Bonobo Road

RIP Toddler Yueyue Wang, a Tiny Martyr for Chinese Freedom.

2011-10-24T12:51:00.001+11:00

Martin Bendeler, 21 October 2011
*Published on ABC The Drum Website, 24/10/11
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3596926.html

On October 13, 2011, two-year-old Wang Yueyue wandered away from her parent's market stall in Foshan, China, and was left bleeding and dying in a gutter after a truck ran over her little body twice and did not stop to help.

Nor did another truck that ran over her. Nor did 18 other pedestrians who saw her and kept on their way. Finally, after seven minutes, an impoverished scrap peddler, 58-year-old Chen Xianmei, frantically raised the alarm. Yueyue was taken to hospital and died on October 21, 2011 of systemic organ failure, after a week in a vegetative state. Chen Xianmei was hounded from her apartment by her landlord because of the media commotion.

Within 24 hours, more than four million Chinese "netizens" had viewed the CCTV footage of the incident on the Chinese equivalent of YouTube and debate raged about the implications for Chinese society. Some blamed the materialism of China's economic growth for making people selfish and insular. Some cited the fraying of the social fabric caused by the movement of 200 million people from the countryside to the city. Others pointed to the well-publicised ruling by a judge in Nanjing that a Good Samaritan was liable for the medical costs of an old lady because "only the guilty help the injured". The truck driver himself said that he did not stop because, under Chinese law, compensation for her death would be limited to RMB20,000 while an injury could cost him "hundreds of thousands".

The Chinese government propaganda machine has already begun to spin the story to dampen the impact, but as the Chinese Communist Party celebrates its 90th anniversary, and as it begins the opaque process of selecting new leadership, the death of one little girl challenges the direction it is taking China, and perhaps its very legitimacy. Because just as it congratulates itself for presiding over the past 30 years of stunning economic growth, it also is responsible for the previous 30 years of catastrophic economic and social destruction.

Before Yueyue, the most famous Chinese citizen left to die alone was China's head of state, Liu Shaoqi, in 1968. A revolutionary hero and one of Mao Zedong's closest friends and supporters, he made the mistake of working with Deng Xiaoping to implement economic reforms after Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) policy of industrialisation and agricultural collectivism led to the deaths of up to 45 million people. Historian Frank Dikotter called it "one of the most deadly mass killings in history." Liu's increasing popularity threatened Mao, who launched a new Cultural Revolution and denounced Liu as "the biggest capitalist roadster in the Party". Liu was subjected to mass criticism, house arrest and complete ostracism. An old man deprived of treatment for diabetes and pneumonia, he was found some weeks after his death covered in diarrhoea and vomit, taken away in a truck and cremated under a different name. His family wasn't told of his death for three years and the public not for another 10. He was previously one of China's most respected, admired and powerful men. Left to die alone in ignominy.

He was not the only victim of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Between 1966 and 1976, China went mad. At a time of critical economic development for most nations, particularly China's Asian neighbours, China devoted almost all its energies towards destroying everything and replacing it with loyalty to Mao and ill-conceived Mao Zedong Thought. Factories and universities closed. The most capable were sent to shovel pig manure and the most craven were given authority to destroy. Wild witch-hunts for spies and traitors spiralled downwards to mass denunciations, imprisonment, beatings, murder and even cannibalism. Neighbours were told to inform on neighbours and children to inform on parents. Traditional values and structures were discredited and their practitioners persecuted. Street battles and political assassinations were common. Children chanted "Parents may love me, but not as much as Chairman Mao". Some historians estimate up to 100 million Chinese were persecuted and up 20 million died, including Liu Shaoqi. A generation grew up illiterate, brutalised and brainwashed.

For almost 4,000 years, China's feudal social structure centred on the multi-generational family compound as a bulwark against a hostile world that sought to tax, conscript or plunder it. Family, clan and, to a lesser extent, village were the main support structures. This precariousness led to the reverence for a Confucianism that highlighted family and preached virtuous rule, as well as to an extreme insularity and conservatism. The feudal system did very little for the development of the masses and even traditional communism, as espoused by Marx, considered peasants to be unsuited to revolution. Mao's genius was to mobilise the peasants to defeat his Japanese and Nationalist enemies, promising justice, liberation and welfare.

His institution of land reform and an "Iron Rice Bowl" cradle-to-grave security net was a welcome yet unprecedented intrusion behind the compound walls. Deeply risk-averse peasants even melted down their tools of millennia - hoes, shovels, ploughs - for industrial pig iron, trusting that the Communist Party would deliver abundant food from communal kitchens. The resultant famine killed 40 million people, compared to 55 million killed in World War II. The next 20 years were a systematic and continual assault on nearly everything that bound society together, all the way down to the basic family unit, with the added stab of being told at the end it was all a long mistake.

China suffered immensely from Mao's folly but this was the logical extension of a political system that inherently combines false infallibility with actual impunity. As the Chinese Communist Party has no effective formal institutional mechanism for change, one billion people had no choice but to endure the madness until Mao's death in 1976. His immediate successor, Hua Guofeng, sought to continue Mao's policies, but the country was almost bankrupt, the population shattered and exhausted, and the army elevated Deng Xiaoping to the leadership in 1978 with his commitment to pragmatic economic reform.

As the Chinese have shown wherever they congregate, given a modicum of security and liberty, they will study, work and invest with phenomenal results. There is, in fact, a direct correlation between the amount of freedom they enjoy and their economic productivity. So the past 30 years of 10 per cent GDP growth, starting from an abysmal and self-inflicted low base, shouldn't be too surprising. It is largely a credit to the Chinese people, not particularly to intelligent government policies. Nor, however, should it be surprising to, today, find the psychological and social legacy of decades of chaos.

The Chinese people have been forced by almost 60 years of communist rule into survival mode, trusting only themselves and their chosen circle. They have re-erected their metaphoric family compound walls against an arbitrary state and a ferociously competitive economy. With minimal security and trust, there is minimal capacity to take a leap of altruism. Without meaningful representation in society, minimal responsibility can be taken for it. It is unfortunate that in southern China, where Yueyue lived, a common curse is to wish someone to "puk gaai", which means, literally, "fall in the street", but with the broader implication of dying alone, in the gutter, like a dog, unloved, without friends or family. Like poor little Yueyue. Martyr for freedom. RIP.

Martin Bendeler is a former adviser on Asian foreign policy at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and currently a consultant on trade, aid and security policy with Eroza.com.

Libya- Please stop shooting, it scares the children

2011-08-26T11:09:00.000+10:00

Billboard in Benghazi- Please stop shooting, it scares the children.

Street by street, house by house. Zenga, Zenga, said Gaddafi in Arabic. These were the words the world used to justify its intervention in Gaddafi’s siege of Benghazi. Six months later I read the same words in reports of rebel forces, spearheaded by NATO air power and Special Forces, “clearing pockets of pro-Gaddafi resistance” in Tripoli, a densely-packed city of nearly two million people. Reports of corpses from both sides by the dozen in the streets, hands-tied, skulls-bulleted. Of teenage boys and young men wildly firing machine guns, 50mm cannons, and rocket-propelled grenades guns in suburban streets. Where do those bullets go? I lived in this city once and have friends there. Every bullet and bomb makes me wince. Hundreds dead and thousands wounded. Hospitals and morgues overflowing. Now the cameras move to Gaddafi’s birthplace of Sirte, midway between Tripoli and Benghazi, as the rebels lay siege there.

There is little questioning of this and much of the reverse- the reporting has either the testosterone stink of a football victory or the clinical resignation of a welcome foregone conclusion.

I would like to celebrate Gaddafi’s departure. Libya and the world would be better off without him. But he’s had months and billions of dollars to prepare for this point and my guts twist at the thought of what further resistance he has up his sleeve. Chemical weapons? Terrorist cells? Inshallah, let there be peace. Does it really have to be this way? Is this the only way to get rid of Gaddafi?

I don’t know. But NATO never coherently explained how their mandate to defend the population extended to bringing down Gaddafi, and by force rather than a negotiated settlement. They never acknowledged the risk to civilians this policy might entail or why they thought it was worth it. Would these European and American politicians and generals countenance such a risk to their own cities and civilians? Would they be so adamant about not negotiating if it was their own land they were bombing?

It is possible that there was no room for compromise. A Tunisian activist friend told me of hearing cars honking in the streets in seeming celebration of President Ben Ali’s announcement of large concessions and a scheduled transition of power. He briefly questioned his opposition- isn’t compromise reasonable? It seemed popular…but then he noticed that the honking cars all had rental number plates. Ben Ali’s last roll of the dice. My friend realised if the protests paused, Ben Ali’s forces would go through Facebook and round up him and all his mates. It was a fight to the end. Perhaps this was the case in Libya. But it looked more to me like NATO thought Gaddafi’s removal would be so quick and popular that nobody would question its mandate or cost. NATO seems unwilling to lose face by either admitting they were wrong or by offering Gaddafi a face-saving exit. History and the Libyan people will be the final judge, but let us pray for peace. Shooting scares, and kills, the children.

Martin Bendeler is a former Advisor on foreign affairs in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and currently a consultant on trade, development and the environment.

Bonobos on the French High School curriculum, annoying American religious conservatives. Viva La France!

2011-05-27T13:12:00.001+10:00

"Students will be expected to explain that the procreative act has evolved from a hormone-based instinct as seen in rats or sheep to a recreational and culturally enhanced activity as observed among primates. Mating Bonobo apes (or pygmy chimpanzees as they were previously called) are shown to act much like humans: they have relations for fun and for bonding and homosexual acts are frequent, read the textbooks. Human sexuality is portrayed as a variant on this theme: a little more complex, possibly inhibited, but no more than an animal behavior."

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/confusing-teens-about-their-gender-the-radical-new-french-high-school-curri/

Exactament. Brilliant!

Gaddafi’s guards steal from African refugees as they flee Libya

2011-04-21T18:21:00.003+10:00

Gaddafi’s guards steal from African refugees as they flee Libya

“Look at me, man!” complains Kenneth Ansu, 29, from Ghana. “You think I like wearing two hats for fun? Three jeans at once? All I could keep was what I could wear. They took everything!” He stands to show me his layers of clothing, including a heavy jacket, blue sweater with nonsense English and three T-shirts. He is in Djerba-Zarzis International Airport in Tunisia, with at least 300 of his countrymen, all young men, all with nothing but uncomfortable and unflattering fashion.

They are part of more than half a million people who have fled the conflict in Libya.

As he headed to the Tunisian-Libyan border, Kenneth was stopped by government soldiers at a checkpoint and ordered to put his bags aside. They strip-searched him and found the meagre savings of $1500 he’d hidden in his shoe. Everything was stolen, except for his clothes, which were thrown back at him. Mobile phones and memory cards were prime targets, as if their confiscation could delete the violence Kenneth was escaping.

But it’s not this treatment or his appearance that humiliates Kenneth the most. It’s the prospect of being shortly flown home to Ghana with absolutely nothing to show for his toil, travels and trouble in Libya. His family are worried and will be happy to see him, “But,” he says, “when my mother sees my pockets are empty, she’ll tell me to go back to Libya and find the nearest moving bullet.”

Kenneth came to Libya three years ago. After the West turned its back on Gaddafi for his sponsorship of terrorism in the 1990s, he adopted a pro-Africa policy and opened his borders. With the ninth largest oil reserves, Libya became a magnet for millions of sub-Saharan Africans in poverty. By 2010 Libya’s official population of six million included one million foreigners, and another million there illegally, including Kenneth.

In his home town of Kumasi, Kenneth was making $50 a month as a driver. Barely enough to live on, let alone save. A friend lent him $500 to cross the Sahara to Libya, a journey of more than 3000 kilometres. He made his own way to Agadez in Niger, an ancient desert crossroads so remote it is often called the beginning of the end of the world. There, people-smugglers put him in a truck with 200 other hopefuls for the long stretch to the Libyan border.

Breakdowns left him in the sun for days and people simply died around him. In the Hoggar Mountains, by the Algerian-Libyan border, he is sure the driver led them directly into an ambush by Tuareg bandits. With no money for bribes, Kenneth’s friend, Calvin Owusu, 23, was detained by soldiers at the border and forced to work without payment for three weeks until Kenneth was able to send some money back to free him.

“Working without payment” — a nice way of saying “slavery” — is a common theme among the sub-Saharan Africans who made it to Libya. In Tripoli, Kenneth found infrequent work as a plasterer. Gaddafi provided subsidised concrete and building materials to households and construction and renovation became a national sport.

“I thought in Libya, my feet would never touch dirt, only tiles and pavement,” Kenneth says. “I thought the people would be white and that white people were kind. Ha ha ha! What a fool.” He was theoretically paid 1.5 Libyan dinars per hour working inside and 1.75 outside (either way, about $US1.20). The days started at 6am, and while Libyan workers would take shelter during the midday heat, the Africans were expected to keep labouring. But often he would not get paid.

Bakary Coloubi, a diplomat from Mali, told me that many of his citizens were in Libyan jails because employers would make false charges of theft, rather than pay rightful salaries. Or the charges would be true because the employee was trying to take what he was owed.

A Libyan friend once mentioned that he remembers, as a boy, seeing a slave market in Tripoli and that it is still common in Libya to refer to black people as “abid”, meaning “slave” or “servant”. Some legacy of this attitude seems to remain, even, or especially, among the higher up. The day before, Kenneth saw a television report in the airport café showing a Gaddafi press conference. “There was a guy in his entourage and I pointed and shouted ‘He owes me 2500 dinars’. Libyans are bad people. They don’t respect humanity. They let their children throw stones at you and say nothing. They beat you in the market with impunity. They cover their noses when you get on the bus.”

Despite all this, he hoped to stay in Libya, save his money and return home to help his family. But Gaddafi took away even that.

I’ve bought Kenneth a beer in the airport café. Nearby, a middle-aged Belgian s-x tourist weeps into her serviette while her temporary Tunisian boyfriend blankly smokes a cigarette. A plane-load of jolly European sun seekers stream through the arrivals gate. And an endless queue of similarly destitute and unfashionable Africans — Ghanaians, Sudanese, Senegalese — wait for baguettes and sandwiches from the tireless Tunisian Red Crescent kitchen.

According to the UNHCR, 5000 more refugees are in the Choucha camp down the road (though as a consolation, they have Angelina Jolie listening to their sad stories, rather than me) and more than 2000 more arrive every day. Already the poorest of the poor, abused in the street by children, working like slaves, now robbed of everything by the Gaddafi regime.

“With the strength of God, I will struggle to find a way to Europe. Perhaps save a deposit for a visa and then overstay. But never Libya or the desert,” swears Kenneth Ansu.

*Martin Bendeler is a former adviser to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on environmental and international policy. He currently consults on trade, security, development and conservation and is managing director of primate conservation charity, Bonobo Conservation Initiative Australia. He was in Tunisia researching the impact of the Jasmine Revolution on transnational crime for Statt Consulting. His blog is Bonobo Road.

(as printed in crikey.com.au- http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/04/21/gaddafis-guards-steal-from-african-refugees-as-they-flee-libya/)

Still, No One Writes to the Colonel

2011-03-01T05:52:00.003+11:00

Still, No One Writes to the Colonel

Martin Bendeler, 28/02/11

The international knives are out for Muammar Gaddafi. Asset freezes, travel bans, revoking of diplomatic immunity already. Maybe soon arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court, no-fly zones and military intervention. Not long ago, Gaddafi was being feted and seduced by the free and fair who are now damning him. How things change. Gaddafi is probably wondering why it is taking so long for negotiations to commence.

Dictators, either local or foreign, were once the norm. In 1878, 70% of the world’s surface was formally and firmly controlled by five colonial powers. The messy and ungracious end of colonialism gave many nations a supposedly inviolable sovereignty to go along with impoverished economies and skewed borders. This sovereignty and the vogue for centrally-planned economies proved too powerful a temptation for many leaders (even those with the best original intentions), who plundered their people with impunity as new dictators. Absolute sovereignty corrupts absolutely. Independent nations with enslaved people. In the Cold War, many dictators played the USSR and America off against each other to the extent that one President expressed his tolerance thus, “He’s a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch” (does this metaphor not make him the bitch?). Those that didn’t were soon replaced by those that did. This sad game came to an end with the fall of the Berlin War, when once-favoured bulwarks against communism became nasty embarrassments to all concerned. Within a decade, dictatorships across Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa had been replaced by democracies of varying competency.

In the Middle East, some dictators staved off the winds of history by claiming to be indispensable in safeguarding oil supplies and the war-on-terror, while offering cosmetic concessions to democratisation. As the remarkable Jasmine Revolution spreads, these regimes could no longer withstand the assault of suicide protests, satellite TV and Facebook with armies unwilling to shoot breasts bared to bullets on television. In African countries such as Zimbabwe and Kenya, entrenched leaders clung on by threatening (and delivering) massive violence if they were not included in awkward “power-sharing” arrangements. This would appear to be the aspiration of election-loser Laurent Gbagbo in the scandalously under-reported Ivory Coast conflict. It allows some protection of assets, a transitioned exit and a hand in negotiating a favourable future political framework. Messy in ink and principle, but not as much in blood.

I would wager this is Gaddafi’s envisaged outcome. And he might get it. The rapid fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, with minimal bloodshed and no negotiation has many in the world impatiently looking for the same thing in Libya. They see the fall of towns and capture of territory by protesters as proving that the rest will inevitably follow, despite Tripoli and the oil fields being the only things worth holding in a dictator’s pinch. They see the defection of two planes as if the Air Force had no more planes left. They see neglected Benghazi as Libya in microcosm. They see no reason for negotiation. They mock Gaddafi and Sons claims that they haven’t begun to use force, that they are open to extensive concessions, that all are armed and they do not resile from a civil war, that slaughter maintained China’s unity in Tiananmen, as the blustering delusional ravings of dead men walking.

But you don’t become the world’s longest-serving leader by being completely mad or delusional. He has a long history of proudly and stubbornly asserting himself, even at great cost, and then making his concessions seem magnanimous. He financed terror and revolution around the world and endured US bombings (that killed his adopted daughter) and years of embargoes before finally normalizing relations. He effectively abolished private property and business before reinstating it after the economy collapsed. He recently withheld all EU visas (endangering international projects worth billions) rather than back down in a dispute with Switzerland.

I hope Gaddafi’s tank is empty. I hope mercenaries, militias and defective pilots are all he’s got. That his bluff will be called and he will leave quickly and quietly. I fear not (and a review of the receipt books of the West’s arms merchants would give a clearer picture of his armoury). I fear he will have the ways and means to escalate this until the Libyan people are sick of the blood enough to let him negotiate an honourable exit. Who knows? Already Al Jazeera is reporting that Gaddafi has sent his foreign intelligence chief, Abu Zaid Dorda, to Benghazi to negotiate with the opposition. There is no playbook for these circumstances, but we must be careful not to get too intoxicated by the scent of raining jasmine.

Libya- No One Writes to the Colonel

2011-02-23T08:14:00.000+11:00

Martin Bendeler, 22/12/11

Libya’s West and East is divided by the Gulf of Sirte and a long stretch of sparsely populated desert. Tripoli on one side and Benghazi on the other, 1000kms away as the camel walks. This gulf is where Field Marshall Rommel ran out of gas, ironically not far from the largest oil reserves in Africa. Colonel Maummar Gadaffi was born in this gulf, in the town of Sirt. He and the oil have been at the center of Libya for the past 40 years. I fear separating him from the oil will rip the country asunder. I hope, as in the rest of the Maghreb and the Middle East, that the soldiers’ guns will be corked by jasmine blossom. I don’t know what to expect. We must prepare for the worst.

When tiny Tunisia’s dictatorship fell, I knew it would impact Libya more than most places. Tunisia has long been Libya’s escape valve. The border is only a few hours drive from Tripoli. During the embargo years, it supplied a lifeline of goods and now its where moderately privileged Libyans go for sin, shopping and hospitals. The fall of neighbouring Egypt, the Arab world’s cultural, political and economic epicenter, must have registered an even deeper seismic shock. It’s easier to get away with beating your wife when the nextdoors are also beating theirs. There is a small and shrinking club of rulers who rule by the club and they need a critical mass to give the illusion to each other, if not the rest of the world, that their preposterous and self-serving justifications (e.g. Asian values, cultural relativity, socialism with Chinese characteristics, indispensible stability, anti-terrorist bulwarks, etc) have any merit even worth discussing. Each one’s fall rips away ever larger strips of the thin veil over the naked thuggery of power that will not listen. None more so than Mubarak, whose fall after 30 years should be the writing on the wall for Gadaffi and his mandate.

When Gadaffi took power as a 26 year old officer in an early morning coup in 1969, the head of the army rolled over in bed muttering, “Impossible. The coup is happening next week.” He deposed reluctant King Idris, a religious leader from the East who had agreed to lead a Libya that was only loosely united under UN mandate in 1951. Prior to that, Libya existed as three separate regions (Tripolitania in the West, Fezzan in the South West desert, and Cyrenaica in the East), impoverished by brutal Italian colonialism and abused as a WW2 battleground. Its main exports were esparto grass (used in paper making) and scrap metal from war wrecks. Oil was found in 1959 and by the time of Gadaffi’s coup in1969, Libya was producing more than Saudi Arabia.

