s symbols are accounted for — but not the posthumously famous one whose Art Deco rubble threatens to overwhelm the 3-metres-high walls.

To some it’s natural for buildings like 213 to come down, as Dong Khoi-centred downtown continues its march to skyscraper-dotted prosperity. But nowhere on HCMC House Trade Management Co, Ltd’s banner is there a Vincom Center or Bitexco.

 On either side of the temporary wall where 213 used to stand are old constructions. One is a former part of the demolished building — its insides now being gutted, its 213-facing side open to the elements — the other is the People’s Committee Building, a relic of the same era, but with a perfectly maintained facade, floodlit at night. Across the streets that 213 used to corner on are the twin presences of Vincom Centers A and B, threatening to overwhelm them all.

Buildings with Souls

Vincent Scully, one of the US’s leading architectural critics over the past century, wrote in a 1985 New York Times article, “Nothing shows up more definitively in a building than a lack of love, unless it is the love of money.”

He wrote this at a time when New York City was at a crossroads, in the process of leaving behind its checkered past for a more prosperous future. Scully’s worry on seeing the towers of modern New York rise was that they “look[ed] devoid of life; their surfaces are closed and dead”. They were no longer part of the city below, and upon entering one had to leave the atmosphere of the city for a closed-off, air-conditioned world.

Scully felt that an architect’s responsibility was to design “buildings that fit, in a civilized manner, into the man-made environment”. At a different crossroads in New York history, Scully was a vocal critic of the 1963 destruction of the original Beaux-Arts-styled Penn Station rail terminal — whose unconsulted demolition kick-started the modern historic preservation movement nationwide. About the transition to the modern, utilitarian Penn Station, Scully said, “One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.”

Crossroads

Saigon is at a crossroads now, similar to the one New York faced in 1963. Modern New York was built on the bones of demolished buildings — there wouldn’t be a Times Square without them.

 But modern New York was also born of the historic consciousness of its public. Three years after Penn Station fell, the National Historic Preservation Act became law. Such an integral part of New York’s fabric never fell again.

 213 Dong Khoi wasn’t the original Penn Station, but it was a building that mattered to many people, a building with 85 years of history and point-of-reference status in cultural touchstones like The Quiet American. And now it’s been excised from the modern city forever.  Tim Doling was prominently involved with raising consciousness about 213, and he thinks that its loss might not have been “completely in vain… It has received a great deal of publicity, and many concerned local people (not just expats!) now seem to be questioning the speed at which old buildings are being destroyed in Ho Chi Minh City.”

For the rest of us, there’s a new concern on the horizon. The 126-year-old former Cochinchina government secretariat at 59-61 Ly Tu Trong, directly behind 213 Dong Khoi, has been slated for “renovation”. Recessed from the street, it’s not as immediate a landmark as 213, but it has been a foundational block of the modern city for as long as it has existed. It’s one of those buildings that we won’t miss until it’s gone, until it’s only a fading photograph from old Saigon.

But there might be some hope for compromise here, the kind we’ll need for the modern city to resemble its past. Tim says, “I hear they are commissioning a new competition for designs which retain/incorporate the old building rather than destroy it.“I really hope that the powers that be will recognise the heritage value of that building and find an alter native solution to demolition.” 

Words by Ed Weinberg | Illustration by Lys Bui | Advisory by Tim Doling. www.historicvietnam.com

[from-saigon]

Bãi Sậy Street.

Near what used to be the Canal Bonard in Ho Chi Minh City’s Cholon area, the family home of a long-gone shipping magnate sits, surrounded by houses with tin roofs and modern structures, rivaling the mansion’s three storeys with their blocky presence. Through the concrete which covers damaged sections of original tile, the original craft is still evident. Contours of elegant wrought iron billow out from concrete walls, which hide the courtyard-wide fence they’d been cast to support. Chicken cages lay scattered.

The patriarch of the nine-member family residing there was named Tiet Tuc. He was part of the Chaozhou Chinese community, whose immigration the French encouraged from the 1860s, the most successful of Cholon’s final wave of settlers. Quach Dam, the builder of Cholon’s magnificent Binh Tay Market, was also from Chaozhou.