Like a Saudi King, Gadaffi could have sat in his tent and creamed off his oil, living a life of indolence. Instead, he brought his youthful audacity into a world still reeling from ideology gone mad (Nazism, fascism, racism, anti-semitism, communism, realpolitik, nationalism, Zionism etc ), from colonialism’s collapse and the Cold War’s dirty fight for the spoils. Inspired by Egypt’s Sadat, he tried to unite the Arab World. They rejected him as a juvenile buffoon. With sincere revolutionary fervor, he financed uprisings and terrorism. It made Libya an international pariah. Despairing of revolution and the Arabs, he spent billions trying to unite Africa. The Africans took his money, gave him a pretty stick and called him “Chief of Chiefs and King of Kings”. And remained profoundly united in their division. If Bob Marley couldn’t do it…

At home, the Leader and Guide of the Revolution let his country in on a secret- he had personally figured out the Solution to the Problem of Democracy (what a vexing problem that was) and the Solution of the Problem of Economics (even worse!) and written it down in a little Green Book. Instead of messy parties and Presidents, all power would be held by committees, formed at the lowest levels and voting directly for representatives higher up. It was turtles all the way down and Gadaffi, effectively, all the way up. Instead of exploitative markets, all property (except for Gadaffi’s) was communal. Wages was slavery. Property and businesses were taken over by workers and the State and ran into the ground (with many of the previous owners run out of the country). And he never won the hearts of the East, putting down frequent rebellions, ordering prison massacres, neglecting medical facilities such that 450 children were infected by HIV-tainted blood. Despite a small population and Africa’s largest oil reserves, by 1999 the Great Leader had led his people down a cul-de-sac of isolation, stagnation and unemployment.

He never lost faith in himself or his leadership, however, and had little patience with those who did. He plastered his increasingly plastic face on ubiquitous billboards in a pious country when even the Prophet specifically abjured a personality cult. He publically executed students and teachers, hanging them in sports halls and public squares and sometimes personally presiding, as if delivering a lecture. Dissidents abroad were called “stray dogs” and hunted down. Thousands disappeared.

From 1999, he tried to normalize his country, spilling the beans on his nuclear program, sacrificing terrorism and paying compensation to his victims in exchange to the lifting of trade sanctions. But as long as he is at the top, Libya will always be very far from normal.

I’ve been to Libya a few times in recent years, mostly for business in Tripoli. My first piece of advice was, “it may seem that everybody is nice and everything is chaotic and no one cares what you do, but one day a man will appear and ask you questions that show he knows everything you’ve done. Keep that in mind.” The second piece of advice was, “Don’t drive.” Libya is booming, with the IMF estimating it grew at 10% last year, faster than China. Its oil is cheaply extracted, easily refined and lies conveniently next to a thirsty Europe. While I was there, Libya warmly welcomed Condeleeza Rice, Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi, while Dimitri Medvedev arrived and offered to buy all of Libya’s oil. The West loved Gadaffi so much, it allowed him to systematically humiliate Switzerland in reprisal for it arresting his son for beating his servants.

The oil sector was a world unto itself, far removed from the average Libyan- separate laws, separate management, tightly regulated access and players. Gadaffi and Co got first bite at that cherry. A rickety social welfare system sporadically provided subsidized and poor quality education and health to the masses, along with building supplies, minimal taxes and cheap power, gas and water. Every year, Gadaffi would appear in front of the General Committee and curse it for corruption and incompetence and promise to deliver oil dividends directly to households. Every year nothing of the sort happened. The real patronage system consisted of the recycling of leftover oil money into construction projects- roads, hospitals, universities, infrastructure etc. More than $100bn was officially pegged to bring Libya into the 20^th century, if not the 21^st. Great, greasy slabs of it went to lucky and chosen Libyans in the form of kickbacks, bribes, commissions and handling fees, with foreign companies clamouring to do most of the work. It reached its apogee for me when the guy I was buying a pizza from pulled out a pamphlet from an international construction company, claiming he was acting as an intermediary with a Gadaffi son, Saadi, with whom he used to play football (Gadaffi bought 7.5% of Italian football team Juventus for $21m, which got Saadi a place on the team but not off the bench). He said he’d help me get contracts for Australian construction companies. The pizza guy. Meanwhile, the starting salary for an engineering graduate, if he could get a job, was $300. He drove a taxi. The engineer.

Of course, discussing succession was the second favourite pastime of urban Libyans (the first being concrete-led home renovation). London-educated Saif Al-Islam was seen as the Western favourite, once telling Time he’d like to see Libya with the same level of freedom as Holland, “now, not in 15 years”. Yet he wasn’t even able to stop his brother, Motassim, the head of National Security and the national telecommunications company, from blocking Youtube let alone deliver democracy. I was also told that the elite would not accept a dynastic succession, that this Gadaffi would be the last. The reasoning was that Libya is a small place, the people who matter are all related, and that Gadaffi rules with a mix of force and consent that he cannot push too far or hard. I put this notion to a senior UK diplomat who said he didn’t see Gadaffi Snr moving on anytime soon or encountering any resistance when he did. Everyone seemed to accept the surrealism of Gadaffi’s fantastical land as normal.

(Motassim Gadaffi with Hillary Clinton)

Including Gadaffi.

He believes his own shtick, despite the bursting of the bubbles in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt. He has little incentive to resign, little reason to exercise restraint, especially with the East, everything to lose and nowhere to go.

I am very, very scared. The floral blitzkrieg of the Jasmine Revolution has given many the idea that relatively peaceful regime change is an immediate historical inevitability. The international media (including Al Jazeera, who everyone hates, proving they must be doing something right) is breathless and impatient for it. But there is nothing inevitable about it, especially the peaceful bit, in Libya.

With oil as the prize, there is already a level of viciousness on both sides that was not seen in Tunisia or Egypt. Protesters are executing suspected mercenaries, trying to seize oil wells, taking hostages. The government is deploying snipers, helicopters and fighter jets. How do they deescalate?

This could go the way of Tunisia and Egypt. Or it could go the way of Teheran and Tiananmen. Or a more likely and sorrowful path would be closer to home- neighbouring Algeria, where more than 160,000 died in a decade-long darkness of the soul.

The response so far from father and son has been to offer massive concessions and massive violence. Elsewhere, this has been the death cry of the tyrant, as the armies refuse to drench their hands in the blood of their fellow citizens. Who can say this will happen in Libya? Will the army fight itself as well as its people? The abyss is before us.

I think the international community should make it known that sanctions, military intervention, no-fly zones and safe havens are on the table. Consider parking a few warships in the Gulf of Sirte. It should prepare for a massive exodus of refugees and asylum seekers. It should facilitate talks between parties, potentially aimed at a face-saving power-sharing transitional arrangement.

I love Libya and the Libyans. I worry desperately for my friends who I cannot call, skype, text or email. They deserve much better than Gadaffi and infinitely better than a war of door-to-door machetes and air-to-surface missiles.

The Jasmine Revolution Blooms

2011-01-20T21:47:00.014+11:00

The buds of the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution sprouted in the ashes of 26 year old Mohammed Bouazizi, who incinerated himself in, literally, the ultimate protest at the corruption of a state that wouldn’t even let him sell fruit to make ends meet. It was watered with the blood of more than 50 more, killed by police in the streets until their consciences would let them kill no more. The delicate jasmine is Tunisia’s national flower and we must wait to see whether its bloom will hold, or wither and die, choked by tenacious weeds. But its roots are deep.

I’ve been to Tunisia. And neighbouring Libya and Algeria. I’ve seen many, many men like Mr Bouazizi – educated, strong, capable, proud- lingering in groups at street corners and cafes or alone in internet kiosks (their sisters lives are also stunted, but behind closed doors). An engineering graduate in Tripoli told me he drove a taxi because even if he was lucky or connected enough to get a graduate position, it would still only pay him $300 a month. Driving a taxi makes him $600. But it is still nowhere near enough to pay for the house he must buy before he can hope to take a bride and start a family. At current oil prices, each Libyan would receive around $500,000 if the country’s estimated reserves were sold and shared equally. He shares the road with BMWs, Mercedes and Ferraris, driven by the fortunate and flashy few. The smarter elite drive more modestly and stash their wealth abroad.

There are many like him across the region, but they are not the first would-be revolutionaries. They are the children of an earlier revolution. Their fathers were Sadat, Gadaffi, Kohmeini, Bourguiba- men who, in the 1970s, promised national liberation and prosperity but delivered stagnation, dictatorship and the pettiest and grandest corruption. And staggering levels of fertility. Egypt’s population has doubled since Hosni Mubarak took power in 1981, to 80 million, with an average age of 24. This generation is now old enough to want and demand a better future.

The Arab world is separated from the West by language, culture and religion but tied tightly to it by brutal colonial histories and modern networks of oil, war-on-terror and migration. This frayed and toxic relationship fed a constant stream of conspiracy theories, made potent by their mix of truth and colourful fantasy, to explain national woes. National governments fostered this through state-media propaganda, assaulting their people with brutal waves of boredom, censorship and repression.

“Information wants to be free” is the geek battle cry, but in the Middle East it has become cheap enough, if not free, for those who have little else. They pray towards Mecca but their satellite dishes point from every balcony in every tawdry, towering apartment block at the optimal point in the sky from which the world pours in- throbbing MTV, evangelising Nigerians, hardcore Ukranian porn, Turkish soap operas, shopping channels, Saudi Wahabbi-ists, teen vampire pap, CNN, BBC. Especially Al Jazeera. Everything. In internet cafes, homes and on phones, young people have the entire cacophony and cornucopia of human knowledge and gossip at their fingertips- Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, email, texts. They are connected to the world and each other in ways their parents have no conception of. And then they walk out into their dusty and potholed streets, so many unemployed, and see the paucity of their own reality. The lies in their newspapers. The untouchably distant wealth, power and impunity of a tiny elite.

A Tunisian friend told me a few years ago that the Arab people did not need the West to bring it democracy and freedom at the barrel of a gun, as in Iraq or Afghanistan. If they desired it strongly enough, they would rise up, move forward and fall down til the soldiers ran out of bullets, or tears, or both. He mentioned the Iranian Revolution of 1978, though not strictly Arab, where thousands of protesters were killed as millions advanced upon the Shah’s Palace. My Tunisian friend emailed me recently to confirm that he and his family were safe and that no one had predicted the Jasmine Revolution. But he had, including the means. Mohammed Bouazizi’s tragic and eloquent sacrifice was a scream to his countrymen that there comes a time when the patently unreasonable and unjust becomes patently untenable.

Tunisia has often been seen as the gentle face of Arab despotism. The satirical newspaper TheOnion caustically described it in their mock atlas as “a Muslim woman’s dream hell, where women have the right to vote…for whoever their spouse tells them to”. It was a country the Western world could do business with…and support. In 2003, Colin Powell said, “We are great admirers of Tunisia and the progress that has been achieved under President Ben Ali's leadership." France kindly offered riot troops after 21 protesters were killed in the early days of the uprising.

Tunisia was relatively secular. Relatively open. Relatively functional. Relatively free. Relative to the rest of the Middle East. It was the last place where a revolution was expected. But what regime can guard against the immeasurable poignancy and sincerity of a suicide protester when it can no longer delete him from history?

Dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali meets his undoer, martyr Mohammed Bouazizi

The club of despots is very small and shrinking. The loss of one is a deep blow to all. Long and beautiful may the jasmine bloom. RIP Mohammed Bouazizi.

"How can you enslave people, when their mothers bore them as free men?"

- Umar bal-Khattab, Second Caliph.

Denmark- You're too....blonde! (and green). COP15 Follies.

2009-12-21T09:54:00.003+11:00

I must admit that I haven't followed the global warming debate closely enough. Working out how to save the bonobo species (and myself) has kept me busy enough and I haven’t formed an educated opinion on whether or not I should be saving the human species as well. But I'm all for anything that tries to make rainforests worth more standing up than cut down and so it is that I am in Copenhagen during the Climate Change Conference (COP15) to attend the REDD+ Gala (pronounced “Gay-la”, by our fabulous American cousins), where the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI) received an award from the Coalition of Rainforest Nations for its role in establishing the Sankuru Nature Reserve (bigger than Belgium) in Congo (DRC). Speakers included the heads of nations (PNG, Gabon, Domnican Republic), of international conservation organisations (UNEP, WWF), Jane Goodall and Vivienne Westwood. Awesome night.

COP15 was an apt name, as the police seemed more active than the politicians. Helicopters hovered in place and filled the chill air with an annoying whine (as if the city didn't have enough annoying whining to begin with). Tear gas, truncheons and digital cameras were deployed. Groups of five or more with covered faces (not so uncommon in the freezing weather…and tear gas) could be detained for 6 hours. But methinks the protesters doth protest too much. I met some who seemed disappointed that they only got teargassed just a little bit, yet that was thrilling enough and made for great excited conversation in the uber-cool, cosy, candle-lit cafes and bars afterwards (full of uber-cool students that can only afford the $15 gluhweins because they get a monthly fortune in government student support. As a Dane told me, "it all balances out.")

In fact, their genetically superior sense of interior design, their bicycles and their giant women reminded me of my beloved Amsterdam. Copenhagen airport, with its mellow light and soft timber, was like a cross between a ski chalet and a mall. Couples cuddled and smooched on the train into the city, dispelling any doubt that I was back in the West. Little children rugged up in rollypolly snow-gear like astronauts, babbling Viking talk with runic subtitles, like magic spells.

New York gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello gave a free concert in the snow and sleet of the city square, while a giant faux globe twirled nearby. The only thing stopping my feet from moving to the manic music was the numbing frost, leeching through my shoes. In the midst of the madness, one girl was knitting. She proudly showed her handiwork- a black woolen willy warmer for her boyfriend. I opined that you couldn't ask for a better, more considerate girlfriend while someone else rebutted that she was merely outsourcing her girlfriendly winter duties.

The men, even the many gay ones, still look perfectly capable of piling into a longboat at a moment's notice and pillaging the pasty Brits again, while the giant women, with their pointy, pert, upturned noses, look like they could equally join them wreaking havoc and then serve the boar and beer when they got home.

I love Denmark. Land of Soren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, and Niels Bohr, smasher of atoms (though on the 500 kroner note (which might buy you a pack of chewing gum), he is just smoking a pipe), Michael Learns to Rock, and Aqua (on the 50 kroner note).

And of course the politicians did not save the world.

Movie Binge- Where the Wild Things Are, Christmas Carol in 3D, The Men who Stare at Goats, Avatar

2009-12-21T07:46:00.004+11:00

Movie Binge- Where the Wild Things Are, Christmas Carol in 3D, The Men who Stare at Goats, Avatar - Review

I love movies. Spending the last few months in Africa often felt like being trapped in one, but I sorely missed my celluloid fix (and refused to watch downloaded movies on my laptop, after seeing the scene in Tropic Thunder where Ben Stiller is stranded in the jungle, comforted by Star Trek on his i-pod). So when I found myself in Phoenix, Arizona, recently with some time to kill, I settled in to a multiplex for a movie binge.

First up-

Where the Wild Things Are

Oh how I’ve been looking forward to this film! Just the name takes me back to my favourite blanky, Spiderman PJ’s and mother’s lullabies. Add Spike Jonez direction (Being John Malkovic, Adaptations, Human Nature (producer) (under-rated- starring Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette (who I’ve had a crush on since True Romance) and Rhys Iffans as a human raised by bonobos) and one of my all-time favourite video clips), Victorian coastline and Arcade Fire in the trailer . So cool, Obama reads it to children in the Rose Garden. Fark!

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him “Wild Thing!” and Max said, “I’ll eat you up!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.” If a book is judged not by its cover but by its opening sentence, then WTWTA has one of the best of all time. The movie is faithful to these beginnings and follows Max’s voyage to the land of monsters, where he is made king.

Like childhood itself, it is a glorious kinetic, synaesthetic tumble of action, colour, light, sound and emotion. Computer magic is married with undeniable physical creativity (like a primary school art class on steroids a la oft-collaborator Michael Gondry) to make an utterly believable and compelling parallel universe. Kids will ride this wave to the shore, taking what they can, letting what they can’t go by. Adults might get dumped a little, hit by flotsam, bounced facefirst along the sandy ocean floor, surface for air only to find another wave coming right at their face, surface again, spluttering salt, but dazzled by the shore, the sea, the sky.

Filmed in the clear winter light of the post-bushfire forests of Victoria, Australia, where the trunks of black ash are occasionally broken by the bright sprouts of new life and the southern waves detonate against the cliffs, Max’s new land is suitably alien and new. As the king of the monsters, he is the center of the world, he does what he wants, and he gives the orders. Be careful what you wish for.

Tolstoy said, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Max finds that his new family is unhappy (put the monsters in tweed and corduroy and they could pass for neurotic Woody Allen denizens of Upper Eastside and the Hamptons) and it’s his job as king to make them not so. He quickly and painfully learns that responsibility and power do not look quite as good in real life (albeit with monsters) as it does on the box. It’s not all dirt fights and dune rolling. Adults are just children with better powers of sarcasm and passive aggression. In the end, he sails his little boat back to the relative safe harbour of childhood and his mother’s arms.

I don’t think Tolstoy was altogether correct. My generation is not known for happy families and probably often for shared reasons. It was not until I reached the age my parents were when they had me that I was finally able to see them as something other than the loving, yet fickle, gods of my life- omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient providers of life and law. Putting myself in their position, imagining myself with children of my own, and knowing how inherently flawed and insecure and ignorant I am, I finally saw them as like me- fallible, finite, selfish and self-centred, trying to make a meaningful life where instructions aren’t included- but making the best of the awesome responsibility and challenge of being a parent. Human. Everybody hurts. I love them even more now and forgive them their f*ck-ups, as I hope my future children will forgive me mine.

Adults (genuine and, like me, pretend) can see and feel this dynamic play out in Where The Wild Things Are, in all its art, beauty and poignancy. It is a needed beautiful, sad song to the childhood and broken families of my generation.

"Let the wild rumpus start!"

p.s. It made me want a dog.

p.p.s. It reminded me of the first time I met bonobos- playing with little orphans in a sanctuary in Kinshasa. Bonobos are sometimes caricatured as peaceful, loving, hippy creatures but I found these supposed angels were competing for cuddles and attention, hitting and slapping each other (and me). Universal love is an oxymoron. There are limited resources, even for love.

Next up- A Christmas Carol in 3D

Maybe the coolest thing about a Christmas Carol in 3D was the opportunity to see the trailer for Avatar in 3D also.

The Simpsons prove you can safely run adult things past children and they won’t mind, as long as there’s enough colour and buffoonery to keep them engaged (the reverse holds true, as advertising and sport proves- people will watch any old rubbish if there is the barest modicum of narrative and drama).

In this case, the adult things consist of too many syllables and references to Victorian history (e.g. treadmills and workhouses)

The story itself doesn’t deviate from tradition but adults and children alike will be amazed by the technical wizardry and detail- forget about panoramic 19^th century London vistas and alleyway close-ups, just check out the pores and wrinkles on an old man’s face, delivered in 3D. And I remember when A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low video was considered groundbreaking…

Cary Elwes does an awesome Scottish Christmas deity in boudoir-wear…but you probably wouldn’t want him near your children...

Finally- The Men Who Stare at Goats

I read the book a couple of years ago and cackled at the depiction of US military programs so crazy and wild (yet no crazier, wilder or dumber than Star Wars Missile Defence or the Iraq invasion and occupation planning) that they must be true. Given the extent to which America (and much of the rest of the world) embraces tripe like The Secret, the Alchemist, Creationism and the Prosperity Gospel, it seemed half-believable, if not reasonable, that someone might take teleportation, telepathy and mental goat assassination seriously.

I remember an interview with the Placebo lead singer where he mentions the “Led Zeppelin Curtain”. It’s OK to approach the curtain in terms of stage-craft and flambouyancy, but step completely through it at your own risk (for There Lie-th Spinal Tap). The Darkness (bless their hearts) are an example of a band that jumped through the Led Zep curtain with both spandex-covered feet (and codpiece). Anyway, the book approached the Led Zep curtain equivalent, but the movie leaps right on through. Its good fun- George Clooney has made a career out of doing the straight clown (O Brother Where art Though, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, Ocean’s Thirteen, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) and he gels well with Ewan Macgregor (who can’t make too many Jedi references)-but it lacks that “hey, is that real? I better google that later to check” element.

Charlie Wilson’s War does a much better job of riding that line between the military ridiculous and real.

Late update- Avatar

So anxious was I to see this movie that I bought my ticket a day in advance and spent 24 hours with a pair of 3D glasses in my pocket. I’m a complete fool for 3D- I saw the IMAX movie, Wings of Courage (the true story, that not even Val Kilmer could butcher, of French aviator Jean Mermoz’s mail run in the 1920’s from Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile), three times, just for the 3D glory of the Andes crossing. I was not disappointed by Avatar.

There are periods in film history that you recognize as they’re happening and where you say, “Damn, the ability to represent reality just took a leap.” They probably thought that when Star Wars first came out. I was too young to appreciate the significance of Return of the Jedi. But I distinctly remember being blown away in the late 90’s by the technical cluster bomb of “Dark City”, “Matrix” and “What Dreams May Come”.

Avatar does this. There is nothing original about the story (young hero finds his feet and love, culminating in rousing battle against overwhelming odds- it could reasonably be called Titanic/Braveheart in Space, especially as it clocks in at nearly 3 hours) but it presses all the right buttons and never seems forced. The plot, dialogue and characters are engaging and believable. These things should be (but so rarely are) a given when you spend more than $100m on a movie. There was topical, right-on references to the war against terror, environmentalism and indigenous rights. Calling the mineral that drives the conflict “unobtainium” is almost an open apology for the corniness of the plot device.

But the coolest thing is the sheer scale, artistry and creativity of the computer generated alien world and action, and how smoothly the gadgetry is integrated into the movie experience. The 3D-ness never felt gimmicky. I’m very excited about the directions talented people will take with these tools at their disposal.

I’m going to watch it again. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to open-eyed dreaming that doesn’t involve pharmaceuticals. These are good times to be alive.

p.s. The blue aliens couldn’t help reminding me of the cartoon dudes in the Daft Punk videos. They are to smurfs what wookies are to ewoks.

p.p.s how come the vortex field scrambles the radios of the baddies, but doesn’t scramble the link between the avatar bodies and the humans?

p.p.s. Where can I find an 8ft blue chick who'll guard my prone body (maybe after a nasty road-rage incident, perhaps?), with drawn bow, bared teeth and hissing fury?...I'll also settle for Leela from Dr Who...

Arizona- Grand Canyon and Basketball

2009-12-18T01:11:00.005+11:00

GRAND CANYON- Dec 13, 2009
I love America- you can rent a luxury car (a Chrysler 300) for $30 a day and, though the American's bitch and wage war over it, the price of gas price half that in the rest of the developed world. Drove north from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon. Great town names along the way- Dead Man's Gulch, Crowning Lord, Bumble Bee. My favourite was Dry Beaver Creek. Felt a sympathetic affection for my Chrysler, knowing it had narrowly avoided being made a museum piece. Great American radio- Classic Hip-hop(which, at first blush seems like an oxymoron, but I guess hip-hop's been around long enough to qualify), Mexi-babble, Country odes to the south (there should be a quota on how many songs can reference quarterbacks marrying homecoming queens). Poxy top 20 christian rock hits- mostly overwrought power ballads in a subverted emo style ("Let your sleeping giant rise, catch those demons by surprise").

I expected sand and rattlesnakes, but noone told me it snows in the desert. Spinifex and snow on the Arizona plateau. By the time I made it to the National Park gates, it was a blizzard and the guard told me it would still cost me $25 to get in, even though you couldn't see more than 50 feet in front of you. I pressed on. I revoked all the curses I'd ever placed on America's love of SUVs as I found every time I paused to check my map that my luxury Chrysler tyres would spin in place. 3 times I relied on the kindness of strangers to shovel me out. Bumped into 2 busloads of Australians on a Kontiki/STD tour, who's hopes of helicopter views had been dashed. I took the Desert View drive from the South Rim to Cameron and soon considered turning back. Only my adventurous spirit (and my fear of getting stuck in the snow while performing a 3-point turn on the narrow road) kept me going. My eyes were fixed on following the tyre tracks in the unploughed road before me (Mr plough, mr plough, that name again is Mr plough) until, in my periphery, I saw the Canyon in its red majesty appear through a gap in the storm. I stopped the car and waded through thigh-deep snow to the cliff's edge, glorying in the visa before me while snow and wind whipped my face. Everything was worth it for those 5 minutes (oh, the things I have said and done in my life for 5 minutes of glory).

Rainbow on the abandoned Indian souvenir shack.

NBA Game- Suns vs Magic, Dec 11 (for basketball fans only)

In the halcyon days of Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson (around 1990), I saw my first NBA game at 1am on Channel 2. Phoenix Suns were playing Utah Jazz (I think in Tokyo). While Stockton-and-Malone were running their timeless pick-and-roll schtick for Utah, Phoenix had this speedy little guard (KJ) "penetrating, creating, devastating", a rough-and-tumble white guy wreaking havoc (Dan "Thunder" Majerle) and another shortish white-guy (Jeff "Horny" Hornacek) raining jumpers. Like me, none of these guys looked like they had any business on a basketball court and yet they were awesome...until KJ pulled a hammy...and then another white guy (Tom Chambers) stepped up with ambidextrous crafty post-moves, drives, jumpers and dunks and pulled out a win. I was sold. I've loved the Suns ever since, especially their tradition of elite PGs (KJ, Kidd, Nash (twice), Starbury) and PFs (Chambers, Barkley, McDyess, Amare, Marion, Diaw), following them from afar- first through box scores in USA Today (furtively read but never bought at McGills on Elizabeth Street), then later through the internet and downloads. Finally I had my chance to see them live. It was a basketball pilgrimage, especially to see Steve Nash hold court.

Pregame warm-up, running layup lines. Mistook Jason Williams (The Artist Formerly Known as White Chocolate) for a ballboy. Couldn't tell if benchwarmer Alando Tucker was at least pleased to be on the court, or if he keenly felt the farce of warming up for a game he wouldn't be participating in.

Grant Hill's mid-range J is still a thing of beauty, though it doesn't translate aesthetically to 3-point land, where he looks like he's trying to crank something up. Channing Frye is a 3-point shooting fool. Bless his heart (his emergence has led to unfavourable comparisons with the departed Shaq- which is unfair as Shaq was brought in last season to complement Amare, who promptly went out with a scratched retina. Had they played together, things would have been different).

Stan Van Gundy- pure porn. Ron Jeremy's doppelganger.

Difference between Hill and Amare- Hill acknowledges a Nash assist, while Amare hoots and hollers.
Amare's worked on his defence chops- demonstrated in numerous poke-outs while defending the post. His jumper is money.

Dwight article on How to Block a Shot in Slam magazine-
1) Identify your prey
2) Time your jump.
3) Jump.
4) BLOCK IT INTO THE CROWD! (emphasis added by me).

How 'bout blocking it towards a teammate?!
Someone send him a youtube link to Bill Russell and Kevin McHale's highlights, please.

Dwight instantly doubled on every catch, not out of respect for his post moves but disrespect for his passing. When he does get close to the basket, they play Hack-a-Dwight- he records 1 fg attempt and 18 ft (making 7).

Such a joy to watch Nash play. Buzz-sawing through the defence, whipping round left-handed passes, assassin 3s.

Dragic looks like a young floppy-haired Ben Mendelson.

Always an adventure every time he's anywhere near the ball- Make a steal, turnaround J, Nash-esque pass off the pick-and-roll, dribble it off his knee, steal it back. He'll be very good in a year or two, if the Suns show the same patience in him that they showed Barbosa in his early years (a shame he's out of the game with an ankle sprain). He mans the point when Nash is resting his back and the drop-off is apparent- but the difference between the two is about $10m and 12 years.

Jared Dudley showing the heads-up D he's known for- hanging back on the first strides of a Carter drive and making the strip when he finally unwound for the shot. He owned VC. Makes the right play (including hitting open J) every time, helping the Suns to forget about Boris Diaw's loss. J-Rich? Not so- Great hands and speed, crafty moves, but doesn't have the same altitude he used to. Fairly high knucklehead quotient.

Anthony "and the" Johnson still peddling his yeoman PG wares. Takes Nash to the rack a few times, which makes him overconfident and try to do things he can't, leading to multiple turnovers.

Gortat looks like a conscript that climbed off the troop train to Grozny.

Announcer Cedric Ceballos has an annoying affected voice.

With his wooly hair, silly socks and fat @rsed-waddle, Robin Foul-a-minute- Lopez looks like the biggest duck in the world. Secretly hoping he loses it and pulls Rashard Lewis' ridiculous Fu-Manchu goatee. That would be decent value for a tech.

This was the game-
http://www.nba.com/games/20091211/ORLPHX/gameinfo.html#nbaGIboxscore

Rwanda

2009-11-26T23:35:00.004+11:00

Rwanda

Rwanda is at the crossroads. Of East Africa and West. French and English. Right-side driving and left. Jungle and savannah. Cradle (with one of the highest birthrates in Africa) and grave. Remembering and forgetting. Freedom and silence.

The Rwandan border with Tanzania is a mountain wall through which the Rusumo Falls crashes. A Lutheran priest, John, helps me change money and offers me a lift onwards to Kigali. A returned Tutsi exile from Tanzania, he tells me bodies and blood once tumbled down these cataracts and he is planting thousands of Cyprus trees on the bare hills here to bring peace and beauty to the ghosts. I suspect the Rwandan government has placed a saint at the frontier for propaganda purposes. On the way, we stop at the parish of a Jesuit priest to discuss, over beer and brochettes, a medical clinic they are working together to set up. A Jesuit and a Lutheran. Neither is telling their superiors of the other.

Over beer, the Jesuit tells me- “There will never be peace in Congo til the FDLR (Hutu rebels) are sorted out.”

I ask, “You mean, welcomed back to Rwanda?”

“Sure,” he replies, but without conviction. “Or the neighbouring community of nations can assist…..Look, we were talking before of shared humanity. But these people killed hundreds of thousands. They don’t deserve to be treated as humans.”…said the priest.

I wondered silently how this country can function.

STORIES I HEARD (might not be true).

People.

A friend has a Rwandan employee who had been unusually quiet. She was then absent from work. “Is Sarah sick?”, he asked a colleague.

“No. Today she is testifying against the people who killed her parents.”

“Oh.”

An American journalist wrote an article which mentioned prostitution being a long-standing part of Rwandan culture. A minister jailed him. He was released and deported two weeks later after the American ambassador had made representations to the President, and on the condition he find some (any) publication in America in which to write an apology.

President Museveni of Uganda was attending a conference in Kigali. He drove from Kampala to the Rwandan-Ugandan border with a security entourage of 30 vehicles, bristling with armed men. 25 were turned back then and there. Two passed through the gates of the conference centre and the rest of the motorcade was stopped by a member of the Rwandan President’s Israeli-trained elite guard, left hand motioning “stop”, right hand “go back”. The lead vehicle continued til it bumped up against the guard’s legs. Unmoved, he said “Go back.” The car did not move. The guard stepped across and rapped on the driver’s window. The tinted window rolled down a centimeter. “Go back.” Nothing. The guard placed his fingers through the crack and physically forced the electric window all the way down. Backed by pointed rifles, he calmly said again, “Go back.” And they did.

Gorillas

Mr Beck, our ranger guide, pulled out a photo album and introduced us to the members of the Sabinyo group of the Ruhengeri mountain gorillas. The alpha male was Guhonda, at 220 kilograms the biggest known silverback in the world. He pointed to Ijisho, a female, and said “She is no longer in the group. She was wooed away by a lone male. The lone male had been part of the group until he challenged Guhonda and failed, losing an eye. Now have a look at Ijisho. She was born with only one eye.”

After less than an hour of walking through potato fields and bamboo secondary forest, we were face-to-face with the Sabinyo group. Walking up the mountain path, we almost literally bumped into Gukunda, the second-in-command, leaning back casually against a tree. After a few seconds of shared looks, he started pulling his lips back and showing his teeth, before moving towards us. A New Zealander pushed against me but I didn’t move, having been told earlier to stand my ground if a gorilla charges. Turns out this does not apply when a gorilla just wants to use your path. He has right of way and the guide was pushing against the New Zealander to move him, as Gukunda rushed passed, sucking out my oxygen as he went.

Not far further ahead, there was crashing at the top of the bamboo grove we were in. We passed under the shadow of an infant. Through a gap, we could see a female sitting atop the bamboo canopy, broad back to us, looking out over the sublime Virunga hills and volcanoes. Nearby, a few metres away and not very high up, a huge male leaned down to regard us implacably through another gap. You have to assume that the world’s biggest silverback is intimately acquainted with the tensile strength of bamboo, and when he crashes down to earth near you, it is because he wants to…and never an undignified accident.

Our allotted hour passed watching the gorillas relax. It was quite cool and Guhonda spent most of his time sitting impressively (anything a creature of that magnitude does is impressive) and impassively against a tree with a little fuzzy silverback-in-training next to him, imitating his arms-crossed pose or curled up sleeping. Nearby, a massive mother groomed her tiny fluffy baby, while other gorillas lounged.

We were undoubtedly in the presence of greatness, in every sense of the word.

Where the Wild Bonobos Are- Bonobo Trekking, Congo DRC, Oct 2009

2009-10-31T06:35:00.014+11:00

Where the Wild Bonobos Are
Bonobo Trekking
Yetee, Kokolopori, Congo DRC
October 14, 2009
Martin Bendeler

The morning Martin put on his jungle trousers and made mischief of one kind and another, the bonobos knew he was coming for them.* I like my anti-mosquito, anti-thorn, anti-leopard jungle trousers, but I completely ruin any chance of cutting a fashionable swathe through the Congo forest by tucking them into my socks. Very nerdy, but it keeps the fireants from getting up there and having their way with my appendages. I’m sure the bonobos won’t mind. Armed with an arsenal of cameras and defended by my jungle trousers, I wait in the pre-dawn darkness for the Vie Sauvage 4WD to pick me up and take me to where the bonobos of the Kala Kala group are waking up.

The bonobo (pan paniscus), also known as the pygmy or gracile chimpanzee, is a Great Ape and man’s closest animal relative, sharing almost 99% of our DNA. It differs from its common chimpanzee (pan troglodyte) cousin in more than its slimmer frame, darker face and center-part hairstyle. Where common chimps have been seen to systematically annihilate neighbouring chimp groups, bonobos dispel tension through orgies. Where common chimp males plot and scheme to become the alpha and violently dominate access to fertile females, bonobos have an alpha female who consolidates her position through lesbian sex with other powerful females. Bonobos have infinitely richer sex lives and, in captivity, leave common chimps in the dust in using symbol language to express themselves. Though our knowledge of bonobos is still in its infancy, and hampered by their isolation deep in the war-torn rainforests of Congo DRC, to know them even a little is to love them a lot.

It was my unrequited long-distance love affair with the bonobo that first brought me to this part of the world, back in 2005. At the time, the only people who were confident of being able to show me wild bonobos was the Washington DC- based Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), who were about to send a boat on the week-long voyage up the Congo and Maringa river to the Kokolopori region. BCI have been active in this area since 2001, working with local NGO Vie Sauvage, and their conservation model involves training and paying for local people to track and observe specific bonobo groups while providing health, education and development assistance in exchange for bonobo conservation across the entire territory over which they have control. In a broken state like the Congo, it is only the local people that truly have the capacity to implement conservation policies. Linking their welfare to the welfare of the bonobos in their midst is an extremely effective and cost-efficient method of protecting large amounts of bonobo habitat. This year, this protection received official recognition and reinforcement when almost five thousand square kilometres of rainforest here was officially gazetted by the Congolese government as the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve.

Witnessing the wonder of the bonobos in the wild at that time, I also saw first-hand the threats to their survival- logging companies were moving in, while the desperate poverty of the local people made bushmeat hunting ever more attractive. I left determined to do what I could to help. I have returned four years later, with medical supplies, a solar power generator and other equipment, to inspect the progress of the health clinics and schools here supported by donations from Indigo Foundation in Australia and the good people of Falls Church, Virginia in the US. And it would be rude of me to come all this way and not say hello to the local bonobos!

The last time I was here in Kokolopori, trackers had only just begun to protect the bonobos of the Kala Kala group in Yetee and they were still shy. Now, as I was trekking through the villagers’ cassava fields on the way into the jungle, I was told that they’d since become quite the exhibitionists…but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I was being guided by Leonard, the most senior of all the trackers. Even during the dark war years he had maintained his observations, unpaid and unassisted. Since then, BCI had sent him to Congo Brazzaville and Uganda to enhance his skills through training in tracking gorillas and he was now in charge of their 11 teams of trackers across the entire bonobo habitat. He paused to show me bonobo food, various fruit and roots, some with medicinal properties (one of the trackers grabbed a root they called jungle Viagra, but with 10 kids already, I wasn't sure he needed any help). He told me of once seeing young bonobos dangling from a branch in a chain of five, like the children’s monkey game. And of watching a young bonobo walking behind an old one, impersonating its elderly gait.

We were now in the primary, untouched forest and Leonard was leading us to where the bonobos had settled down for the evening, the path marked by trackers the night before by a twisted twig here or a leaf placed on a log there.
Within an hour, we were directly beneath the nests of the bonobos, up in the canopy. They had woken up and our first sign of them was an intermittent drizzle of morning shit and piss. The tree above me shook and a shower of what I hoped was dislodged dew fell upon my head. Around me, from different angles, there was crashing in the canopy, branches bending, leaves shaking, but I couldn’t get a clear view of bonobos through the curtain of vines and branches, beyond a quick streak of black as they descended to the ground and moved off in the undergrowth.

For about 20 minutes we followed them through the foliage. While they moved through the safety of the upper canopy making as much noise and mess as they liked, on the ground they moved silently and smoothly, always about 10 metres in front of us, just out of camera shot, plucking and eating shoots and mushrooms as they went. The day was still cool, but we were being led a merry chase by the bonobos through every clinging vine and thorn. We eventually paused on a giant termite mound to catch our breath, and while I redid my bootlace I looked up….to find two bonobos had double-backed to watch/tease us before disappearing!

Some other trackers had peeled off earlier to outflank the moving bonobo group and get to where they were headed- a tree in fruit- first. We followed quite leisurely until I looked up and saw a bonobo 15ms ahead a few metres up a tree just staring at me. Sometimes he scratched his head in reflection or confusion, sometimes slapping the trunk of the tree, perhaps in warning. Around me other bonobos frolicked in the trees above, some in groups of three or four, others relaxing alone. The one that was staring at me, a male adult, was approached by a little juvenile, scaling a nearby branch. The little one also looked at me briefly before reaching up to a higher branch from which he could dangle and spin in the air while jumping with both feet on the adult’s head, who endured it stoically, even reaching around to tossle the scamp’s hair.

A mother and baby daughter were in the fork of another tree, stripping leaves and eating them. A larger male swung over rambunctiously, leaves and branches flying, and the baby clung closer to its mother’s breast, but he was just passing by. I heard a cracking sound not far behind me, near a bamboo grove, and turned around to see that a bonobo had come down closer to my level by bending down a bamboo trunk, like a pole vaulter or a Chinese circus performer or the Cheshire Cat, to get a better look at me.

We humans love our opposable thumbs, but bonobos have the most awesome big toes- long and strong enough to wrap around a branch and let a full-grown adult just dangle, upside down. They make ours look like God’s leftovers. Anything and everything in grasping range- vines, branches, trunks- can be used to propel themselves, break a fall, or bridge between trees. They are perfectly at ease with the physics of the forest. More than that. You can tell it gives them great joy, as they casually pull out of a plummeting death dive by lazily grabbing a vine, or sail by a friend on a flexed branch.

In a nearby tree, I see a cluster of three young bonobos, like the proverbial wise monkeys. A female bends right over and thrusts her rear in the air. She waggles it a little but to no avail. She even puts her hand back and points to it. With two other bonobos nearby, surely at least one would get the picture? A young one was just above her looking back at me, but not even an Australian in the Congo jungle was strange enough to distract him from the waving, blooming, blossoming treat before him. He clambered over and with minimal introduction or foreplay, went to work, a foot on separate branches. The female somehow hooked a foot back behind her to press against the rump of the little chap on her- maybe making sure he didn't fall off while there or maybe just being romantic. I filmed it, and timed it later- easily the best 23 seconds of her bonobo life. The male celebrated by grabbing a couple of branches and aeroplaning about in the air, legs spread wide, spinning round and around in jubilation. The female maintained her position, ever hopeful, and the young male eventually sat beside her and absent-mindedly stroked her. Nearby, I could have sworn the other bonobo, a female, was also stroking herself. At 30 metres in the air, it gave new definition to the “Mile High Club”.

I’m just going to say it- they have splendid genitals. They are so distinctive, you wonder how any one could have ever mistaken bonobos for regular chimpanzees, as they once did. With their dark faces and black fur, sometimes its only the bright pink that lets you find them in the shadows of the jungle. The bonobo’s penis seems almost as flexible as the rest of his appendages, sometimes rising and waving without any discernible stimulation. And the glorious full bloom of the vulva is the size of a cabbage, though I am ashamed to compare it to something so drab and banal. They seem very pleased with their own gonads, spending a lot of time simply holding them with their fingers and admiring them, cleaning them and playing with them.

My brief was to take as much footage and photos as I could. Photographing bonobos isn’t easy. The layers of twigs and branches between you and them foil any auto-focus attempts. The light in the jungle is often too weak, or so strong that the bonobos are over-exposed, black silhouettes against the sky. A decent telephoto lens is required to get detail but the weak light means you need a steady hand or a tripod to avoid blur. With your lens pointed up at the canopy, condensation and dislodged rain can cloud the picture. And finally, the presence of bonobos is so exciting that you can very easily, like I did, go through 8gbs of memory cards very quickly. This was actually a relief for me, because it gave me an excuse to pull out the binoculars and just have the bonobos fill my entire vision, first as I craned my neck up, and then later as I just lay down on the jungle floor (last time we’d brought foldable picnic chairs but unfortunately, not this time).

I lost myself in them and for a short time I had travelled much further than the four-thousand miles to the Congolese jungle. The Kala Kala bonobos had been kind enough to accompany me four million years down our shared genetic bloodlines to show me a glimpse of our common essential nature. I suspended analysis and just let myself be with them, accepting the privilege. At a certain point, the morning light moved from pallid white to rich honey yellow and I’m taken aback to see what looks like quite a fierce male come into view, moving across a branch with purpose. Though it could have been the change in the light, the shadows of branches, his face was paler than normal and ripped with scars. I lose him as he enters thick foliage and leaves but almost immediately the area erupts in commotion, trees shaking and bonobos scattering. Then there is a squeal and Leonard tells me “That is the signal from the dominant male to move on. The group will start to find another feeding or resting place now.”

Was that the alpha male I had just seen, bossing about the group?
Until very recently, studying wild bonobos has been too hard- the Congo has been too unstable and dangerous and the bonobos too remote and inaccessible in the canopy. Most of our current knowledge of bonobos comes from zoos or from groups that had been lured from the jungle by sugar cane, and in this environment, the females band together to dominate the males.

But some Congolese researchers tell me that in the wild, it is the alpha male that dominates, deciding when and where to eat and sleep. Another told me that the alpha female has a veto power. Are our closest animal relatives matriarchal or patriarchal? Does it depend on the environment and the personalities that each group finds itself in? Do different bonobo groups have different “cultures”?