 Sunk Costs

80 or 90 years ago, according to Tuc’s granddaughter Mrs. Dinh, her grandfather’s import-export company Thuan Long sent an ill-fated shipment of beans to Hong Kong. When the ship sank, he looked to his insurance company for compensation. The owner of the insurance company was the original inhabitant of the house Tuc’s family still calls home.

It was here that Tuc set about building his legacy. In 62-year-old Dinh’s early years, it was still the only home on its canal-circumscribed block. As what would become Ho Chi Minh City developed and became more prosperous, Tuc contributed to that development — commissioning the building of An Binh Hospital and Nghe An High School. To staff them, he invited doctors and teachers from Chaozhou to work there and train local professionals in Chaozhou-style methods.

The house passed to Tuc’s fourth son, Tiet Que, who also took control of his father’s business — renaming it Soon Long, minus accents, in an effort to Anglicise it. His wife, Dinh’s mother, still lives in the house, although all of his children except for Dinh have moved overseas.

The House

Still possessing many of its original design elements, the house has two residential floors with identical floor plans — three bedrooms and a kitchen on each, one for each of the original owner’s wives. The ground floor was the workers’ quarters, which the authorities took over from 1975 to 1986, forcing the family into the upper levels. To this day, the house is split into two residential addresses.

The 800sqm structure is made of stone, in a style that has held up well over time. Stepping inside, you feel a tangible chill in the air. Although many of the structural elements have fallen into disrepair — to the point that the company in discussions to purchase it intends to tear it down — they still communicate the aura of the house, an aura that has taken inspiration from every part of the last century of its existence. 

Words by Ed Weinberg | Illustration and translation by Lys Bui | Advisory by Tim Doling. www.historicvietnam.com

[worldeddy]

Ed Weinberg spends three hours and VND800,000 in Japan’s Narita Airport, and all he gets is this crappy T-shirt

[donswaynos]

Pretty fantastic art on this book of flexis.

[worldeddy]

This girl is amazing

from

Pliketi Plok's photostream :

x

[worldeddy]

wow is it ever good to be back in saigon

[worldeddy]

REACHING AN UNDERSTANDING

It's taken me a while to figure this place out, at least in the way I can enjoy it and not be pushed into dismay by constant honking and random streetside carts full of goat legs. I've finally fallen into the hidden currents of Patan (consider it southside Kathmandu, but with a 2300-year history of its own), sometimes bored and a bit uncomfortable, but hey, that's what I signed up for.

The turning point was Wednesday, the day after I wrote my previous entry and made the decision to leave Patan and, perhaps fatefully, the first day of the chariot pull. This is an important festival here, all of Patan turning out to pull an 80-foot tall, bronze and wood and sapling-laden chariot through tiny streets and alleys, and yell "AISTE!" During the procession I met a Nepali named Bal, who invited me to his house to have coffee, then later surprised me at my guesthouse at 8 am two days later to ask pertinent info for my horoscope.

On the way back from a sunset coffee and awkward conversation on Bal's rooftop, I saw a small woman walking along in a rough horizontal, pushing a cart with 15 containers holding 10-20 liters of water each (an aside: I don't understand how women are not allowed to pull the chariot, but this kind of backbreaking work is fine). She turned out to be Dilmaya, and she was so grateful for my help (and, I suspect, my interesting presence) that she invited me for dinner the next night and hasn't stopped blowing up my phone since. I'm amazed that she does this route on her own, as it took us 15 minutes to get this cart through cracked, unlit streets, and then it was still a walk-up and two flights to her apartment.

When I came back for dinner the next night, they had invited the whole neighborhood out. Iswor, who keeps texting me with the question "How r you bro" was there, as were a steady stream of people staring in from the shared balcony. Awkwardly, I was the only one eating, and the meal I had come out for was of the take-out variety, comprised of the two greasy staples of Tibetan-Nepali fast food cuisine — dumpling-like momos, and 1950s American-Chinese food-like chow mein.

Sitting next to me, carrying his roll of canvas and poetry books under one arm, was the night's most interesting product, Asim Sagar. He showed me the two books of ghazals (lyrical poems, usually set to music) he'd already published, with another five on the way. He showed me the mountain landscapes he'd painted from postcards, having never been to see them himself. They were simplistic and beautiful, with charmingly naive details like yaks and peasants added to each one. He told me about a poetry contest he'd entered, and come in 6th out of more than a thousand.