With peace and stability returning to this part of the Congo DRC, and with bonobo ranges like Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve under the protection of BCI, Vie Sauvage and the local community, we have an historic opportunity to closely observe our primate cousins and let them teach us about themselves and, by extension, ourselves. Primate researcher Alex Georgiev from Harvard University recently spent 3 months in Kokolopori, and it is hoped more scientists will follow.

But peace brings its own challenges, as the splendid isolation of the bonobos is threatened not only by nosey researchers and ecotourists watching them have sex, but by deadly poachers, loggers and plantation developers. Some have even tried to score political points by opposing the creation of the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, calling on people to kill the bonobos there. The vast rainforest of the Congo Basin is one of the lungs of the earth. The other is the Amazon, where local people have been dispossessed of their traditional land at gunpoint, and an area larger than France has been deforested for timber, soy beans and beef. With this lesson in mind, the bonobos, already one of the rarest primates on earth, could be extinct within our lifetime, on our watch. Now, more than ever, the gentle bonobos and the people who protect them need your help.

Tax-deductible donations can be made in America at this address-
http://www.bonobo.org/howcanihelp.html

Tax-deductible donations can be made in Australia at this address-
http://www.bonobo.org.au/how-to-donate.htm

*Acknowledgments and Apologies to Maurice Sendak for paraphrasing the introduction to his timeless children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are”.= "The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him "Wild Thing!" and Max said "I'll eat you up!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything." Best intro of all time. Can't wait to see the movie.

All photos copyright Martin Bendeler

Surgery at the Bonobo Health Clinic, Congo

2009-10-12T06:28:00.002+11:00

Surgery at the Bonobo Health Clinic
11/10/09, Kokolopori, Congo.
Martin Bendeler

The rooster crowed outside my door at about 6.00am this morning and I tried to both ignore it and decide whether we should eat it before it could wake me up again tomorrow. Shortly after, there was a knock on my door. Dr Saidi had arrived to invite me to an appendectomy commencing shortly at the Bonobo Health Clinic (run by local conservation NGO Vie Sauvage and supported by the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, Indigo Foundation and the Kokolopori Falls Church Sister City Program). I had appendicitis when I was 13 and have never experienced anything so painful, before or since, so I had a personal investment in seeing this.

I threw on some clothes and made my way over in the morning cool. Already some mothers were out, their babies in jackets, making morning fires. Girls were headed towards the forest to gather, large wicker baskets slung across their foreheads. Other girls were returning to their huts with firewood or water. Men slept.

In the sparse room, where a few days earlier I had seen a baby born, sat Bebeesh Bikoma, 28, with her worried husband, Antoine Lokonga. She was stoically enduring what I knew to be immense pain. Bebeesh and Antoine are both primary school teachers, but Bebeesh was working in her house when the pain in her abdomen became so strong that it paralysed her right leg. She searched for antibiotics but the pain would not go away, so Antoine pulled her 37kms on a bicycle across cratered jungle roads from their village of Yalokengi to the Bonobo Health Clinic of Yalokele. This was her only option. The next nearest hospital was100kms away in Djolu, and even if she could have reached there, it would have cost much more than she or her family could afford.

The delivery chair reclined and became an operating table (the stirrups discarded to a corner), and the table from Dr Saidi’s consulting room was carried in and covered with a table cloth and the necessary drugs and surgical instruments. The honeyed orange morning light came in through two paneless windows in the mudbrick wall and the large space where the steel roof hand not been sealed (perhaps deliberately for ventilation?). Tubs of water rested on the dirt floor and had been brought by women from the source of a spring, 3 kilometres away, and then purified. A large donated cistern was waiting in the nearest river port of Bifore, 50 kilometres away, but there was not the funds or the fuel to transport it to Kokolopori. I stepped out while the medical staff scrubbed up and prepared Bebeesh for surgery.

When I returned, she was lying on the table, a blanket of sorts covering her abdomen except for the area of operation. Around her were Dr Saidi and three nurses- Eduard Limboto Losase, Nestor Baelonganoi and Albert Alukana (visiting from Yettee, where he oversees a dispensary)- who were administering a local anaesthetetic (lidocaine?).

Before making the first incision, Dr Saidi raised his hand and made an impassioned prayer in Lingala, and during the operation he and the nurses sang hymns in beautiful harmony. Dr Saidi later told me he was both seeking God’s blessing and administering psychotherapy for the patient. After awhile Bebeesh begin to suck in air through her teeth, in pain, and ketamine was prepared as a painkiller. One of the nurses used the strap of his stopwatch as a tourniquet and made the injection.

Given Bebeesh’s suffering, I felt guilty for my own congenital queasiness at the sight of blood, exacerbated by my lack of breakfast and my fasting from the day before (due to my stomach’s treachery), as I sat down next to her husband Antoine for a spell. He said he was nervous but grateful that his wife’s life was being saved.

Relatively quickly, Eduard presented me with the offending appendix- looking like a thin, sinister, raw sausage covered with mustard. A nurse with a stethoscope checked Bebeesh regularly to ensure there were no complications. While Dr Saidi sutured the incision, he spoke with me about the challenges of rural health in impoverished communities. “As you can see, we are saving lives on dirt floors, delivery chairs and with glassless windows. You are lucky- today, this is our 150th operation in the past 18 months- appendixes, Caesarian sections, hernias, ovarian cysts, tumours, prostates. We are grateful to our partners abroad- Indigo, Falls Church, BCI- who have provided the gowns, gloves, anaesthetics and other equipment for this operation. But we are still challenged by the basic conditions. In terms of medicines, our greatest needs are for anti-malarials, anti-biotics and anti-worm tablets.”

With nine stitches and around 45 minutes, Bebeesh’s life was saved. Such a simple thing as appendicitis, as common here as it is in the West, kills horribly and almost certainly if not surgically treated. I would have died 20 years ago had I been born here and there was no clinic. Imagine walking into your suburban shopping mall, cocking your finger and thumb into an imaginary gun, and symbolically shooting dead every third or fourth person you see. Such is life and loss here in the absence of medical care.

Four men carried Bebeesh from the operating theatre to the basic internment building, chickens scattering before them, where Bebeesh’s mother, brother and children waited. They would stay there and look after her for the next 5-7 days while she recovered. Bebeesh’s younger brother, Fidel, is a member of Vie Sauvage’s tracking/anti-poaching team in Yetee, monitoring and guarding a group of bonobos and their range. Saving his sister’s life is probably the most powerful example of the spirit behind Vie Sauvage and BCI’s motto- “Salisa bonobo , mpe bonobo akosalisa yo.” Help the bonobo and the bonobo will help you.

Tax-deductible donations can be made in America at this address-
http://www.bonobo.org/howcanihelp.html

Tax-deductible donations can be made in Australia at this address-
http://www.bonobo.org.au/how-to-donate.htm

Bonobo Health Clinic- Saving Lives, New Lives

2009-10-12T06:24:00.001+11:00

Kokolopori, Congo DRC, 8/10/09

Martin Bendeler

I have returned to Kokolopori, Congo, after four years. The last time, I came as an ecotourist wanting to see wild bonobos before I turned 30. Now I come as a Director of Bonobo Conservation Initiative Australia (BCIA) and as a representative of Indigo Foundation (IF) and Kokolopori Falls Church Sister City Program (KFCSCP) to evaluate the health program they have established since I was last here, and to get a better idea of the needs, challenges and priorities of the communities who protect the bonobo habitat.

This region, deep in the green heart of the Congo Basin and peopled by some of the world’s poorest, is rich in bonobos. BCI found that the most effective and efficient means of conserving bonobos was to work in cooperation with the forest people who shared and controlled their habitat. Medical assistance had been part of this approach, but on a relatively small and ad-hoc scale until my fellow directors of BCIA- Philip Strickland, Dr Luke Bennett and Angus Gemmell made their own long voyage to Kokolopori with BCI to establish a medicine dispensary and anti-malarial program, generously funded by Indigo Foundation.

The momentum generated by the program engaged the substantial hearts and minds of the people of Falls Church, Virginia, who established the KFCSCP and significantly expanded the scope and capacity of the bonobo clinic. Three years on, from nothing, I find there is now a doctor, four nurses, 10 midwives and a pharmacy, saving lives and winning hearts and making a tangible connection between the welfare of the community and the welfare of the bonobos and their forests. All this in perhaps the most isolated place in the world, far from electricity, running water, mobile phones (or even beer and Coca Cola!), where the roads out have been destroyed by years of war and criminal neglect and where the river journey to urban markets can take weeks.

My arrival has been made possible by Aviation Sans Frontieres France, who have recently recommenced heavily subsidized flights for NGOs between Kisangani and a basic airfield in Djolu (70kms by 4WD from Kokolopori). I have flown in with Albert Lotana Lokasola, the President of Vie Sauvage, the NGO managing the conservation and community development program here, and with nearly 600kgs of medical supplies, mosquito nets, educational materials, a large solar generator and a satellite phone/modem, generously donated by IF and KFCSCP and coordinated by BCI and Vie Sauvage.

After a delicious breakfast of Kokolopori coffee, freshly squeezed pineapple juice, an omelette and avocado (all local), I stroll over from the Vie Sauvage guest house to the Bonobo Clinic. What I remembered as an empty field now has three large buildings- one containing consulting rooms and a delivery ward, another for longer-term patients and their families, and an extension of this still under construction.

I sit in the consulting room with Dr Saidi and find we have arrived just in time. 18 year old Nadine Bawambo has walked here from the nearby village of Yaliseko because her 8 month old son, Ntoto, has malaria, bronchitis and anemia. The pharmacy had run out of quinine, antibiotics and iron pills but we had brought fresh supplies on our flight. And a mosquito net for the bubba. In the Delivery Room stood Marie Bochi Bolamba, 32 years old, mother of six, leaning against the wall with contractions and working hard on her seventh. There was also a delivery table with stirrups, four midwives gossiping with each other, and not much else.

The hospital was an 8-roomed building with a thatched roof and a central corridor. On one side were the patients and on the other were their families, with their cooking fires and utensils. In the first room was little 6 year old Alexandra Eyan Mbula with severe diarrhea.

Next was 77 year old Papa Otto Bokongi, who’d had a huge cyst removed from his prostate. Unable to urinate for five days, he had searched desperately for help, including from local shamans, before walking the 35 kilometers along jungle tracks to the Bonobo Clinic. Dr Saidi had operated to drain the cyst and old Papa Otto’s relief was palpable.

Another who’s excruciating pain had been relieved was Jolie Ngochuka Mbongi, 22, who’d had her appendix removed and had been there for a week, recuperating with her baby and grandmother by her side. Everyone’s recovery was slowed by malaria and malnutrition.

In the last room was sad 18 year old Ruine Bayamba, who had walked 15 kilometeres (7 hours) from her village of Lopori with labour complications, had had a caesarean section, but her baby had died. She sat quiet and sad, comforted by her mother.

As we walked out of the dark hut into the tropical glare, Nurse Nestor rushed over with news that Marie’s baby was peeking out from behind the stage curtains. We arrived in the Delivery Room to find the midwives, aged between Brigitte Bombolo Bolimo’s 32 and old Mama Gertrude Kolobaka’s “about 50 to you, young whippersnapper!”, had sprung into choregraphed action.

Dr Saidi explained that it had been a difficult birth because Marie was malnourished but her baby girl was healthy and beautiful and named Martine in my honour. He said, “I have been a doctor for 31 years and worked here for the past 2, far from my children, because I love my country and the people need me here. People would definitely die if we weren’t here. We do great things with the little we have, but we need your continued support.”

Tax-deductible donations can be made in America at this address-
http://www.bonobo.org/howcanihelp.html

Tax-deductible donations can be made in Australia at this address-
http://www.bonobo.org.au/how-to-donate.htm

Review- Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-30T10:38:00.004+10:00

Review- Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino gets away with a lot. On the strength of his name, he can get Brad Pitt and enough money to make absolutely whatever he can imagine happen on the screen. He’s the only man who can get half of America to sit through two and a half hours of mostly French, German and subtitles. And they go in ready to forgive the outlandish, self-indulgent (e.g. an extended, overwrought David Bowie montage in a WW2 movie) and silly as “a homage to his beloved b-grade flicks.” The gravity working on the suspension of disbelief in a Tarantino movie is not very strong. Even with all that head-start, he’s made a very average movie in “Inglourious Basterds”, ostensibly a counter-factual historical boys-own adventure about the Jews getting revenge on Hitler.

It screamed mediocrity. The jokes aren’t very funny. The characters aren’t very engaging. The plot is only marginally interesting. Brad Pitt is barely, poorly and sorely used. It’s B-gradeness is worn on its sleeve, there’s more ham than a Paul Keating business venture and yet, apart from a couple of scenes, its still not much fun. I went in to the cinema to fall in love with what Quentin Tarantino could do with $100 million and Mr. Pitt. I walked out with the feeling that someone (with the initials Q and T) had played an extended pull-my-finger gag on me. And with a reduced regard for Tarantino and humanity in general (or at least the sample in the audience who laughed at torture and applauded the credits (and I almost joined them, though out of sheer relief)).

Oh, the betrayal! How could you do this to me, Quentin? After all we’ve been through over the years. What were you thinking?

It is quite possible that Mr. Tarantino had just laid a stinky egg and sold it to me for USD10 and nearly three hours of my life. But like an abused wife, I looked for reason behind the cruelty. I had to draw a few long bows but I’ve come up with a few.

1) He is testing the moral compass (or his own contempt) of the audience. Tarantino had said of his mixing realistic torture with well-executed comedy in his earlier Reservoir Dogs “I sucker-punched you! You’re supposed to laugh until I stop you laughing.” His sucker-punch is an old-school slap-in-the-face-with-a-leather-glove challenge to the viewer’s honour, and the viewer’s response tells you something about his character. In Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino sucker-punches the audience repeatedly, and with the most perfunctory minimum of comedic foreplay/lubrication. To walk out would be honourable. To avert your eyes would be only decent. To continue watching is to be complicit. And to continue laughing or cheering, in the safety of the darkness of the cinema, is contemptible. There was a lot of laughing and cheering when I saw this movie.

In David Lynch’s Dune (which also featured Sting in winged Speedos and a soundtrack by Toto) there is a “humanity test” which kills those whose nature proves to be more beast than human. Similarly Inglorious Basterds, American Psycho, even Lolilta, to some extent, at least serve the function, either deliberately or not, of acquainting the viewer/reader with their own moral limits of acceptability. There is some perverse social merit there. It is art, and therefore more easily and acceptably palatable, if you wrap something intriguingly vile in comedy (Tarantino), social observation (American Psycho) or eloquence (Lolita), but it is still damaging to the psyche.

In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino rips off the bloody stump of your own conscience and belts you over the head with it. I didn’t appreciate it. Bloody torture porn.

2) Tarantino throws out more sucker punches. Being Tarantino, you expect stylized action, uber-coolness, force-of-nature heroes. He plays on this, introducing his heroes with a blaze of (in)glory. “Inglorious Basterds” sounds cool. But inglory is not to glory what infamy is to fame. Infamy is cool. “Inglorious” is actually kind of pathetic and tragic, and usually associated with defeat. It is specifically not-cool. And his heroes turn out to be almost all pathetic and tragic- they blow their own cover, get themselves killed or captured unnecessarily, and fail to rise to the (heightened) occasion almost every time. Even their rare successes are redundant. They are irrelevant and defeated. Yet, the audience has been so well trained by Tarantino to expect fine comedy and action when fed certain queues, they don’t even notice or mind when Tarantino doesn’t deliver. Like dogs that keep rolling over, even though the master no longer gives them chocolate. I lost count of the times the person next to me muttered “Ok, this is where so-and-so goes to work”, only to have so-and-so die ingloriously.

And maybe this is Tarantino’s real commentary- the Jews really were poor inglorious bastards. They did not rise to the occasion. They did not kill Hitler and win WW2. If you are willing to seriously indulge a rather juvenile wish-fulfilling revenge fantasy, you deserve everything you get.

3) Maybe Tarantino is the Inglorious Basterd. Knowing anything he brings out now will inevitably suffer in comparison to what he has produced before, he has deliberately aimed to make something that is pretty rubbish while seeming, to the chumps who love him unconditionally, the real pathetic inglorious bastards, pretty cool. So far, it looks like he is the man who fooled the world.

Journey to the South

2009-08-21T01:23:00.005+10:00

My teenage years were fired up with Jack Kerouac stories of mad drives across Mother America in battered Buicks and Caddys but the best I could manage as an (ostensible) adult was a trusty Hyundai Sonata hire car for a Washington DC to Augusta, Georgia, haul.
I tried to suck in what I could of America through the windscreen and the radio aerial. For the first time in my life, I gave country music a fair hearing and found myself chuckling along at regular intervals. My favourite lines were, “All my exes live in Texas, that’s why I’m living in Tennessee” and “I’m not as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.” But also got a goodly serving of Mexican music in a blazing epileptic fit of horns and accordions, a black hip-hop station that told me that everyone save Tyra Banks would be ignoring National No-Weave Day on September 8, and the tedious wheedling of Christian channels. Amused to find one children’s station had rehabilitated the slave work lament “Jump down, turn around, pick a bail of cotton” to “jump down turn around, eat a bowl of cherries”.

Outside of Woodbridge, Virginia, I pulled into a Hi-Mart, thinking it sounded like an electronics place where I could buy a phone charger. It was like a Safeway that had been cleared and converted into a cavern of crap. It was full of little cubicles, some defended by bars or flimsy wooden veneer walls, others by naught but a curtain, some open, some closed, where individual Korean and Chinese proprietors sold cheap and tawdry Korean and Chinese trinkets. There were a few Hispanic stores selling Tex-Mex Country and Western CDs, and Mexican wrestling masks and soccer jerseys, but I’m tipping even those items came from China. So too, I’m sure, were the unicorns and crystals in another booth. The busiest business was a black hair salon near the entrance, running a production line of weaves, braids and corn rows. I strolled bemused around the strange indoor yard sale, my first taste of America’s irrepressible entrepreneurialism. Wasn’t long before I’d been force-fed the endless miles of strip malls. I eventually even satisfied my curiousity by visiting a Walmart. I had expected a stripped down barn filled with cheap everything but it looked as shiny as the Targets or Kmarts in Australia. In fact, it looked the same. I was on the lookout for cheesy items like antlers for cars, but the best I could find were $2 decoy pigeons and a $100 pink Barbie hunting rifle.

The open road became a bumper-bar in my face at the North Carolina border, where roadworks were banking up traffic for miles. I veered off the interstate onto obscure country byways and was soon cruising past tobacco and corn fields, rows of dead sunflowers and black families watching the summer from the shade of the porch. I wanted to make a coffee table book of the elegant dilapidation of the streetside houses and cottages abandoned to nature- wild branches growing through timber, vines draping windows, the fade and shade of useless wooden walls. Very fat men rode shirtless astride ride-on lawnmowers, like adults on tricycles. Tributary roads through the rundown torpor of Halifax and Enfield, skirting Rocky Mount, and eventually rejoining the highway before Wilson. I saw Zebulon and Hephzibah on the map.

I pulled in to North Augusta after dark and we headed out to the Country Club, where I was told they played both sorts of music- country AND western- and promised a procession of Southern culture. I wasn’t disappointed when I saw my first mullet in its natural habitat. A magnificent specimen it was, too, as it took to the dance floor and inspired a harem of middle-aged ladies to join it in some line-dancing. The band busted out Queen’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls”, instantly dispelling any notion that Southerners lacked irony. There was an awful lot of human biomass, if not exactly biodiversity. The crowd took to the floor to Riverdance to Copperhead Road and an androgynous fiddler dueled Satan in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”.

A confederate flag hung in the VIP room, but overall I saw much less flaggery than I expected. I joined my friends in the smoking room, where one pointed to his crooked nose and declared, “This is where my first wife hit me with a frying pan. She threw a bottle at me, which I dodged, then she hit me upside the head with the skillet. I told her I was goin’ out to get beer and didn’t want to see her when I got back. She left and I filed divorce papers the next day. Now she’s got a big tattoo on her right tit of a head, with half a skull and the other half my face, with a bloody knife through it. Crazy bitch!”

The next day we drove north through the sublime hills to Lake Keowee, the Redneck Riviera. A veritable Flight of the Valkyries of jet-skis and speedboats fanned out across the rich green water, with slower motorized pontoons bringing up the rear to provide platforms for drinking and music. Ringed by hills and forests, waterfalls and cliffs, the good Southern folk (all white) would weigh anchor (a freeze block), twist some buoyant tubes around themselves and bob in the water in a circle, beers held aloft in salute. The natural beauty extended for mile after mile, and humanity had spread upon it shoreside mansions and expensive motorcraft in a riotous display of pleasure-seeking prosperity. I understood why Americans so rarely breach their Atlantic and Pacific moats/quarantine to see the rest of the world when they have such hedonistic wonders at their doorsteps. And how much this particular fun depends on armies of lawyers (and police) to defend every square inch of property at home and armies of soldiers to defend the flow of cheap oil abroad.

We motored over to some cliffs, which I scaled (like an albino alopecia-ed ape) to find myself looking down at the water 20ms below with a skinny 9 year old girl next to me. She calmly told me she’d jumped four times already, took two steps and plunged without a squeal. I couldn’t back out after that and I told myself it wasn’t as high as it looked- surely it was just an optical illusion borne by the lack of a reference point. I gritted my teeth, girded my loins and stepped off, and just as I wondered why I was still in the air, I pindropped into the water. Human noses are designed for swimming, not plunging, and my skull was given an unexpected enema. I came up spluttering and laughing and did it again and again and again, stopping only when my ex-Marine friend performed a perfect swan dive from a bit lower down. I thought I’d give that a try and took to the sky but I must have chickened out at the last minute and gone foetal, because I bellywhacked into the water. Huddled deep underwater, I did a systems check to ensure there were no physical or costume malfunctions. My thighs were bruised, my stomach ached and I wondered abstractly whether it was possible to fracture a foreskin. My pride was irreparably damaged and I was greeted at the surface with all the laughter and mocking and sympathy I deserved. My diving days on the Redneck Riviera were done.

I drove back through the back of North Carolina, taking country roads and national park detours where possible. All manner of mangled critters and varmints passed beneath my tires- opossums (I wonder if there are also okangaroos, owombats and okoalas…), armadillos, even an ex-raccoon, but was very pleased when a little bambi pranced across the road on the Blue Ridge Parkway. In a Charlotte diner, the newspaper told the story of a New Jersey preacher who was told by God in a dream to take his flock to North Carolina, swelling the local population by 60 (saved) souls. There was another article showing an anti-Obama protester at a Presidential event bearing a “the tree of liberty must be watered (from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots)” placard and…a 9mm AUTOMATIC PISTOL holstered to his thigh, as was his constitutional right. Unbelievable! This is a country with a history of using black politicians for target practice and for whisking people away just because they have the wrong name to Diego Garcia or Djibouti for exotic waterboarding and testicle electrocution holiday. Its one thing to not agree with what a person says but die for his right to say it, its another thing to agree with a man’s right to hold a gun and then die because he doesn’t agree with what you say. And cars there don’t have to have number plates on the front, as if allowing criminals to buy assault weapons didn’t give them enough of a headstart on the cops…

But I love the South. Such good people.
I only drove on the wrong side of the road twice.
I ate grits.

English banker piñata

2009-07-29T06:00:00.000+10:00

Flagellation is a time-honoured and respected English vice and the GFC (not to be confused with the BFG) has given wonderful scope for its indulgence, at least with regard to the fallen banking industry.

I counted at least 5 titles in the Heathrow airport bookstore (not known for its range in the first place) bewailing/celebrating the amoral excesses of the London bankers. One was called "Beer and Loathing in the City". Another was simply called "Tomas" and I opened it at a random page purely on the strength of a two-word recommendation from Stephen Fry on a nearby poster ("Absolutely" and "Brilliant" were the words procured from the "manque intellectual booby" (as the Daily Mail referred to the much beloved gay avuncular badger-cross-walrus), presumably at hideous expense.) where I found a banker suspended naked but-for-truffles-on-the-wi

lly above leaping ravenous truffle pigs, being forced to confess he was only it for the money, strippers and hookers and had a rubbish family life. Boohoo!

Railing at bankers' greed is like criticising a prostitute for being promiscuous. Its their job! People pay them to try and make them as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. Trying to legislate against people taking risks and losing money reminds me of the Onion headline in response to anti-globalisation protesters- "WTO gives in. Utopia to start tomorrow." And I don't for a second swallow the twaddle that "bankers had constructed financial instruments and models that were too complex for the risks to be understood." If you don't like the motives of your financial intermediaries or the products they spruik, don't give them your life savings.

Every inflight movie on British Airways was preceded by a jaunty 30 second promotion extolling Wales as a vibrant, diverse place to do business, in which every second scene featured a very happy black fellow. I think he was Daffyd Token, the only black man in the vullage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4zx1ZX8GW4

Prague

2009-07-21T05:56:00.000+10:00

Prague old city is where good Melbournians go after they die. In Melbourne, your social status is measured by how many cosy cafes and bars you know that can only be found down labryinthine alleyways with the aid of a hipster douchebag sherpa and military-strength GPS. While the Prague thoroughfares sport large bars and cheap beer to distract and detain the hordes of American youth discovering the exciting novelty of passports and alcohol, the rest of the city is a beautifully beguiling maze of cobblestoned streets, time-travel architecture (including grand entrances made for horse-and-carriage), jazz, blues, coffee, pilsner, pumping dub, candles and timber and stone and shadows, absinthe.

Amazing how far it has travelled since the dark, dour and dowdy days of Kundera-land (ah the heroes with feet of clay- Michael Jackson who paid $20m to silence a child, Paul Keating, Gough Whitlam and Gareth Evans who fawned on Suharto and sold out East Timor, Bill Clinton who cut-and-ran on Somalia and dithered-and-cried on Rwanda, and Milan Kundera the secret police informer). I imagine in winter it still has much of the INXS, "Never Tear Us Apart" gloom to it.

And listening to the language here, I realised Slartibartfast's true origins. He is obviously Czek, where his name is spelt, "Claati Bortvascht".
(Just wiki'ed Mr Bartfast and apparently Douglas Adams gave birth to him as "Phartiphukborlz".)

Triple J Hottest 100 songs of all time

2009-07-14T05:53:00.000+10:00

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hottest100_alltime/countdown/cd_list.htm

No girls allowed.

Hottest 100 Of All Time 2009

1.
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
2.
Rage Against the Machine - Killing In The Name
3.
Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
4.
Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
5.
Radiohead - Paranoid Android
6.
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
7.
Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye
8.
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under The Bridge
9.
Foo Fighters - Everlong
10.
Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven
11.
John Lennon - Imagine
12.
Oasis - Wonderwall
13.
Radiohead - Creep
14.
The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
15.
Radiohead - Karma Police
16.
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
17.
Hilltop Hoods - The Nosebleed Section
18.
Muse - Knights Of Cydonia
19.
Metallica - One
20.
White Stripes - Seven Nation Army
21.
Powderfinger - These Days
22.
Massive Attack - Teardrop
23.
Hunters & Collectors - Throw Your Arms Around Me
24.
The Beatles - A Day in the Life
25.
Pearl Jam - Alive
26.
Michael Jackson - Thriller
27.
Powderfinger - My Happiness
28.
Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees
29.
Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
30.
Jimi Hendrix - All Along the Watchtower
31.
Metallica - Enter Sandman
32.
New Order - Blue Monday
33.
Silverchair - Tomorrow
34.
The Living End - Prisoner Of Society
35.
Smashing Pumpkins - 1979
36.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Into My Arms
37.
Tool - Stinkfist
38.
The Killers - Mr Brightside
39.
Pearl Jam - Better Man
40.
Nirvana - Come As You Are
41.
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
42.
Bloc Party - Banquet
43.
The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
44.
The Beatles - Hey Jude
45.
Queens of the Stone Age - No One Knows
46.
Faith No More - Epic
47.
John Butler Trio - Betterman
48.
Beastie Boys - Sabotage
49.
Guns 'N Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine
50.
Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over
51.
Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings
52.
You Am I - Berlin Chair
53.
Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
54.
The Cure - Close To Me
55.
Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone
56.
Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should Have Come Over
57.
Tool - Forty Six & 2
58.
Daft Punk - Around The World
59.
Augie March - One Crowded Hour
60.
Johnny Cash - Hurt
61.
Blur - Song 2
62.
Nine Inch Nails - Closer
63.
AC/DC - Thunderstruck
64.
Violent Femmes - Blister in the Sun
65.
Underworld - Born Slippy
66.
Elton John - Tiny Dancer
67.
Ben Folds Five - Brick
68.
Blink 182 - Dammit
69.
Jeff Buckley - Grace
70.
The Prodigy - Breathe
71.
The Smiths - How Soon Is Now?
72.
The Shins - New Slang
73.
The Clash - London Calling
74.
Nirvana - Lithium
75.
Green Day - Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)
76.
The Stone Roses - Fools Gold
77.
Gotye - Hearts A Mess
78.
Smashing Pumpkins - Today
79.
David Bowie - Life on Mars
80.
The Rolling Stones - Paint It Black
81.
Pulp - Common People
82.
System Of A Down - Chop Suey!
83.
Placebo - Every You Every Me
84.
Bob Marley & The Wailers - No Woman, No Cry
85.
The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You
86.
The Beatles - Come Together
87.
Coldplay - Yellow
88.
The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter
89.
Rage Against the Machine - Bulls On Parade
90.
Kings of Leon - Sex on Fire
91.
AC/DC - Back In Black
92.
Bon Iver - Skinny Love
93.
Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy
94.
Modest Mouse - Float On
95.
Stevie Wonder - Superstition
96.
Daft Punk - One More Time
97.
Midnight Oil - Beds Are Burning
98.
Led Zeppelin - Kashmir
99.
TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me
100.
Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out

Hong Kong- June 28, 09

2009-07-10T05:49:00.001+10:00

Drinking a beer at the Cheung Chao Windsurfing Club, looking out over the beach.
Dark evening storm clouds, like the underbelly of a vast flying dragon, descend upon the silver sunset. Rain roars on the roof. I smile.

Chopping wood with Buddha

2009-06-16T05:46:00.000+10:00

I was chopping wood today and thinking about the notion of Buddhist compassion and thought of a nice metaphor-
We are all born into stormy seas of confusion, desires, endless racing thoughts and emotions and we strain on our broken oars as best we can, round and round in twisted circles, seemingly all alone. Compassion comes from first realising that everyone else is stuck in the same storm, so we can't be too hard on ourselves or others. And not only are we in the same storm, we are actually in the same boat, so it helps if we can try and row in the same direction, if we can.

Put that in a fortune cookie and smoke it.

Austria and China- Almost philosophy of all the stars

2009-04-20T03:04:00.006+10:00

Vienna

A drunk in a suit walking to the station after after-work drinks, radiating wobbly and completely unrequited universal benevolence.

Jabberers in the cafe, a sea of swaying cigarettes pointing ceiling-wards, like so many periscopes, or drowning people breathing through reeds.

I think rock stars and Germans/Austrians account for the largest share of the global male leather trousers market.

Big posters of Tom Cruise in his latest Nazi film, Valkyrie (a wretched mishmash of accents), defaced with Hitler moustaches.

Ostensibly heterosexual Scientologists, Tom Cruise and John Travolta are apparently doing a remake of that classic gay movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…Hmmm.

Surely Italy has produced singers other than Laura Pausini and Zuchero for Italian restaurants and cafes to play?

I took in the Senegalese joy of Orchestra Baobab, like an African Buena Vista Social Club, in the opulent Vienna Konzerthaus. Normally staid Vienna untucked their shirts from their undies and were dancing in the aisles to the infectious Afro-Latin grooves. A few frowners stayed put though, muttering to their spouses about the proximity of unattended valuables to black men.

Snow that bubbles atop the chimney flutes, like pop corn popping.

Snow in a slight beeze that meanders along sideways, like coral spawning.

Tiny, tiny, specks of snow, that dart in and out of your vision like the little wiggles you only see when your close your eyes and look at your lids or like exotic quantum particles.

Snow out my window like dandelion spores on the wind in some super detailed Japanese CGI anime.

Ski slopes-people walk around gingerly in ski boots like they'd just been kicked in the balls. It’s also about as close as white men get to a black man's strut.

Snow in the streets- Narnia one day, sludge the next. Swaddled pedestrians shuffle across the ice in a side-to-side rocking motion to maximise surface contact like penguins, in a fillip towards convergent evolution.

A gaggle of English scrubbers boarding a Gatwick flight at Schiphol. One Eliza Doolittle squawks in clipped consonants and violated vowels-

"…put on me fancy knickers and lippy cos I'm goin over to his tonight...hang on..."

She turns to her friend and screeches-

"You didn't tell me you f*cked him! You just said you did your "little things" together"- waggling dismissive fingers at her friend's groin.

Friend looks mortified. "I did tell you!". Other friends chip in with support- "yeah, she told everyone she f*cked him".

"No, look, it doesn't ma'er...but, you know, you just said you just did finger stuff...you know...you-sucked-him, he-licked-you and stuff...you didn't say you F*CKED him first. Not that he's anything special. But I don't really care." The friend mumbles, "But I did tell you...", while other friends pat her on the back and say, "It's ok, love", as they remove all their cheap bling to feed through the xray machine. They continue like this all the way through the boarding tunnel. I look aghast about me in disbelief that people could speak like that in public and look for hidden cameras for some reality TV show. How did Ryanair passengers get on a BA flight...?

Guangzhou airport.

Man in the departure lounge loudly honks some snot into a tissue. Well, at least he's using a tissue. That's an improvement on the last time I was here. He looks at his snot, looks for a place to put the tissue, and ends up jamming it between the airport seats.

I hold myself back from remonstrating. Something about this country turns me into a hygiene Nazi. China, the Plague Mother.

Hangzhou airport-

AUD$12 cups of bad coffee, the proprietors apparently believing the secret to Starbuck’s success is overpricing (rather than fostering and feeding a dependency). China will be a scary place once everyone’s hooked on caffeine. It will put the Opium War to shame.

Last remaining strands of hair on a man's head doing heroic work covering for his lost comrades in a gallant comb over.

Hangzhou-

City laid out in perfectly gridlocked grid.

China has leapfrogged the West with the prevalence of electric scooters. For less than USD$400, you can buy a bike that cruises at up to 30kph (fast enough to conveniently get around without menacing cyclists and pedestrians) with a range of around 30kms on a single charge from a rechargeable battery around half the size of a car’s. You can fit an entire OneChild Family on such a beast.

Last time I was in China, I noted the government selectively uses Western media on television to show its people they are not missing out on anything. That time it was Police Academy 2. This time it was televised curling.

Ruddycheeked peasant street sweepers on bicycles, carrying long brooms of bamboo and leaves. Grandparents taking children, perched on electric scooters, to school. Endless new boulevards lined with trees and shrubs that must have previously been prepared in vast vats in cities devoted to nothing else and rolled out.

Canal-side parks, with spring blossom drifting gently in the breeze, that are inexplicably unpatronised.

Beautifully wooded hills on outskirts. Trees so slender, high and green, if you look up you can almost see Shaolin monks sprinting across the tops.

Bought an Australian-municipal-celebration amount of fireworks for AUD50 and blew them up in the bikelane outside our house in the middle of the night. Excellent fun. A guard wandered over as we were setting up, not to dissuade us, but to offer us a lighter while he called his friends on the radio to watch. The right to bear fireworks is one of china's few inalienable constitutional rights that are enforced in practise. They also have the right

· to spit watermelon seeds

· to noisy indignation

· to wear pleated trousers, belted above patriotic potbellies, with polo shirts.

· to permed hair and figure enhancing undergarments

· to only conduct meaningful business or politics within the privacy of one's favourite banquetroom or brothel

· to mangle English for the amusement of foreigners

· to Andy Lau

· to Yao Ming

· to Lei Feng

· to curse the Japanese while buying their produce

· to small dogs as accessories and entrees

· to not be hindered by the tyranny of queues

· to manifest destiny.

Who can, without prejudice, truly say the Chinese people are without rights!

Chinglish too common to enumerate but one t-shirt stood out "Almost philosophy of all the stars". Composed by genius or random generator.

-----------

We are all would-be singularities- imagining we exist in a single eternal and immortal moment of infinite possibility and potential- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary. The true genius of human evolution is an ageing process so gradual that the consciousness rarely notices. Somehow death always comes as a surprise party.

George Michael and the Pope would have you believe that all you need in life is a little faith. But actually a frequently renewed suspension of disbelief should be sufficient.

Ramadan, Eid- Libya, Switzerland, Austria

2008-10-19T13:13:00.001+11:00

Final Days of Ramadan- Libya

De Niro in Taxi Driver gives the professional road-ragist’s lament- “Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Jack Nicholson says something similar in Batman- “This town needs an enema!”. I don’t want to draw down a fatwa upon myself or anything by making any direction comparisons, but Ramadan does a mighty good job of cleaning the streets and traffic jams of Tripoli. First there is the Killing Hour just before sunset, where a city of starving, thirsty, cold-turkeyed nicotine-coffee junkies take to the roads to get home in time to break their fast. Then tumbleweeds and crickets…

Sometimes the Call to Prayer is the most soulful thing I’ve ever heard. Sometimes it sounds like the opening bars of Elvis Presley’s “Kung Fu Fighting”. Sometimes it sounds like the staggered howling of neighbourhood dogs.

It seems in Libya the purpose of a roundabout is to allow cars to enter crowded intersections as fast as possible. Cars entering seem to have right of way, while those already on must take evasive manoeuvres. This is different to Canberra, where roundabouts are a defensive mechanism, designed to thwart and confuse invading armies.

I see regular accidents and some are fatalistic, saying Allah protects and dispatches as he sees fit, while others say stupid driving is suicide, which Allah does not permit.

It seems to me that too often religion equals “men with beards taking themselves too seriously”. If patriotism is the refuge of the scoundrel, religion and politics are too often the refuge of those replacing their lost youth with power….

Arabic is a language where all the vowels have been replaced by coughs.

After Ramadan, Eid- Switzerland and Austria

I arrive in Geneva on Easyjet. I look at the gougingly expensive food on the Easyjet menu and it suddenly occurs to me that I should buy as much as I can and stuff my pockets, for these prices will be nothing compared to what awaits me in Switzerland…

Both the Swiss and Libyans I meet seem rather pleased that their otherwise overlooked countries got a bit of press recently for a silly bilateral incident that I can’t really mention. I’m sure there is a whole slew of small nations that would enter the diplomatic equivalent of “Big Brother” if they could, just for any exposure at all. Burkina Faso would shower nude on television, Uruguay would snog Latvia in the spa, Burundi would confess its teenage eating disorder etc. The UN General Council is about as close as many get, I suppose…

Geneva seems to sport demographic proportions of European, African and Arab not too dissimilar to Tripoli. Apart from that, couldn’t be much more different.

I see a black woman on old-school rollerskates, pushing along her baby in a stroller at ungodly speeds…

If the Yarra was as clear as the Rhone, you'd probably be able to finally properly count all the corpses drifting down from the Casino. Such beautiful water that is clearly limestone flavoured snow. Want to dive in and float all way to the Med...

I’m staying here with a good friend, doubly cursed with the name “Mohammed Cohen”. Luckily he’s blessed with a goodly streak of genius.

Got lost looking for my friend’s place and made some friends with some UNHCR interns doing a spot of drinking-supermarket-beer-in-the-park, for they get paid nothing in the most expensive place on earth. Much of the UN’s legwork gets done by Europeans on internships and dodgy short-term contracts (e.g. where, for accounting purposes, they are considered to be photo-copiers or forklifts, not actual people) because permanent positions are so often distributed through cutthroat horse-trading among the “under-represented” countries and ultimately allocated to timeservers, placesitters, and political appointees. The UN- lifting people out of poverty one person at a time…and no more. Geneva is a great place to see this dynamic at work…

I see a poster for an upcoming referendum showing multi-coloured hands dipping at the same fondue pot. I’m sure its for something admirably liberal and progressive but can’t help thinking of Maggie Blackamoor from Little Britain- (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=iAnmGTrZe-c&feature=related) and Asterix in Helvetica (which involved some sort of Roman fondue orgy that featured penalties for losing your bread in the cheese…)

Every train station has a big billboard for men’s underwear featuring a man in said underwear flanked by a black woman in underwear and…a goat…Its always the people that seem the most straight-laced…

Took a daytrip by train from Geneva to the alpine town of Gruyere, famous for its cheese. Beautiful journey, tracking along the lake and the terraced and manicured vineyards but The Rapture must be imminent because the train broke down (it even made the news the next day) before Lausanne and we had to improvise on suburban trams and buses.

For some reason, every semi-touristic place in Switzerland needs to have a museum dedicated to HR Giger (the chap famous for designing the Alien in Aliens) and Gruyere is no exception. I don’t like eroticised cyborg horror enough to pay CHF12 for it. Actually, a bit embarrassed to say that I didn’t really like cheese enough to pay for the local speciality. Or castles enough to pay to go in. Though quite happily paid for the local beer and white wine…

Lovely stroll in the mountains. Cows meander and moo. We wondered if farmers get their friends to dress up in pantomime cow costumes when the subsidy inspectors come to visit.
I see so many fluffy plump sheep in Europe yet find it very hard to get lamb cutlets in any restaurants…Having subsidised these animals to within an inch of an African’s life, I don’t want to think of what they do to them if they don’t eat them…

An eagle in a meadow dipping and turning, trying to catch a thermal. Proud Swiss flags. Cuckoo clock houses.

Hillary Clinton liked to say it takes a village to raise a child...the Swiss seem to believe it takes a crane to build a house....little country villages with cranes sticking out of them...

An Italian tells me the Italian govt will pay 60% of the price of any car bought by a legally blind person. So his 94yo blind aunt buys a fancy subsidised Volvo, he pays her and drives it...

An Austrian tells me the Swiss go down to their cellars to laugh. My Tourettes made me make a “joke” about Austrians and cellars. I think I might need medication…

Very beautiful here in early autumn. I squint my eyes and try and imagine it all covered in snow for the winter.

The valley meadows are littered with giant multicoloured spheres that I first suspect might be tedious modern art but turn out to be wrapped hay bails…nice…

An awful lot of cornfields...didn't realise it was such a Swiss staple…

The local newspaper features a busty farmgirl in lingerie and a pitchfork on page 1, next to stories in German of banks crashing and American politicians blinking.

According to the economic textbooks written by economists- a “downturn” is when your neighbour loses his job, a “recession” is when you lose your job and a “depression” is when an economist loses his job. My initial response is shrugged shoulders. You play at the casino with your own money and the golden rule applies- only bet what you're prepared to lose. Many made their fortunes in the property bubble. Many doubled-up their bets, even long after basic indicators of value (e.g. The rental return vs the interest rate/ mortage repayments as % of monthly salary/house price as multiple of annual salary) were way out of whack. It is wrong to blame this on lying bankers or sub-prime deceptions. Essentially, the largest demographic in the western world, the baby-boomers, met with the cheap credit flooding the world from the historic rise of China and India and the oil states and leveraged their substantial life-savings and their peak earning years to play a pyramid game with each other's houses. Of course the music had to stop eventually. Just a tragic shame that this huge amount of marshalled capital was not directed at repairing the environment, or eliminating poverty, or making the basic social contract that our children are born into more efficient, effective and rewarding, or even just for productive investment (infra-structure, R&D etc), not speculation. These have been wasted years. But it is not our financial or political system to blame. It is ourselves.