At first I waited for the inevitable sell, but as the night progressed I changed my disposition. For some reason or other I was an attraction here, someone to impress and confide in. Most people did this by introducing their wives and cousins, showing me photographs and cell phones. But Asim's pride was in his artistic creations, and he wanted to show them to someone who understood. In some simple twist of fate, I did.

On my way back home, I stopped off at a "cold store" for a beer. People were hanging out in the courtyard accessible through the other end of the store. I drank beer and raksi, a fermented rice spirit, and partook in some weird raksi-accompaniment, tomato-soaked fish out of a can. With some of the fellas I went for a nighttime inspection of the chariot, housing maybe the same hold man who implored the crowd to "AISTE!" at other times, bathed in the light of devotional candles.

Friday was a wash, but Saturday I bartended Sattya's one-year anniversary party, which was nice, and gave me some insight into the organization that had lured me all these many miles. I made a green tea-honey-cucumber-mint punch to complement the 6 liters of raksi they'd gotten donated and it went over pretty well. Getting back into a familiar rhythm was also a nice thing, and I was pleased to see Sattya do something exceedingly well — which hadn't been my experience with the cancelled workshop I had been slated to teach.

Here's what I wrote on coming home that night:

How fucking gorgeous was tonight? It ended in getting a surprise ride home — a bigger thing than you'd imagine at 10:30 pm, the hour that everything is usually desolate and stray dogs start getting growly ideas — and getting dropped off on the edge of devotional, tea-candled Saturday night in Patan. Among these tea candles were two giant chariots, and they contained all the secrets of the world. The first thing I saw on this round was a guy clearing all the candles off a cross-bar of chariot with a sweep of his hand, and a boy trying to pull the children's chariot until I told him no, to the delight of his parents.

And that was just the afterglow. What really happened is I got involved with the thing I'd been seeking, the alternative pulse of this regimented city, and was welcomed. I got to fuck off a bit and eat free pasta, and was still appreciated. I forget how much I enjoy being a bartender.

Sunday I went to my favorite cafe here — Higher Ground, get the carrot cake — and ran into a girl I'd met at the Sattya party. We exchanged numbers and some insight struck me — right, this is how things go when they're going. We tried to meet up at the chariot pull, but I decided last minute not to be a bystander. I pulled the massive thing, along with 300 other able bodies, through a canyon of apartment buildings, one of whose sides the 15˚-bent tip of the chariot got snagged on. From a full stop we would grunt and pull at the three ropes tethered to it, then run in a mad dash for 50 feet or so over uneven streets that spat bricks into our path, trying not to get trampled. In these moments, I leaned on the rope as much as I pulled on it. I had three separate conversations of "Where are you from?... Having fun?" When I eventually broke off, after about 500 feet of this, I was blown away by the level of adrenaline I had coursing through my veins, and the feeling of accomplishment I got from having participated in such an incomprehensible and sacred thing.

Yesterday I went to the hospital for the stomach thing (diarrhea!) that is keeping me off trekking for a few more days. I had one of those utterly alien experiences that I like when I'm not feeling threatened by it, with the same people who were crowding the doctor's door that I was waiting for excitedly stepping onto a scale, treating it as more a novelty than a diagnostic tool, having their their children bend down to read its scratched-up window. I eventually got some good, compassionate advice, and a $2 booster shot of Hep B immunoglobulin (note to the savvy — getting a rare tropical inoculation like Japanese Encephalitis here instead of in the US would have saved me $500!). I went home and watched some movies.

And today, waking up after 11 hours for some guesthouse lobby french-toast-and-internet, I made a new friend. She has a remarkable English vocabulary for a 6-year-old Nepali, but she still was no help with the crossword. So I proceeded to bang my head against the wall while letting her fast-forward her way through How to Train Your Dragon, The Aristocats and Fantastic Mr. Fox. She would rewind certain sections to an extent that made me pull her hand away from the button, and a few times she counted along with the time signature. And still I was pretty amazed whenever she would laugh at something, it would pull me out of my smug little over-the-crossword watch and get me engaged. Kids are pretty magical in that way.

And then we took these funny pictures:

[worldeddy]

[worldeddy]

vietnamese shirt that woman initially wouldn't let me take take pic of because of resultant bad luck of me not buying it.... i convinced her that the pic was to send to my girlfriend to ask her opinion, i do have misgivings about that....

[worldeddy]

DECISIONS, DECISIONS (a word whose repeating only serves to delay the inevitable)

As of about an hour ago, I informed the two founders of the Sattya Media Arts Collective that I won't be teaching the course I've come to Nepal to teach. I did this after considerable soul-searching, I did it via text message (although let it be known I called before sending). I still haven't received a reply [ED: it took them 24 hours].

It was a lot of things, but mostly a matter of timing. Their timing, with a one-year anniversary party coming this weekend, a $9,000 kickstarter half-fulfilled and entering that 10-day do-or-die period, and some personnel things seemingly in flux (i.e. I was given a flyer advertising the position of the guy who brought me in to stick to bulletin boards alongside my workshop flyer). My timing, with 6 weeks left to make something transcendentally memorable of my time here, which was so far consumed by 2 great weeks with my dad, and 2 more recent boring weeks at a quiet, out-of-the-tourist-district guesthouse. The prospective students' timing also wasn't right this week, when I was originally supposed to run the workshop (was told is was exams, maybe), and might not be right in the still-TBD future, while I cooled my budget jets in this strange, early-to-sleep city with no real friends.

And still I could have gutted it through, and it might have been amazing. The workshop still gets me amped — a 5-dayer that demonstrates my quirky methods in the service of idea generation and "honing the tools of curiosity." This I thought about over another boring weekend, head held down by the kind of depression which indicates: You have a decision to make. And in the end, this city without a coalesced, active art scene (that I've seen) can't compare to a month-long trek through the Himalayas, with stops for random monasteries and burning the leeches off of my feet.

It's one of those things that isn't a perfect solution, with the only one of those existing in before-the-fact theory. This week, I've been thinking a bit about another difficult — and as it happened, disastrous — decision, made by (of course) my favorite calamity-prone basketball team, the NJ — soon to be Brooklyn — Nets.

At the start of their NBA tenure, they were faced with a difficult situation — as one of 4 teams selected to make the jump from the carnivalesque, always precariously-financed ABA, they had to come up with nearly $5 million 1977 dollars to pay the NY Knicks for metro-area territorial rights, and $3 million to pay the NBA. Their owner, Roy Boe, a vaudeville type who'd bought the team for $1.1 million in 1969, was squarely in over his head. The solution he found has been regretted by generations of Nets fans since — he sold off the team's best player, Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan, to the Philadelphia 76ers for $3 million. Julius "Dr. J" Erving, the godfather of playing above the rim, won an NBA title with Philadelphia in 1983, after two with the ABA Nets. The NBA Nets never won another.

As New Jersey's team becomes Brooklyn's, an era marked by losing, poor decisions, tragedy, bad luck and comical antics comes to an end — and many people trace this right back to the selling of Dr. J (the "curse of"?). Rightly or wrongly, Boe is the godfather of a circus — which they once had to give up their arena and forfeit a play-in game for the playoffs for the literal sort of! 

A lot of memories about the team are going around this week, but one is not — the alternate history one where they kept the game's most exciting player and had an entirely different fate. But if we're going to construct alternate histories, we have to deal with the facts of the time, the facts which led Boe to find an unconventional solution to a lose-lose situation, and enabled his team to move forward with the pieces that were left.

Just to be clear, I am not in any way equating my decision with one that led to a generation's worth of failure.

[worldeddy]

New Year's World Tour -- Eve 5, Nepal

"USA — rapists !

IMF — rapists !

International MOTHERFUCKERRSSS !!!"

-battle cry of the funky-mustached, wild-eyed drummer, before launching the band into a number that had me pogoing in a pool of sweat on a cold night, hand slapping the ceiling

The energy in the room pulsated like a West Philly basement on a good night. Children, ex-pats, French dudes in sherpa hats and a friendly, middle-aged Nepali in a fez skanked to the dutty island rhythms and aggressive sonic drones of self-described Himalayan ska punks Naya Faya (wow, who knew?). People bounced around, high on the manic energy in the room, cascading off of drums and funky vocoder licks, sloganeering ("this song is dedicated to the fucking plastic bags everywhere"), more spandex and cross-dressing and skin than you'll see on a typical stage out here. People smiled through the body heat and driving, endless grooves, shining with the feeling in the air that we were sharing a good moment on a good night. And of course it was a good night — it was new year's eve.