If I were world president and God- I would make any bailout/rescue package be financed by those who profited from the bubble. Just go back through the tax records and retrospectively triple the capital gains tax levied on earlier house sales.

And which idiot forgot to include house prices in the CPI?

And how come the Americans throw taxpayers’ money at companies when things go wrong and call it Keynes? Why is there no talk of Economics 101’s “automatic stablilisers”- a progressive tax system and a generous welfare system that moderates the economic cycle by taking extra during good times and paying-out extra during bad times? It took WW2 and the threat (and siren call) of communism to civilise Europe’s economy. Behind the Atlantic and Pacific moats, the robber barons still haunt America but its political system is dynamic enough for it to catch up and I think we are seeing that now…You can fool some of the people, some of the time…

Between Zurich-Sargard. Cliffs, dusted with pines, glistening lakes fed by waterfalls, depth of turquoise varying with the depth of water. Mountains upon mountains. Little clouds collaring the peaks. A few reflecting the whiteness of the clouds on the upper peaks with fresh snow. Vaulted bolts of sunlight blessing a favoured meadow through the clouds. Every hill, both lonely and haughty, boasts a church, chapel, castle, chalet or chateau in varied states of age and repair. Hours and hours of stunning beauty, all the way to Vienna.

I'd always thought of these peaks and places as part of my Western birthright, but have waited this long to inspect my patrimony.
But it is not the first time I have visited the realm of angels. 10 years ago I touched the sky in northern Pakistan in the Karakorum ranges, where the Himalayas start their mighty march. Then I was amongst the poorest in the world, whose lives depended on their goats and tiny plots of grain. Who faced the winter winds and snow in stone huts, dirt floors, without electricity or running water. They likely didn't even have title over their land, let alone a bank account or police force or much else beyond their faith in Allah (and the Agha Khan, the 42nd imam). Here I am again in the clouds but this time amongst the world's richest people. They have their own money, as well as a goodly proportion of the rest of the world's, in their bank accounts. Their women are better educated than their men. They keep their crops and cows and God as national hobbies. 'tis an interesting contrast.

I see the almost hubristic Swiss manicured perfection in the face of altitude, avalanches, snow, seasons, cliffs and warring neighbours and it occurs to me that the obsessive compulsives shall inherit the earth…the West frets that the Chinese are driving them into a race to the bottom, but the ultra-rationalist-neurotic West are not necessarily driving the world in a better direction...I look at the Swiss, Germans and Austrians and suspect they all have their shirts tucked into their underpants...and examine their stool before flushing... Austrians put grills like fencing masks over their urinals, presumably to dissipate splash back...

Vienna- found a tourism brochure for Australia in a cafe and was a bit perturbed to see the word "lebensraum" in a headline....not sure we want to really encourage that notion...

A Russian girl seems surprised she can’t get through security at Heathrow with a belt made of bullets....

TRAVELS IN FIRSTCLASSLANDIA

2008-10-18T12:08:00.005+11:00

There are many strange things about Libya. One of the strangest is that you can buy first class tickets on reputable airlines at a fraction of their normal cost. Thus, I was able to infiltrate the snooty snout of an Emirates Airbus from Tripoli to Sydney, via Dubai. Of course first-class and business class have their own check-in line at chaotic Tripoli airport, but because so many people in Tripoli are in on the lark, I found it quicker to line up in the Economy row (or is that column?...too much Excel). Once checked-in, you may enter the first-class/business lounge, where the sofas are plush, the TVs wide and Al-Jazeer-y/BBC-ish, the only International Herald Tribune gets pilfered early on and the Tripoli Post is all yours. You can smoke, microwave up a mini-pizza and enjoy your near-beer, but I'm sorry Sir, the wi-fi is down at the moment. When you board you are spoiled with champagne, "special" Arabian coffee and dates, and the hostesses do a truncated dance-of-the-thousand veils, losing their headdress and then jackets as the flight goes on (I notice these things because I have been in Libya, where you are lucky to see a woman's shadow).

The only drawback of getting dirt-cheap Libyan first-class tickets is that you have to take a backwards detour to Dubai via Tunis.There is a place in the world called Sfax. You cool your heels on the tarmac of Carthage International Airport (where you half-expect to see Hannibal's elephants spilling out of a nearby hangar) for a couple of hours, while rather hot and ragged menial folk come in from the blasting heat outside and clean around you and hand you your fresh blankets. The pilot apologises for it taking an hour longer than it should have but apparently it was because "we were loading luggage on".

Then you're off again, finally tracking East over the Mediterranean to the polished t… of the Arabian Gulf, Dubai. The polluted sky, sand and tarmac are all the same colour and the infernal heat makes you wonder why they need oil at all when the air itself must be hot enough to drive pistons. The airport contains the same duty-free junk the world all over, an incongruous Irish pub and half of Africa, Arabia and the Indian sub-continent sprawled asleep on chairs, behind pot plants and on the floor. In the First Class lounge, an earnest Filipino will do his best to help you scoff as much fake bacon and real eggs as you can for breakfast. He is so helpful and earnest when there is no chance of any tip that you look around for cameras and taser turrets to account for it…

From Dubai, the thick rich First-class cream gets separated from the Business class froth- they get their own private quarters for the 14 hour flight to Sydney. Plastic partitions completely separate you from your neighbour in front and behind while, at the press of the button, plastic doors slide shut along the aisle, leaving your First Class personage in Splendid Isolation. Almost. The doors are only about 5 feet high, meaning the craning necks of hosts, hostesses and fellow passengers can still peer over and see if one is getting too comfortable with one's self. For what it's worth, having given it much thought, I've concluded that economy class is better for high-altitude hanky-panky- you are not separated from your neighbour and what doesn't go on under a blanket? For the kinky-minded, the airline also thoughtfully provides blindfolds to take home to the missus.

I have one complaint- there is nothing worse than when the fellow reading the safety instructions sounds like he is afraid of flying. He stutters, pauses to catch his breath, whimpers a little. You're 11kms in the air, hurtling along at around 11kms a minute, and the man responsible for your safety is turtling.

Once settled in your quarters you can begin to explore- a little bench by the window has a basket of welcome chocolates (with a little tube of Pringles that look likes its about to explode due to the pressurisation in a geyser of fat-saturated slivers), and at the press of a button a minibar selection of drinks is supposed to rise up smoothly like a supervillian revealing his secret weapon, but it sort of shudders instead. The arm rests are supposed to unobtrusively lock away, but only one of mine does. The laptop power recharger automatically turns off at the slightest turbulence…and doesn't turn back on again. Apparently you can send emails and texts for $1 a pop but, "I'm sorry sir, comsat is down." Airlines seem to have so much trouble with all these moving parts that I sometimes think they would be better giving each passenger nothing more than an I-pod and a beanbag and be done with it. That said, your seat opens, shuts and folds itself like a Swiss-army knife at the touch of a button, reclining to a full bed and giving targeted vibrations to make up for the lack of company.

To make your journey more pleasant, you are given a fluffy duvet and brown Emirates pajamas/track-suit. I close my shutters and change into mine and moon all of Sri-Lanka in the process. I'm not sure if brown track-suits are in proper accordance with my First Class majesty and I wondered what would be worse- to crash and die in a brown Emirates tracksuit or crash and survive and be rescued in a brown Emirates tracksuit. At any rate, they are great equalisers and I nod at my fellow sheikhs, oil barons and Tripoli scammers as we pass each other on the way to the loo with great equanimity and equality. The bathroom is richly appointed with expensive smellies and ointments and unguents and triple-bladed razors and such.

When it comes to alcohol, Libya is drier than the Sahara, so I admit I was tempted to order the entire drinks menu as a milkshake with a wafer on top. But there's nothing more pathetic than a solitary drunk, so I settled for a celebratory Moet Chandon 2000 to settle in, a 1994 Bordeaux with my filet mignon and some port after. A 19inch television on the wall in front of you has over 600 movies and TV shows. I content myself with the fancy noise-reducing headphones and the new albums from Goldfrappe, the Raconteurs and Cold Play and the old album of the Stone Roses (God's balls! Did they really come out 20 years ago?...fark…).

There was a Korean businessman two cubicles down from me who lined up all the alcohol in his minibar in a little row on his bench and used his duvet to make a roof over his section, in the same way little children put a blanket over two chairs to make a little house. I heard little snuffling noises from that direction occasionally and Korean mutterings and moanings and then, 2/3 of the way through the flight, he leapt up from his blanket house with a loud "Aha!" and stood there, naked except for an Emirates tracksuit sweater streaked with unidentifiable stains, with an empty bottle of Moet Chandon in one hand and his anatomy in the other, swaying and thrusting his hips at the other passengers and stewardesses and singing a Barry Manilow number. Two flight marshalls appeared but were to revolted to tackle him. After a brief discussion, they tasered him, wrapped him up in his duvet and stashed him in the coat cupboard for the rest of the flight.

That didn't actually happen, but it could have and probably will.

Holland- Snuf de Hond

2008-08-10T23:08:00.000+10:00

Arrived in Amsterdam just in time for the Gay Pride march/ canal float. More gayness than you can poke a dick at. Fey gays and stoutly built dykes abound.

Particular alchemy of doof-doof bass and falsetto treble mixed with 80's homo hymns that resonates in the avid homosexualist's hips, heart and loins to compel an unholy Dance of St Vitus
.
Amsterdammers watch with bemusement from their bridges and canalhouse windows and every day the sea tide flushes clean the canals and sins of the city.

2 gays in matching sedgways swish by...

Local movies in the cinema-
Snuf de Hond
Plop en de Kabouterschat 2008
I schat you not.

North Korean Flying Circus is in town.
My uncle opined that whatever flying there was would probably be tethered to restrict defection.
I would love to see tubby Kim Jong Il as the Ringmaster- "Radies and Gentleman! So ronery!"

Little clumps of clouds hugging low over Switzerland like a swarm of fluffy tendrilly jellyfish. The dun patchwork plains of Spain.

Asterix in Libya

2008-07-13T03:43:00.000+10:00

ASTERIX IN LIBYA

It was my birthday this week and to put my feelings of ancient decrepitude into perspective I drove the 130kms to the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna. Along the way, Italian radio from Sicily and Genoa crackled while, almost the whole way, stores of varied persuasion lined one side of the road and the long white beach the other. Tripoli families guarded their patch of sand like territorial Antarctic elephant seals.

I arrived at Leptis Magna and felt a bit like Asterix in Libya.

Leptis Magna was founded by Rick Fox's seafaring Phoenician ancestors around 1100 BC as a trading port for ivory, gold, camels and slaves from the African interior. It was nominally within the Carthage orbit from 400BC and then incorporated into the Roman Empire after the 3^rd Punic War. But it wasn't until local-boy-made-good, Septimius Severus, became Emperor of Rome in 193 AD that the city became prime Mediterranean real estate. Some Ebonologists claim his ascension as an African victory over Europe. And Jesus was a black, man. It fell into disrepair in 493AD after Vandals captured Catharge and its surrounds from the Romans and pulled down the city's walls to discourage local rebellion. A short while later, grateful Berber raiders swept down from the hills and sacked the place.

The entrance to Leptis Magna is lined, incongruously for an Australian, by an honour guard of eucalyptus trees. In the shade of one I was approached by an earnest guide named Usama ("No relation, hehe…I can converse in all topics in English- history, anthropology, geography…I'm sorry? Politics?...ah, no. sorry. Not that one..haha…I am interested in culture and language so I can speak with all the peoples…please tell me something in your local way of speaking…"I hope your…chooks?...turn into…emus?...and kick your..dunny?..down."…what does this mean? Ah, very funny….if you look down there, towards the Mediterranean, you can see a girl in a bikini!...yes, it is true!…she is Sally…She sells seashells by the seashore…hahaha!"

A guide being compulsory, I availed myself of Usama's company as he rattled off a machine-gun fire of memorised commentary. I had the most spectacular and unspoiled Roman ruins in the Mediterranean entirely to myself.

Hard to tell how much was original and how much restored by the good folk of UNESCO, but very easy to imagine togas and sandals strolling the same streets, markets, theatres and baths. Marvelled at those who had dug this out of the dirt. The desert sun beat down from the stark blue sky and from the top tier of the theatre the Mediterranean sprawled out to the summer horizon in even bluer shades. Had to remind myself that the columns were not just there because Romans liked to wander around in the sun with something to lean against sometimes, but that they once held up grand roofs and ceilings. Many of Leptis Magna's sublime columns of local and Egyptian marble, granite and alabaster can now be found propping up comparatively pedestrian structures in Windsor, Versailles and St Germain-de-Pres. Apparently three still stand stranded on the beach where an 18^th century French consul was unable to load them onto a barge.

Nearby is the port (well-preserved because, as the Emperor's glamour project, it did not take into account practical matters such as silting and hence was rarely used) and the colosseum, surrounded by a chariot drag strip. Septimius Severus was a stickler for rules, including Rome's "don't ask-don't tell" policy on Christians. While not actively seeking our Christians, those so accused could either curse Jesus and make an offering to Roman Gods or be executed. I imagine the colosseum, with its lovely sea views, also saw its share of Christian and lion shows. Recently excavated mosaics also apparently show pygmies fighting crocodiles. I've heard you have to go all the way to Cambodia to catch a double-act like that nowadays.

At the end of my time travel, I didn't feel quite as old anymore but felt much hotter, so I embraced the sea that had been by my side throughout the journey. The nearby beach had a few families frolicking in the sand, not so many in the sea. I ran in like a loon, as the cold raced up my legs, kicked me in the nuts on the way up and settled in my chest for awhile until my body temperature evened things up a little. Surprised and pleased to find that either the salt content of the Meditteranean was higher than Australian waters or my fat content had risen, but either way I could now float. In the past, floating had always been a rather short-lived battle between my natural (lack of) buoyancy and gravity, with my head surrendering last. But now I could lie back, star-fished and foetal at the same time, and bob in the gentle swell, sunlight filtering through my closed eyelids and the quiet rushhhhh of the sea in my ears. Such bliss. I know I'm getting old. In my younger years, I'd be doing somersaults and handstands and getting water up my nose. Now I was so glad to just lie there at peace.

After awhile, a local lad stroked out easily to join me. I'd been introduced to him earlier. As far as I could tell, he went by the most un-Arabic name of Monty and was a 2^nd year med-student at a nearby university. We exchanged greetings (according to the Koran or a Hadith, you get extra rewards in heaven for following up a greeting with a more elaborate response. This can lead to some very long greetings) and he pointed out some pretty blue jelly-fish pulsing through the water. This was why noone was swimming. I gingerly made my way back to shore, not knowing if Libyan jellyfish were like Australian stingers but, not seeing any vinegar anywhere, I did not fancy finding out the painful way that they were and trying to explain through sign language the correct response.

Settled back in a cane chair of a nearby café, cradled mint tea and read Hemingway's "Fiesta: The Sun also Rises"…With a shy smile, Monty rifled in his own bag and plucked out Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" in Arabic. Apparently, in English and Arabic, it is a common part of the advanced Libyan curriculum. It got better- he pulled out "100 Years of Solitude" in Arabic. I tried to corrupt him further by recommending Jack Kerouac's "On the Road".

Drove back to the city in the increasingly sepia toned light of evening falling. Roadside stalls sold honey and olive oil, like jars of bottled light in the fading streaking sun. At traffic lights, a pair of camels in the back of a ute stared at me obstinately. Further on, a car had been rear-ended and cracks in its windscreen attested to the tragic absence of seatbelt culture in this country.

My friend tells me during the Bosnian war, Libya took in Muslim refugees and the whole country looked on in envy as the television showed them drinking Pepsi and eating apples, while everybody else went without under the decade long American embargo.

Austria, Malta, Libya

2008-07-12T03:45:00.000+10:00

Austria, Malta, Libya

Austria doesn't seem the sort of place that would drive a man to acts of heinous indecency in the basement. Absolutely lovely in the summer. Morning jog around the Schonbrunn. In the Karlsplatz, drunken Spaniards toss a poor lone Croat in the air in jubilation at the latter country's win over Germany. Paid homage to Klimt's Kiss (officially the 2^nd most common art on a college freshman's wall, according to Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Judith. The basement of the Leopold Gallery contains a sadly neglected exhibition of the art of the Faroe Islands…A big sign at the entrance- "Faroe Islands- the World's Most Appealing Islands"…can't help thinking there's an appalling typo in there somewhere…

In Malta long enough for swordfish and beer overlooking a piazza, while semi-naked and oiled European men and women file down the medieval streets. Tripoli, Libya, is an hour and a universe away.

What do you know about Libya? President G@daffi? His famous female bodyguards? Lockerbie bombings? Bulgarian nurses? Tobruk, Rommel and the Desert Rats? Did you know the name is written in hieroglyphics in Egypt? Did you know that nowadays it goes by the euphonious acronym, the Great SPLAJ (Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya)? Did you know that its flag is completely green? Did you know that it has the largest oil reserves in Africa and the 9^th most in the world (behind Russia and before Mexico and US)? And with a population of 5.7m, and with oil prices as they are, if every Libyan was to put their share of the oil on E-Bay, they'd get about a million dollars each, probably in a last-minute bidding (and possibly real) war between the Chinese, Japanese, Indians and, of course, Americans.

Not surprisingly, shops and pockets are full…Yet for some reason the young taxi driver laments that despite being a Tripoli-born Libyan, his fresh Engineering degree only gets him 370 dinars (USD$350) a month, hence the taxi-driving gig….I compliment him on the fine Algerian Rai music pumping from the tapedeck. He smiles and rifles in his glovebox (narrowly avoiding a collision with the curb) for something special..."Jesus to a Child" from George Michael's "Older" album...it is a great album but even if I had the vocabulary, I wouldn't have had the heart to tell him it was an ode of love from one man to another...he followed this up with Celine Dion, nasally whining something in French…

Every day is 30 degree+, sun beats down, sea and sirocco breezes.

Beach visit on the Friday Sabbath, where Tripoli folk frolic. Families on one end, men on the other. Stickfest 2008. Ten boys for every girl, sing the Libyan Beachboys. Still, surprising to see Arab beach culture, with barbecues set up in the sand and little waves rising up against shore rocks. A Brazilian feel here, with the easy mixing of black, brown and white. A local tells me, "we are not racist for anything…except marriage...but it wasn't so long ago you couldn't marry someone unless they were your cousin...now at least a person from Tripoli can marry a person from Benghazi...not that you'd want to… Benghazis are rough as guts with black hearts..."

Petrol here is 15 cents a litre…Pity there aren't too many places you'd want to drive to…Roman ruins…beaches…tea in the Sahara…Tunisia a few hours away for a booze-run…at these prices, I suppose I worry needlessly that the air-conditioning is working full-time to freeze the high-ceilinged room while the front door is open to the summer heat…and the water in our fountain last saw sunlight when the Sahara was an Eden and is pumped from aquifers on the other side of the desert…

Some tell me Libyans receive 75% of construction costs for their houses from the government. And that Mr G@daffi recently promised every family USD$4000 a month…Others tell me this is rubbish….At any rate, building and renovating seems to be even more of a national sport here than it is in Australia. Lovely, lovely concrete seems to be the building block of choice, and everybody seems to be putting up concrete Scarface mansions/bunkers behind concrete walls in alleyways…The sort of place I imagine Uday Hussein having his final shoot-out with the Americans from…If urban Iraq is anything like this, it would be such a guerrilla heaven I'd expect to see winged Dian Fossey, Koko and even King Kong floating about on little clouds…(boom boom! Thank you , thank you, I'll be here all week)….

The Italians did a wretched job of colonising this country but they did a fine job of seeding it with espresso machines...

Cornflakes are available at $9 a box...but I can't find any fresh milk to put on it…like one-half of an O Henry story….I understand the Saudis are spending a good chunk of their oil revenues developing genetically engineered cows that can eat sand...

Our satelite dish seems to be pointing at a Ukrainian piece of the sky which gives us hardcore porn sandwiched between "zona romantica" Latin soap opera channels...apparently the previous maid, a Moroccana so rusticated she couldn't speak French, used to watch hardcore while doing the ironing...

There was a young man from Dubrovnik- England, Ireland, Croatia

2008-04-09T03:37:00.000+10:00

There was a young man from Dubrovnik- England, Ireland, Croatia

England-

England weather is like Melbourne's "Four seasons in one day" on speed. Snow fell in Easter, at first in delicate flutters, as if God's beanbag had sprung a leak while watching the telly, and then in whipping rips.

I rented a Renault "Megane" (which makes me giggle for no reason because it means "glasses" in Japanese. And on that matter, only the French would make a little nubbin of a car and call it the "Clio"…) and gallivanted across the countryside with my mother- Harry Potter Cambridge, Coventry (where the Germans bombed the cathedral and then kindly put it back together again), Bath via the sublime Cotswolds and back via more Harry Potter Oxford. As I experienced England mostly through a windscreen, I hoped to at least sample some local wildlife, if only through roadkill…how I longed to squish a curmudgeonly badger or a friendly stoat beneath my tyres…alas, I only saw pheasant and thought of how Danny the Champion of the World used to poach them with raisins on a string when he could have just peeled them off the asphalt….