For me — lover of all kinds of music, recent taker-in of a string of mediocre cover band performances in the far-flung corners of the world — these guys were a revelation, as well as a fuck-you to the city powers-that-be that ensure that every night ends at 12 am. Supposedly, you could hear these kids all over Thamel.

I still haven't heard a good explanation of the police-enforced shutdown of the city at 10 pm or 12, or a defense of the trickle-down effect it has on other things, like the last minibus that leaves my nearby city for Kathmandu at 7, or my first-night guesthouse with the 8 pm curfew. It's been refreshing to wake up at 7 am everyday, feeling crisp after a night that didn't end in the early morning, and stare out my window at the nearby mountains. But these rules also serve to enforce a monoculture — one which, in the absence of a stable network of friends and family or reliable non-touristy activities to take up the endless daytime hours, pushes most travelers into the pandering jaws of touristy Thamel.

But tonight, me and my new friends took to the night with different intentions — one of which, I'd been promised, was staying out until midnight (this hadn't been the case the night before, which had ended with taxis and lame excuses at 9:15). We put enough whiskey into our bodies to ensure that we'd be useless the next morning. And we caroused, our manic energy not exactly fitting the next spots, the three noticeable tweakers bouncing off the dancefloors of urbane and sophisticated lounges.

We hit one place,  then wandered off in search of another. We got to the Attic at 11:50, and piled onto the vacant dancefloor to soak up the last bars of "Billie Jean." We didn't stop shimmying between songs, and ramped it up further when the band went into "I Wanna Dance With Somebody." After that, the lead singer went into countdown mode, and I was surprised to look down at my phone and find the world still ensconced in the old year. 11:58, not even close. When I held my phone up to the singer she just sneered, and flashed her past-12 wristwatch.

The bar stayed open a little later than usual, and by the time me and Weena — also without a close-by bed — started looking for a hotel room, everything was closed. Not just closed, but unreachable, behind locked doors, shuttered, barricaded. We met a Finnish guy in a similar situation, but with an already occupied room, and a roommate who was just then crawling over a wall to bridge the jerry-rigged obstruction mechanisms of the place and get his friend in. And us, as it turned out.

We stayed up till 3:30 talking about mostly forgettable things, then shared skinny beds with our new Finnish friends. And I finally realized the New Year's insanity that I'd being trying to tap into all around the calendars — the Jewish, Gregorian, Vietnamese and Chinese ones — but in all of the wrong places, finding it in the most unlikely of locales.

[worldeddy]

FOR MOM, A GLIMPSE

first days in nepal, spent with dad and mountains and monkeys

[worldeddy]

NEPAL, AN INTRODUCTION

I leave my friends at 7 am the night of my leaving party. I'm home in time to get 3 hours of sleep, and then some frantic packing done. Actually,maybe frantic shouldn't describe my first steps toward Nepal; perhaps it's a word better left in the land of motorbikes.

So I get on my Air Asia flight to Bangkok, a city I've never been to, and won't be going to now. Instead, I stay in the airport for the 11 hours of my layover -- bridging the time the metro closes, but barely. I make a friend on a shorter layover. We drink. He tells me about a bachelor party he's organizing where the theme is to dress up like '80s wrestlers. We laugh. Then he tells me about a girl he's going to meet in Florida, where his stepdad lives.

He met her two years ago, and not since. They sometimes email each other 4 or 5 times a day! Admittedly, he's the one who's kept it going, and he's worried that this next meeting will put too much pressure on her, especially with some of the things he's said. He tells me he's going to marry her, at least he hopes so.  Even as my attachment alarm is going off, I still feel a pang of envy for something -- anything -- so lasting.

He gets on his plane and I start looking at the fascinating people all around. I hatch a plan to photo/interview those whose stories I can't guess -- like a middle-aged Germanic looking couple with a 17-ish daughter, her identity obvious in her subtly impatient stance and lack of talking. Who isn't so obvious is the 20-something Asian girl in club clothes who comes out to the smokers' curb with them, then stands apart just long enough to make me feel their walking together was just coincidence. Then they walk back together, mother and father and daughter and Asian girl, before I can engage them. I fall asleep on a metal bench.

I wake for the flight to Delhi, the highlight of which is getting a thing of sunscreen onto the plane unchecked, making a persuasive argument to the TSA checker with a touch of my scar and some basically true words.

The Mahatma Gandhi Airport is beautiful, lushly carpeted in this weird Hindu way that you wouldn't think would jibe with a hub of duty-free consumerism. I get on another plane. This one finally takes me to my destination -- which makes me so unreasonably happy, it reminds me what travel can be like.

There are the predictable shenanigans with the taxi hustlers, and some unpredictable ones with the sim-card lady who takes my picture, my father's and grandfather's names, and my thumbprints. But then I get into the city, and things change into a shimmering, chaotic, handpainted sign wonderland. I'd forgotten how much beauty can affect me, and here is some of the strangest types I've ever seen.

I make it into Sattya, the non-profit I'll be volunteering to teach workshops for, and am greeted enthusiastically and likemindedly. The guy who I've been in touch with there, Galen, shows me around the office, the rooftop screening room, the future reclaimed garden space, the outdoor walls in the beginning stages of being covered in color. We share some words about the need to foster creativity in people, and I think it's going to work out alright.

After our meet, Galen suggests a walking route past Patan's royal square, towards a nice guesthouse. I can't stop taking pictures. All around me is this crazy life, bright clothes and crooked driving patterns and arcane temples and lots of smiles. It's alive in a way I can't explain and I'm not used to, and I think I'm going to like it.

I venture out that night to find someraksi, a local fermented rice spirit that I've been told is cheaper than the strangely expensive Nepali beer rates. I find some at a corner store, and a few new friends. I drink it there, but my hanging-out buddies decline -- supposedly the cops are a bit less circumspect about harassing locals than tourists.

The raksihas a nice effect on me as I wander among the night dogs, scampering in the shadows of decayed palaces and temples. The city shuts down at 9 or so, giving my experience a sense of intimacy. I smile at the few people passing in the street at this hour. Then I find the rooftop terrace of my guesthouse and put on a jacket for the first time in months. The wind comes off of the mountains, and I feel good to be alive.

[worldeddy]

Visit Original Link

If you want to truly know me, go to a desert island and listen to this song, endlessly, on repeat. Let's never get tired of it together.

[worldeddy]

DISTRACTION CULTURE IN THE HELLA BIOME

I had just gotten out of one of those short-term relationships whose essential transitoriness leaves it feeling more like a beautiful dream than life. It still lingered through the drive out of Ho Chi Minh City, on the front of a bike which carried aspiring dissident Asia, in pole position on a beach trip roommate Sara had devised. This trip was my attempt to splash some cold water on myself, and get back to the boring complexities of everyday life.

Distraction culture is a term Asia coined, about the political dimensions of youth culture. In describing it, he talked about the hyperactivity of youth-targeted media in his generation (he's 17), and the effect it has on an attention span — and indeed, on the steadiness of passion. We were talking about women whose lives are way more wide-open than our own, and sensual and divided in response, but we could have been talking about art blogs just as easily, or this trip, or ourselves.

On the way out, Sara sang to her iPod and weaved all over the road. We burned a straight line and tried to follow her.

We hit the kchink-chank of a metal bridge, spanning a lake, and I pointed out the different tree types shrouding each side.

"There's a lot of biomes out here," I said.

"Yeah, hella biomes!" he nodded.

We entered the nicest one we'd seen on our three hour trip, just in time for sunset. It cast a lovely tint on the South China Sea. We pitched a tent on the sand at a cost of $6 per person, drank Vietnamese whiskey and felt the cool ocean breeze. After a while we decided to get naked and swim the choppy night ocean. After another while we put our clothes back on and snuck into the backlit pool.

After Sara went to sleep, Asia and I hung out in a cabana, watching the stars. Like-mindedly, we couldn't keep our eyes from the illuminated construction site down the beach that will soon host an MGM Grand resort. We looked at it and squinted and wondered, and eventually decided to amble down the beach toward it.