The English are plainly bored with their language when they have road signs warning of "adverse camber" (does this mean "bad cheese"?) and "soft verges" when they could have just as easily as said "tight cornerl" and "soft edges", respectively…

And only someone born after 1950 would assume that the sign for "speed camera" was anything other than an obscure Aztec rune…

Stratford-on-Avon is a nice place for a cup of tea. That's probably the best that can be said for it, unless you get excited about seeing Shakespeare's second best friend's paddock.

Ireland

They say the Guinness tastes better in Ireland...it tastes the same..you can't improve on perfection...Just like a beer milkshake, only Irish.

I left a bit early to catch the famed splendour of the Running of the Vomit in Temple Bar...my Irish friend tells me the girls in mini-skirts in the freezing cold are English…I asked a random one and she says she was…

A Gaelic radio station playing zydeco, Irish airs, Gypsy Kings, Frankie goes to Hollywood and...an ironic Gaelic remix of House of Pain's iconic Jump Around (doubly ironic given how, for all House of Pain's sham shamrock tattoos, Hard Man scowls, bagpipes and Boston Celtics shirts, the most ethnic they got was Latvian- thanks, Wikipedia…) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZZADbubu0Y.

They say half of white men want to be Irish...and the other half want to be black...then the new breed of black Irish I saw must have the world at their feet...

Even the barmaids in Birr are Polish...

The mountains, fjords, moraines and wetlands of Connemara… where imperious sheep walk the roads like they own it...

Ireland seems like Argentina before the crash, when it was more expensive than Paris...like they were smugly pulling a swifty on the rest of the world...The collapse of the peso pulled the rug out from under that Latin craic....with bog standard 2br apartments in Dublin going for more than half-a-million euros, I think the housing market will do the trick there...

Somehow, somewhere, tracksuit replaced tartan as Ireland's national dress..

Journalist and former hostage Brian Keenan on the radio explaining how after 4 years chained by his ankle to a Lebanese wall, his physiotherapist tried to have him build muscle tone by...tying his ankle with a pilates elastic band to the wall...and how he eventually married her...

The Irish Travelling Community, or gypsies, were introduced to the world through the anthropological disquisition of Guy Ritchie's "Snatch", featuring Brad Pitt- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9XQvJX6OiA. In their homeland, they are also known as "Tinkers" (not to be confused with Irish philosophers…tink about it), "Pikeys" and "Knackers" (which apparently should never be spoken in their presence unless you want a man in a cheap tracksuit and a bad haircut putting a screwdriver through your heart). They have replaced leprechauns as the prime suspects when streetsigns are turned the wrong way or anything else goes wrong- fookin' eejut tinkers. And the real deal makes Brad Pitt's teeven' ways look amateur- while I was in Ireland, the headlines were screaming about a community of Pikeys who successfully turned the 37 acres they were squatting on into 5.5m Euros from the local council (http://www.independent.ie/national-news/travellers-raise-the-stakes-after-836455m-council-payout-1331743.html). I hope they make a reality TV show of what they do with the money- Pikeys in Ibiza.

Pikey on a Plane-

The woman on the plane tried to get the attention of the flight attendant rushing past-

"you go by very fast, don't you"

"i'm sorry, madam, but we're landing in 10 minutes".

She turned to the silver haired biddy next to her and said

"Polish....gay"

The old biddy replied, "They are lovely, aren't they?"

"Yeah, but you should have seen the treatment I got on the way up..

I asked the lady to help me with my bag and she said, "whatever." I stood up and said "what did you say to me?" and she says "take your medication and sit down"...oh I would have boxed her...I mean I didn't box her cos then they wouldn't let me fly again...but I would have boxed her, you know...spanish she was...assholes..."

Later she says…

"Oi'm going through security and your man asks me to take my boots off! N I say-"how come you only pick me out for searchin? I just look like a gyp, i'm not one."

Croatia

I arrive in Zadar on the Adriatic coast on a 10 squid Ryanair ticket.

Zadar was beseiged by the Venetians for 10 years til they persuaded some passing Crusaders to make a detour and have a crack. And Germans, Turks and Serbs all took their turn.

AC/DC and swastikas scribbled on bus shelters.

They've erected an ugly great unbroken sea wall of cement-block pensions and apartments from Sibenik to Split and beyond, which only repels good taste while stalling invading Germans and Italians at the shore...

The sheer limestone cliffs and turquoise water that stretch for hour after hour on the bus ride to Dubrovnik have spoiled my eyes for beauty. The best $32 I have ever spent.

"Drazen Petrovic- The Musical!"

The Balkans held out for centuries against the Islamofacists of the east but I fear they will soon fall to the euro-directives of the west against their sacred right to give you an ash tray with your coffee....may my children one day look upon an ashtray the way I would look today upon a snuffbox....

Borat has opened a hostel on the road between Sibenik and Split- Villa Vajina.

Snow on the frontier mountains of Bosnia. Dubrovnik is actually separated from the rest of Croatia at the coast by a little stretch of Bosnia, but only the Croatian guards seem interested in checking passports on the way out or in…I love those little enclaves…Kaliningrad…Oecussi…

The cascades of Krka.

Abandoned farm houses with collapsed roofs.

Mortar...sad the same word that keeps houses together also blows them apart...there's still a lot that's burnt and broken here...the people seem normal enough...but I can only imagine what it must be like to have your back to the ocean or the wall and know that its not paranoia but sanity to think that people are trying to kill you and to have to seriously consider how you and yours might be killed or worse and how you might have to kill...while Europe a few hours away parties like its 1999.

Capitalism comes with instructions- the biggest chain of supermarkets is called "Konzum"...

I went to Dubrovnik because I told a friend I loved the little ancient alleyways of Sana'a in Yemen and she said I should see Dubrovnik…I guess I got the ancient alleyways, but apart from sharing UNESCO heritage listings, the two cities could not be much further apart, culturally…The Yemenese would suicide bomb a United Colours of Benetton franchise in their midst on principle….and I would applaud…

I found myself stuck in a pizzeria next to two Americans who were bouncing turgid armchair MBA-speak between themselves (merits of slow versus high growth strategies, capital raising events etc.)...They asked me if I knew the best way to get into Albania...I suggested they buy a donkey....They were scouting for "investment opportunities in post-stress economies"...Ah, vultures...Given Albania is the sort of place where a pyramid scheme/scam bankrupts the country, the Americans probably thought they were in with a chance...But I'm tipping by this time now they are tapping on the American embassy door in Tirana with absolutely nothing but their underwear (if they're lucky) and bruises and a sad story of humiliation and loss, insisting to the sceptical guards they are American citizens in need of repatriation....

I had some coffee later with some American girls who asked me what language they speak in neighbouring Montenegro....

"Same as here, I think...serbo-croat"...

"Serbo-what…".

"Um, Serbo...from Serbia...you know Serbia?...um...Well you've heard of Yugoslavia? Well they had a war and...oh look, never mind..."

I haven't finished bagging Americans. They are the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to ridicule.

Spiel from Nikki, the waitress in a Dubrovnik café-

"I am not saying Americans are stupid...but they know very little.

An American woman from a cruise shop came in one day and asked me if she was in Italy...I said yes, you are in northern Italy...she asked how to get to the Vatican...I pointed her to the bus station and said she should just ask for a ticket...she came back three days later and screamed at me but I pretended I did not know her.

Stupid American. At least know which country you are in."

I was very nice to this waitress- at least until she had served me my food.

It reminded me of some Americans I met in the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem awhile back…They were pilgrims from Kentucky and Tennessee attracted by the cheeseburgers on offer (you can't get them in most places there because milk and meat together are not kosher). They were starving because they refused to eat anything vaguely local.

Some quotes-
"Hey Martha, waddya wanna drink?"
"What is there?"
"Well there's Nestea..."
"Nes-what?"
"Nestea."
"What?
"Nestea!"
".....I don't trust it. Give me a Coke."

"You know, I don't know if you know the term "to jew", but you gotta jew all the time here!"

For more anthropological background on the Balkans, may I recommend Marina Abramovic's seminal Balkan Erotic Epic- http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk7m0_balkaneroticepicmarinaabramovic

Other stuff

Someone seems to have queer-eyed Carlos Tevez since he arrived at Manchester United...

US Government= Buddhist Pacifists? Yoda?

"Nobody benefits from violence, so nobody wants to see that. But we believe that it is very important that in responding to these protests that the Chinese Government turn away from use of force or violence in responding to the protests.

State department spokesperson

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2008/mar/102248.htm"

Violence leads to hate…hate leads to terrorism…terrorism leads to war…war leads to freedom from terrrror…

The United States set back pacifism and non-violence 20 years when it comes to diplomacy…

Globalisation= Two Bulgarian sisters, 16 and 19, who were forced to work in an Italian circus where one had to go in a pool of piranhas and the other had snakes thrown at her…It is horrible…but…if only it wasn't real I wouldn't feel so guilty in finding it sort of funny…

Ligers are real?

Deb: What are you drawing?

Napoleon Dynamite: A liger.

Deb: What's a liger?

Napoleon Dynamite: It's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jmkpaw7yYg0&feature=related
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Borat's Running of the Jew was based on true events?- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9Yu0pWl38

Mark Twain writes in 1869 in The Innocents Abroad, from the perspective of a Roman peasant who has gone to the US and returned with incredulous stories for his compatriots-

"Jews, there, are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs. They can work at any business they please; they can sell brand new goods if they want to; they can keep drug-stores; they can practice medicine among Christians; they can even shake hands with Christians if they choose; they can associate with them, just the same as one human being does with another human being; they don't have to stay shut up in one corner of the towns; they can live in any part of a town they like best; it is said they even have the privilege of buying land and houses, and owning them themselves, though I doubt that, myself; they never have had to run races naked through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their religion especially and particularly cursed; at this very day, in that curious country, a Jew is allowed to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a rostrum in the public street and express his opinion of the government if the government don't suit him! Ah, it is wonderful."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5690/5690-h/5690-h.htm

A doctor friend recently told me how, as an intern effectively in charge of a country hospital, a female patient presented with back pain and numb legs...he suspected spinal nerve damage and phoned a senior colleague for advice...the senior doctor assured him the correct test in these cases was to...place one finger in the anus and rub the clitoris with the other and register the responsiveness of anal tone...he had a nurse give him a hand, as it were...May I lose my anal tone if I tell a lie….

Mark Twain’s "Shagmap of the Old Continent and the Levant" and other reviews...

2008-03-17T03:35:00.000+11:00

Mark Twain’s "Shagmap of the Old Continent and the Levant" and other reviews...

I shall give you some relief from my tedious travel scribblings and instead present you with Mark Twain’s "Shagmap of the Old Continent and the Levant", taken from his book "The Innocents Abroad"...

On the Moors (close lexical cousins to the Moops)-

"I have caught a glimpse of several Moorish women (for they are only human; and will expose their faces for the admiration of a Christian dog when no male Moor is by), and I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness."

On the Jews- "Their women are plump and pretty, and do smile upon a Christian in a way which is in the last degree comforting" (I think Rembrandt had a similar opinion, if his "Jewish Bride" is any guide...Van Gough sat in front of that painting all day and declared he would give 10 years of his life to be able to sit there another fortnight...as it turned out, unfortunately, Vincent gave away too many decades free of charge...)

On the French- "..(their women) had large hands, large feet, large mouths; they had pug noses as a general thing, and moustaches that not even good breeding could overlook; they combed their hair straight back without parting; they were not graceful; I knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and finally, to my thinking it would be base flattery to call them immoral."

And Wikipedia calls Mark Twain a "humanist"...

I love him dearly, nevertheless...

Some reviews

I’m Not There- Bob Dylan biopic...Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger et al take turns playing Uncle Bob Zimmerman. Historically faithful, down to the famous hand up the unwifely dress, and, unlike Scorcese’s earlier hagiography, carries on beyond cool Bob, to Loser Rambling Christian Bob. As the quintessential pop star, Bob, both personally and in his music, presented the world with evolving romantic images of familiar times past, mixed with pressing times now and mysterious times to come. This movie honours that in its segues between alternate Bobs, alternate legendscapes and alternate realities to give something beautiful and engaging and swirling, with only undercurrents of truth and meaning.

There Will Be Blood- Daniel Day Lewis gooning his way to another Oscar.

No Country For Old men- some art can only be redeemed by interpreting its depiction of gross and vile inhumanity as an attempt to take the viewer beyond the point of titillation and even disgust in order that they may locate their own personal boundary between entertainment and mental pollution. American Psycho fits this bill (and Borders must wonder who it is that always moves their copies of this book to unfindable places in the bookstore). No Country for Old Men is two movies. One is a Tarantino-esque blood and money feud between a psycopathic Javier Bardem (who kills people in ways you wish you didn’t know were possible) and a generic Action Jackson sort. The other is a sensitive and human depiction of the real hero, Sheriff Tommy Lee Jones, as he wrestles with real questions, as well as the incomprehensibility of the violence before him and, by extension, the enjoyment of it by the audience. It’s not called "Psycho-hunter Gets the Money". It’s called "No Country for Old Men". This is the only excuse I can find for the horrific things I saw. Yes, the Coen Brothers write amusing dialogue and have a finely tuned ear for the nuances of regional American accents.

Love in the Time of Cholera.- This is the film version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ epic book that inspired me to learn Spanish. Inevitably, it reminded me of the Woody Allen line- "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia." Despite this, the movie did the book justice, and it was a relief to see Javier Bardem not killing people with an air compressor.

Memories of my Melancholy Whores, Gabriel Garcia Marquez- It is the prerogative of Latin octogenarian male Nobel Laureates for Literature to cast their chief protagonists as nonagenarian writers of equine proportions and virility...as much as this stretches disbelief and magical realism to their limits...

Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell- Excellent pieces on his days as a police officer in colonial Burma and his down-and-out days. Less so when he rambles at length on the political merits of the Famous Five from a Trotksyite perspective.

10,000 BC- Essentially Clan of the Cave Bear but with less raping of Darryl Hannah and more Lindsey-Lohan-was-going-to-do-this-but-was-in-rehab-so-we-found-another-big-eyed-big-busted-pointy-nosed-does-nothing-but-look-winsome-girl. And the way the audience winced when cute marauding mammoths get speared, you half expect a reassuring notice at the end of the movie- "no computer generated animals were harmed during the making of this film."

Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew-

Jesus Christ has the coolest Elvis Presley/Kung-fu stance as he points out Matthew to start a new life...."you ain’t nothin but a tax collector, sinning all the time..."

If Caravaggio had been born in Melbourne, he would have been slaughtered on Lygon St for spitting on Carl Williams.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Michelangelo_Caravaggio_040.jpg

....

Finally, something about HK.

Looking out my office window, I saw cameras and satelite dishes and media folk gather outside the nearby Foreign Correspondents Club. I asked a chap what the commotion was and was told there was an imminent press conference by a Singaporean journalist, Mr Ching Cheong, just released from Chinese jail after serving nearly 3 years of a 5 year sentence on trumped-up spying charges. He had been attempting to obtain a manuscript of interviews with former leader Zhao Ziyang compiled by his doctor. Zhao Ziyang opposed the use of force in Tiananmen Square but was sidelined by Deng Xiaoping and spent his remaining years under house arrest.

I turned on the news when I got home, eager to hear what he had to say...Unfortunately, his thunder was stolen by the competing press conference of a previously minor celebrity who had returned to Hong Kong from hiding in Canada to explain how he had single-handedly cut a swathe through half the stock of Hongky starlets and left graphic anatomical photographic proof on a laptop that he had given to a careless repairman...

The South China Morning Post, which has taken on a disctinctly red hue post-handover, carried the journalist’s release on the third page but with so little analysis, you could be forgiven for thinking Mr Ching had been convicted for pedophilia.

Philippines- Are you for scuba?

2008-02-12T03:32:00.000+11:00

Philippines- Are you for scuba?

The office was closed last week for Chinese New Year and I took the opportunity to head to Philippines to swim with whalesharks.

I got into a fight with someone on the airport train leaving Hong Kong. As the station PA said, "Please let other people get off before you get on", an Asian guy just rammed through everybody. As he sat down, I called him on it- "You know, you're really supposed to let people get off before you get on." He fired up, "Who are you, my father? This is CHINA! You can't tell us what to do anymore. JACKASS!" (I think, if he could, he would have kicked me in the chest down an open well, Leonides-style- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkWS9PiXekE). The recent Guangzhou station stampede shows what happens when you get millions of such people "queuing" up…He later ostentatiously let an old woman have his seat, so at least some good came of it...I can be idiotically quixotic at times.

In the immigration queue in Manila, a little Chinese girl had Mickey Mouse ears with a bride's veil on top while fat Dutchmen in shorts and combovers took proprietorial guard over their little Filipina consorts. Through a crack in a door marked "Quarantine" I could see a jolly woman fold up the thin mattress upon which she'd been napping.

From the taxi I saw a love hotel advertising a special "5 Solid Hours" deal for 400 pesos...the sign also said "Guaranteed- no brown-outs"… The taxi driver informs me that many young Koreans are coming to the Philippines to study English. "They are stupid people. They can't even speak English!" he says, in something approximating English. His radio played a never-ending river of 80's karaoke power ballads. Anything where the chorus can be played with one hand on a synth, while the other hand is clinched into a passionate fist...Peter Cetera, Glen Medeiros, Chicago, REO Speedwagon, other balladeers I've never heard of...every Filipino is just a power chord away from busting into karaoke...

They say Manila was once beautiful- elegant Spanish architecture in tropical timber. Then the Americans forcefully dislodged the Japanese in 1945 in the Battle of Manila...more loss of civilian life (100,000+) and property than Hiroshima...Then, later, the Americans propped up that great anti-communist kleptocrat dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, for 20 years before obligingly whisking him off in a US navy helicopter to a cushy exile in Hawaii after the Filipino people corked his army's guns with flowers…it's tough to get over that sort of thing, aesthetically and culturally, in just a generation....
I wish the Americans had loved democracy and true market capitalism as much as they hated Communism...And the Americans have no memory, hence no shame, about such things.

A Filipino mariachi band serenaded our dinner with their version of Rhianna's "Umbrella"…

Poster for a "Family Valentine Event- Kickboxing Showdown!"...very family friendly...and how romantic...like an uncle I know who gave a frying pan as a birthday present to a woman who wasn't my auntie much longer....

Perhaps the goodnaturedness of Filipinos can be attributed to their level of sugar intake- Pinoy spag bog is sprinkled with sugar, little kids have big jagged grey smiles and a pack of M&Ms will get you anywhere...Whereas America marches on caffeine, viagra and prozac, the Filipinos are on a sugar high...so I wasn't surprised to find the natural corollary to this- a big sign advertising a "one-stop diabetes center", including "diabetes foot spa and massage"....the people here are so nice, you wonder why there are guards with shotguns everywhere and the sign "please leave firearms at the bar" seems too common to be a joke...but don't want to find out....

Warily accepted my first ever facial as part of a cheap massage deal. Some contraption pumped out steam and then the woman pulled out something that crackled like an electric fly killer and waved it in front of my face- "it is a laser for closing your pores. Don't worry." I worried and instantly regretted paying so little to have someone mess with my face….with visions of walking away scarred and burned dancing in my head, I heard a melodic beeping…no..please..don't let it…is she?…she can't…"excuse me, could I ask that you not text while you are using a laser on my face?"

Travelled a few hours from Manila to Tagatay- an island in a lake in a volcano in a lake on island in an ocean. Trekked up to the caldera along a steep, dusty, uneven track . You could take a mangy pony up (led or pushed by a walking Filipino) or walk. It always seems to me an affront to equity and efficiency to ride a horse while another person walks alongside it. And I wondered who was running Korea because it seemed the entire Korean population was there, all on horseback and sharing no such compunctions. Nothing funnier than watching old Koreans, for whom face is everything, trying to look dignified as their Filipino guide slaps their horse into a trot. All the tightarse egalitarian white tourists walked.

I caught a flight down to Legaspi in Bicol province on the southeastern tip of the main island of Luzon, where I had an appointment with some whalesharks. Legaspi is lorded over by Mt Mayon, widely considered to have the world's most perfect volcano shape… the sort of Platonic Form Richard Dreyfuss had in mind while playing with mashed potato in close encounters...so incongruously big in the tropical haze, the brain refuses to compute and prefers to conclude it is a trick of the clouds and edits it out...

So good to be back in the tropics- sunshowers that set the world to diamonds, the shadow play and winds of coming storms, the first rivulet of sweat between my shoulder blades, the irrepressible rambunctious rampant electric lush green, the good-natured haggling, creative cajolery and lateral thinking required to make things happen and the good-natured patience, stoicism and solidarity when things don't, flip-flops and shorts, ice tea, fans (not a/c), sleeping naked with naught but a sheet, cold showers that feel good, rain on cane.