We got barked at by some scary dogs for walking too close to the treeline, and got chased into the ocean. I flashed my camera at the boldest one, and that seemed to put him off.

We sloshed our way through a couple km of tide pools and weird beach debris, made to look ghostly by tricks of light. And eventually we got to a fence, housing what looked like a small city behind it.

In a place like Vietnam where resourcefulness is a national trait, it seemed unlikely that this collection of buildings would be desolate at any hour. We trod carefully, walking the perimeter before attempting anything blatantly trespassy. Closer to the 19-story main skeleton, we found the end of fence and walked in casually.

The light angles were lovely at that time of spotlit night, and the piles of bricks and worker trash and preemptive graffiti scrawls gave us a glimpse of what the concrete palace may look like fifty or eighty years down the road. We stealthed our way up the stairs, peering out on the beach from increasingly lovely angles. Ripped tarps flapped in the wind, and scaffolding framed the moon.

As we hit the rooftop hull, we paused to take a look over our surroundings, and under the two giant cranes that still towered above, and the metal girders that would eventually become rooftop. We looked over the frames of 541 luxury suites, a future fountain, the beginnings of what would become visitors' entertainment, contained risks and relaxation — a very different type of distraction culture than what we'd been talking about before. Or who knows, maybe something not so different, just evolved, and settled, and less wondrous.

We came down the stairs, exhilarated, just missing a security guard, who slept on a piece of cardboard on the opposite 4th floor landing from the one we'd come up by. His walkie-talkie crackled as we tip-toed back up the stairs to cross over the floor above. And finally, with luck and not a little anxiety, we made it down the stairs and back to no man's land, where the tide was far out. We walked back slowly by the edge of the sea, letting the tide lick our ankles, just trying to savor the moment in silence, and create a little space for it in our overtaxed heads.

[worldeddy]

THE SLOW TRAIN TO NHA TRANG

or, THE DIFFERENCE $7 MAKES AROUND HERE

I went to Nha Trang this past week, a lovely seaside town with something quite Mediterranean about it. I took the train, which I was looking forward to despite my fussy Vietnamese friend complaining about the toilet situation -- a hole in the floor that you can only use when the train's in motion, that convinced her not to go to the bathroom for the 8 hours the journey takes.

The only seat I could choose was a $6 "hard seat." I chose it. The train itself was an old colonial filled with unevenly painted park benches, set in facing pairs. My seat was occupied by an old woman, whom I considered for a moment before asking to move. I sat down and shared a laugh with my seatmates, then noticed a finger pointing in my direction.

As the first leg of the trip got on, people started to get comfortable. The girl next to me leaned against my shoulder, close as it was, offsetting the duffle she'd left on the other side of the seat. The man across disembarked at a close stop, and the woman he was sitting next to lay down across both seats, her legs against the window wall. A man in the seat behind her got up and squeezed his floormat into the pyramid formed by the back-facing seats, squeezing himself in after it. The people rolling food and drink carts slightly adjusted their paths to avoid his two peeking feet.

I was doing that thing where I pretend a bunch of people aren't too close to me -- feigning absorption in my poorly photocopied bootleg novel -- even though me and the girl beside were jockeying for better shoulder positioning, and a toddler was making runs at me across the aisle, stamping her feet on my toe-tight FiveFingers shoe.

And I occasionally smiled, but it's a tentative smile aimed at the children of strangers. But soon someone caught my eye and handed me the cut-off bottom third of a water bottle filled with tea, and the train opened to me, twenty cars of people looking at the green mountains passing and the only white person on the train.

Mothers picked their children up onto seats before my waiting lens, other young ones yelled "hello!" over armrests. And I yelled back. We were all in this together, just trying to get through an 8-hour train ride with our bums intact.

So here are some pictures.

Don't get so excited; this is tobacco, people.

On the way back, Josefine and I took the soft-seat, AC option ($13). It wasn't nearly as colorful and generous, probably because the seats were comfortable enough to sit in all the way through, without having to resort to antics. There were also a lot more Westerners with us, and just my visible identity didn't earn me smiles. I got only one picture on it, but it was a good one.