Gave a guy some money to let me use his motorbike and rode through the city traffic in a constant state of whiteknuckled turtlement til I hit the open road on the way to the nearby Busay Waterfalls. Splashed about with the other Filipinos at play. A group of theology students having a picnic challenged me to quiz them on God. Luckily I had something ready- I'd earlier seen an episode of "Where's that in the Bible?" on one of the many evangelical TV channels here where the question was posed- "Why is Sunday the Christian's holy day when the Bible says the Sabbath is Saturday?" The answer is that Jesus ushered in a New Covenant that replaced the old rules for those born to the right mothers (no pork, off-with-the-foreskins, no-Saturday-toil) with just one for everybody- accept Jesus and his words. Jesus' followers believed he rose from the dead on a Sunday and so picked that day to honour him…not sure where that leaves those Christians who quote Old Testament sages to oppress gays…

Fireflies at night...Schoolchildren sending up flights of hidden minor birds from the paddies with claps and hoots…Kid perched precariously on the roof of a moving covered motorcycle sidecar, texting...Small children squawking up their karaoke chops in houses that are little more than reed huts but still have a karaoke machine... Roadside chapels of corrugated iron and bamboo…Braziers resting on elegant stands constructed from tyre tubes….Grazing cows tending the graveyard. ….Rice, woven reed fans and coconut shells drying on the road on plastic tarps…Small, solemn candle-lit processions, led by children bearing icons…Fat dog lying on the road, enjoying the heat on his belly and the attention from swerving angry drivers...the correct way to carry a fighting cock on a motorbike is arse to the wind…Piglets go round the other way (I made that up- who would carry a wriggly wiggly piggly on a motorbike?)…. Peasant pushing a water-buffalo pulling a log along the ground with wishful bovine contemplations on the wheel…World Vision postcard scenes of little kids trawling through rubbish heaps…

Wherever I went, in shops, homes, buses, I come across an icon of a little boy in a cape, holding a sphere in his hand. It took a bit of asking, but apparently he is Santo Nino de Cebu, the preferred representation of Jesus in these parts. Reminded me of that scene in Talladega Nights where they argue over which Jesus to do Grace to- (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A0-u85aAYg),

Ricky Bobby: Dear tiny infant Jesus...
Carley Bobby: Hey, um... you know sweetie, Jesus did grow up. You don't always have to call him baby. It's a bit odd and off puttin' to pray to a baby.
Ricky Bobby: Well look, I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I'm sayin grace. When you say grace, you can say it to grown up Jesus, or teenage Jesus, or bearded Jesus, or whoever you want….Dear Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus, don't even know a word yet, just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent.

Cal Naughton, Jr.:
• I like to think of Jesus like a muscular trapeze artist.
• I like to think of Jesus like a dirty old bum. He's comin' up to me, and I'm 'bout to sock him, cause, you know, he's a dirty old bum, but then I say, "Wait a minute, there's something... I don't know, special about this guy. Like maybe he can start fires with his mind…"
• I like to think of Jesus as wearin' a Tuxedo T-shirt, 'cause it says, like, "I want to be formal, but I'm here to party too." I like to party, so I like my Jesus to party.
• I like to think of Jesus as a mischievous badger.
• I like to picture Jesus as a ninja, fighting off evil samurai.
• I like to think of Jesus with, like, big eagle's wings, singin' lead vocals for Lynyrd Skynrd with, like, an angel band, and I'm in the front row, and I'm hammered drunk...

Humphrey B Bear is peddling his no-pants shenanigans on television to innocent Filipino children.

Played basketball on a court by the Legaspi market in the evening cool in the shadow of an unclouded Mt Mayon...lost my flip-flops on my first move and played barefoot thereafter...shamefully missed multiple lay-ups but my trusty slow-motion, sweeping, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't drives served me well...the guys were good and they paid 20 pesos a head for the privilege of taking the court, but it was a rough neighbourhood and word got out quick that a foreigner was making a spectacle of himself...13yo girls cradling a baby in one hand and a cigarette in the other....lot of fun and camaraderie...but we lost...I commiserated the loss with 15 pork kebabs marinated in Bicol's famed fiery coconut sauce and a mountain dew in the market...While gorging, I was buttonholed by a chap selling lottery tickets...had earlier worked for 10 years in Saudi as an "office boy" for usd$700 a month...demanded to know why I didn't have any children when he had 6...he said Westerners hate children and are only interested in "Having the ojays..the what?...You know, with the swapping of the wives and the sex...Oh, orgies." The Catholic church plays a big part in Filipino politics and pushes very strongly in all media the concept of a "pro-life culture". He told me divorce was illegal in the Philippines and foreigners all wanted Filipina wives because they will stay loyal even if you become an alcoholic and beat them...I had to say that I wouldn't want to marry a woman who didn't have the self-respect to leave me if I beat her. He seemed to think women would deliberately get themselves beaten just to wheedle a divorce if they could. The Filipinos are as suited to Catholicism as the Chinese are to Communism.

I gatecrashed a French family diving holiday to the Manta Bowl. They didn't get my Hank Azaria line "Do you scuba?...Eet is like ze story of ze zebra and ze 'ippo" from "Along came Polly"... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hbASOncYwo) They thought even less of it when I answered their query whether they got a French actor to play the amiable naked French homewrecker by saying, "Ah no, it was someone who does voices on The Simpsons." I would have got a better reaction if I'd relieved myself in their wetsuits. The Simpsons? Pfft.

Flying fish dart between the choppy waves like little more than enchanted splashes.

The dive was quite challenging. The current was so strong that we were given hooks with which we were to told to latch onto dead coral on the sea floor. I couldn't find dead coral, just the live stuff, and felt terrible. This was somewhat allayed by the fun of Superman-ing in the current. The idea was to wait on the bottom and scan the blue for curious manta rays. But I was just as content with the coral beneath me. Hamlet may have been able to count himself a king of infinite space while bounded in a nutshell, but give me a random square foot of undersea community and I am well pleased. Delighted to find a tiny juvenile Lion Fish, only a couple of inches long but already bristling with golden spines and f*ck-off attitude…Confused sadness at one point where the ocean floor was littered with fresh dead fish…Nature abhors a dirty abattoir so this piscine holocaust must have been recent…Dynamite fishing …that explained the dull distant booms we heard earlier…Another example of how, in some ways, the Philippines is a failed state…While thinking such thoughts, I reacted to the somewhat gimpish muffled calls of my divebuddy in time to look up. At first all I saw was width, and thought I was indeed seeing a passing War-of-the-Worlds manta…but the width kept coming and coming to become an enormous length as the tail end of something huge and fishy…I was glad that the only thing that big in these parts was a toothless whaleshark because otherwise it could only be a Great White…All I saw was a passing great shadow but I must have used up half my air in excitement…on a later dive another curious whaleshark came to say hello in the last 2 minutes of our safety stop…I followed him for awhile but I was torn when he descended between following my fellow divers down or maintaining my safety stop depth so I held back. It didn't matter- the next day I swam with eight in the space of 2 hours, finning alongside to my heart's content.

Movie Review- Sweeney Todd

Depp plays an American Emo in London while channeling the voice of David Bowie from "Please Mr Gravedigger" (my personal favourite Bowie track (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvqH0-2KWnQ)…along with the sardonic "Love You til Tuesday").

Helena Bonham Carter deliciously bridges the divide between mother and whore. How I love her. Her and Rachel Weisz. All sass and class and ass.

Noone does more with spittle than Alan Rickman (except maybe John Malkovich). He also wins the Oscar for "Best use of the words "catamite" and "gander" in a major motion picture."

Sacha Baron Cohen is upstaged by his codpiece.

Forget Sweeney Todd- the real horror story is Johnny Depp's daily foetus stem cell milkshake that keeps him so preternaturally young.

Errata
In an earlier mail, I had mistakenly said Hillary Swank debased herself as the lead character in 27 Dresses. Apparently it was some woman from Grey's Anatomy (which I am proud to say I have never watched a single episode of…but will be surely made to go through all the boxed DVD sets at some stage by a future harpy girlfriend). But I do not apologise or resile from my criticism as it seems Ms Swank is prostituting her talent in the upcoming rom-com "PS I love you" alongside Gerard "This is SPARTA" Butler.

I do, however, apologise for earlier calling Oscar Wilde English.

HK- the information you were working on might be lost.

2008-01-27T03:29:00.000+11:00

HK- the information you were working on might be lost.

There is a special place in my heart for the Chunking Mansions. The cheapest place to stay (by the night or by the hour) in Hong Kong, it opens its arms and legs wide to all those whose dreams are bigger than their wallets- Nigerians, SubContinentals, Filipinos, mainlanders, backpackers and even me, 10 years ago as a penniless student spat out by China. A 17-storey firetrap of guesthouses, outhouses, dosshouses, African bistros, p!ss-reeking stairwells, broken elevators, immigration police, purveyors of porn, curry, saris and foreign exchange. Wong Kar Wai immortalised it in "Chunking Express", which brought the world's attention to Chris Doyle's electric cinematography, Faye Wong's Cantonese cover of the Cranberries' "Dreams" and the Taiwanese-Japanese Heath Ledger, Takeshi Kaneshiro (a bit dim, but captivatingly pretty and charismatic)…

I go past it every day now on the way home from work and the other day I discovered that it offers not only refuge to the teeming hordes of Tsim Sha Tsui but spiritual succour- its giant 20m video advertisement screen displayed the following message-

"Mmos.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost.

Please tell Microsoft about this problem."

A true koan for our times.
I took a photo with my phone but I just googled the error message and found someone had already taken a better one (attached).

Some people have accused me of being anti-Chinese. I'm not. All humanity perplexes and delights me equally. Except for bankers. I hate them a lot.

Look no further for justification than the front page of the giveaway HK newspaper for justification-

Jan 25
Rogue Trader in HK56bn fraud-
One guy in an office in France defrauded his employer, Societe Generale, of AUD$8bn over just 1 year…and…did not enrich himself!!! I might have almost forgiven him if he'd done it because of obscene amounts of human greed…but it would appear, like Nick Leesing back in the day, he made some initial losses and kept digging his hole deeper to avoid having his boss yelling at him…like a weak-kneed schoolboy…what a prat…AUD$8bn is a ridiculous amount of money…that sort of money would probably immunise every child in Africa against common disease and distribute anti-malaria and HIV medication across the continent…or pay for 2 months of Iraq occupation by the US Army…or 3 stealth bombers…

On the same front page- this article
"top banker attacked woman taxi driver"
A British expat Managing Director of Standard Chartered Bank, was fined HK5000 (AUD800) and given a two year suspended sentence for common assault. A woman taxi driver was having trouble changing the large note he'd paid her with so he hit her in the face and when she got out of the vehicle, he pushed her over, slapped her face again and kicked her chest.
In mitigation he said "he felt remorseful and described his act as "stupid", blaming the incident on cultural and language differences. He expressed the hope the court would only fine him as he was willing to compensate the driver."
What a prat...beats up a woman, blames it on culture, and hopes to get off because he has lots of money to pay her…and does…it's almost the stuff of old Bob Dylan songs…

"In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'.
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears."

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Bob Dylan, 1964

There is a level of impunity amongst tycoons and bankers here.
There are no anti-competition laws. No laws against price-fixing. Developers carve up the scarce real-estate between themselves like chummy feudal barons.
Hong Kong citizens are denied universal suffrage by the Chinese Government until at least 2020 on the grounds that the island would be threatened by the choices its citizens may make…but its citizens are already threatened every day by the choices rich and connected people have and poor people don't.

Cinemas have a habit here of disgorging their patrons through the dingy staircases of the fire-exits after the movie finishes to presumably prevent them lingering around and trying to sneak into another movie for free. It is like the human digestive system- the entrance is beautiful and well-maintained and enticing, while the back door is where the sun doesn't shine. While not quite as heroic as the Tiananmen Tank Stopper, I have made my own stand- I go out from whence I came in, brushing past the cleaner directing me in the other direction and at a loss about what to do with this challenge to his already meagre authority.

Pre-movie advertising for a skin cream called FANCL Tense-Up...just in case the title made you think it doubled as anti-incontinence medication, the subtitles reassuringly stated- "with a credible Japanese patent, you can rest assured."…Another ad on the subway for perfume- "Esprique Precious- Mature but kawaii"…I saw a black guy buy 3 tubes of Darlie toothpaste in a Tsim Sha Tsui supermarket and didn't know what to think…

I fear I shall remain single forever as the last vestiges of tolerance for American romantic comedies has finally left me…no more date movies for me...I find myself gagging at the forced plot devices, implausible dialogue delivered by barely 2 dimensional characters, and find myself no longer resenting paying AUD$15 for only 90 minutes of something for which the big screen adds no value whatsoever, but wishing, around the 40 minute mark at the third iteration of boy-gets-girl-loses girl, that the movie will just end then and there and I could cut my losses and get out... 27 Dresses, j'accuse! I demand my hk$50 and 90 minutes back! Hillary Swank went from double academy award winning gutsy portrayals of hermaphrodites and pugilists to a demeaning stint as a ditzy, dysfunctional PA in love with weddings and her boss. Just as Hollywood actors have to get their knees dirty as gigolos and party tarties before they become stars, they seem to have to further lower their dignity afterwards in rom-coms and children's movies... But I do remember a time, when I was falling in and out of love, and in the belly of the beast in between, that this pap seemed so profound....

I admire how America can reduce the human condition into its specific components and shamelessly fluff it individually...McDonalds serves up 99% proof fat, sugar and salt- the caveman nutritional jackpot...porn gives men an endless parade of the specific anatomy they crave...sport and action prepares them vicariously for war, or at least violence...rom-coms are barely disguised idiots-guides-to-dischargi

ng-your-biological-duty-to-convince-somebody-to-procreate-with-you...a noble pursuit, but surely these aspects can be explored with less formula and pap...i'm a sucker for a movie...i suspend my disbelief at the drop of the house lights...but once that suspension is gone, I found myself trapped in a dark room with stinking rubbish...the cinematic equivalent of wanting to gnaw your own arm off to escape the morning embrace of a drunken tryst with a beast.

Australia Day passed me by yesterday but I know I'm Australian because I love Cold Chisel. When we inevitably become a republic, Khe Sanh will be our updated national anthem. I was introduced to Cold Chisel when I was 13 by a 17 yo older brother of a friend's friend who we thought was so cool because he had a car and would drive us to Doncaster Shoppingtown and had all the Dungeons and Dragons manuals. He also leant us his Cold Chisel tapes which we played to destruction. In Year 8 they made girls do woodwork and boys do cooking and textiles and I made a stuffed guitar emblazoned with the words, "Cold Chisel." So while I missed out on seeing Michael Jordan play, I made the pilgrimage a few weeks ago to pay homage to another great icon of my times, former Cold Chisel lead singer, Jimmy Barnes. My boss had a spare ticket (his wife was stuck in Istanbul) so I gladly came along.

If it wasn't for the billion-dollar view from atop The Peak of Hong Kong island, I could almost imagine I was at over 35's night at the surburban Cherry Tree Hotel in Templestowe, with the décor and the sound system, and the 80s cover/support band, and the wrinkles and bellies. Jimmy took to the stage like an old boxer takes to the ring, a Ray Winstone-esque sense of presence and restrained menace- a professional "f*ck you, I've been doing this a long time, I'm a professional, I know how its done and I'm going to have a f*cking good time while I do it and you can come along for the ride if you want, but either way I don't give a sh*t". I had to educate some uncouth louts making discourteous remarks about his daughters in the band. I'm sure Mr Barnes doesn't need to be told his daughters are hot. But I did find myself enviously hoping that when I'm old I too, like Barnes, can attain some measure of the Ron Burgundy definition of domestic bliss- "I know that one day Veronica and I are gonna to get married on top of a mountain, and there's going to be flutes playing and trombones and flowers and garlands of fresh herbs. And we will dance till the sun rises. And then our children will form a family band. And we will tour the countryside and you won't be invited."

We had taken position to the side of the stage, where the acoustics weren't the best and he seemed to banter with the crowd in some sort of Canto-brogue, reminiscent of Brad Pitt's culchy in Snatch (memotherwantsacaravanwitperiwinklebluecurtains). We wondered if he only had the rights to play the Chisel songs that he wrote and this seemed to be the case, as he opened up with his comparatively pedestrian (next to Ian Moss' and Don Walkers' more sophisticated material) twelve bar blues numbers, Rising Sun and Astrid. There was some irony in hearing a roomful of bankers who'd paid AUD$110 a head form a lumpen mosh proletariat for "Working Class Man". The punters listened politely and humoured him as he played his new songs and he repaid them by bringing the night home with a stretch of Proud Mary, Flame Trees and Khe Sanh ("hit some hong kong matress all night long!"). The audience was ecstatic and you could hear them muttering, beseeching- "Choir Girl!", "Cheap wine!". Quite a lovely chant, not normally associated with Aussies ("Oi Oi Oi" does not count), even went up "Saturday night- doo de doo de doo doo". But Jimmy lost it with a series of unrecognisable ditties of his own design, extending into the encores. Normally abandoning your subject at the point of climax is a mortal sin, but for old people the money shot is not the point- its all about the embrace and the moment and Barnes was in our arms.

We stayed on afterwards to get drunk and drink beer while dancing (in true Australian style) to the houseband, led by a little Filipina belting out AC/DC numbers. My boss challenged me to a race down the vertiginous slope of Old Peak Rd and I loped down like a loon, sober enough to understand the career implications of beating him, but having a great time taking giant loping strides. At a certain point I decided to make like a French urban gymnast and take a few horizontal steps along the vertical retaining wall. Unfortunately, my Blundstone boots lacked the traction of my conviction and I left some skin on Old Peak Rd and some gravel in my body that I didn't feel until the next day. Bandaids on adults only means alcohol abuse.

Dr Who a who-opsy?

2008-01-19T03:28:00.000+11:00

Dr Who a who-opsy?

Was Dr Who lonely? He travelled with young attractive companions. But how could they stimulate his galactic intellect? The obvious implication is that they stimulated something baser, but surely that would have eventually got tedious and heaven knows what sort of kink an immortal must turn to for spice...He had K9 for company but a metallic anally retentive dog can hardly offer much comfort...Why didn't he hook up with Romana?...or even the Master?...Perhaps their eternal conflict represented misdirected desire for the other's attention...Someone should have told them to just get a room and get it over with already. The dandy incarnation in the cricket whites would surely have been up for it, if his preference for fey Adric over Page 3 Leela is any indication....

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced the Doctor is the quintessential English gentleman dilettante bugger...up there with Oscar Wilde, Uncle Monty from Withnail and I, and Laurence of Arabia...Of independent means, a confirmed bachelor (to use the euphemism of the obituaries), eccentric, he sallies forth from his comfortable abode to dally in this and that before retiring back to the fawning attention of his live-in faghag/boytoy...

I think I will have to reevaluate my entire childhood in the light of this knowledge...

But he does appeal to the modern psyche (as well as those who drop anchor in Pooh Bay on Gabo Island) in a certain respect- the original galactic hitchhiker, the cosmic flaneur, jaunting from place to place for casual encounters and passing dalliances with the exotic and thrilling. But I do wonder if he got lonely...

VINCENT
So if you're quitting the life,
what'll you do?

JULES
That's what I've been sitting here
contemplating. First, I'm gonna
deliver this case to Marsellus.
Then, basically, I'm gonna walk the
earth.

VINCENT
What do you mean, walk the earth?

JULES
You know, like Caine in "KUNG FU."
Just walk from town to town, meet
people, get in adventures.

VINCENT
How long do you intend to walk the
earth?

JULES
Until God puts me where he want me
to be.

VINCENT
What if he never does?

JULES
If it takes forever, I'll wait
forever.

VINCENT
So you decided to be a bum?

JULES
I'll just be Jules, Vincent -- no
more, no less.

VINCENT
No Jules, you're gonna be like
those pieces of sh*t out there who
beg for change. They walk around
like a bunch of f&ckin' zombies,
they sleep in garbage bins, they
eat what I throw away, and dogs
piss on 'em. They got a word for
'em, they're called bums. And
without a job, residence, or legal
tender, that's what you're gonna be
-- a f&ckin' bum!

JULES
Look my friend, this is just where
me and you differ --

(Pulp Fiction)

HK- Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily...

2008-01-16T03:28:00.000+11:00

HK- Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily...

Two leftover observations from Shanghai-

1.Rat-faced Chinese pimp escorting two young giggling eastern European prostitutes in fur coats down the street.

2. I refuse to leave my used toiletpaper steaming in the little rubbish bin provided next to the toilet. I would rather clog the pipes and be convicted as a counter-revolutionary saboteur and sent to Ningxia for Education through Labour….

---------
Back to HK...

Saw in the New Year from penthouse rooftop barbecue overlooking Happy Valley and the HK skyline, hosted by banker friends-in-law-twice-removed. Met an Indian couple who's faces lit up as they told me of the time they met "the handsome Waug (sic) brothers" in Bangalore. Then drinks at a semi-exclusive bar, where a banker bought friends and influenced people by commanding a table endlessly stocked with champagne, vodka and gin.

Australian bankers making midnight drunken trades with their blackberries on Taiwanese and Korean stocks they probably can't even pronounce. So much for the efficient markets theorem...but I suppose if there's enough of them doing it, they should cancel each other out...Women are rated as "buys" or "sells"…

My first post-uni job offer was in Corporate Finance…Mergers and Acquisitions…Murders and Executions…I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out after a few years of 16 hour days in testosterone soaked offices, justified by copious amounts of money that I could only enjoy in short extreme bursts…Thankfully, I got sucked in and spat out of the Dot Com vortex instead…

----------

Eddie Murphy "joked" that black people have so much ass and bollocks that they walk with an unbalanced swagger…while Asians have so little that they trot along in little tight mincing steps…The joke probably depends on some accompanying visual humour but he may have had a point, if the width of HK toilet paper is any guide. Very narrow. But their asses must make up for size with productivity, as it's impossible to buy toilet paper in quantities of less than 12. And rather than advertise their eco-friendliness, you'll find reassurances that your bogroll is made of 100% Malaysian pulp, presumably straight from the grasp of a dispossessed orangutan...It would be uncharitable to mention differences in condom size…though I do note that the BBC website seems to take so much relish in every few months reminding its readers that its most-viewed article is headlined- "Condoms "too big" for Indian men" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6161691.stm) that I sometimes wonder if it is not actually a covert British diplomatic tactic to stunt the rise of Indian cockiness…Maybe we can do the same thing to the Indonesians…much cheaper than a fleet of submarines…my mate's Dad is a medical anthropologist and the world's foremost expert on "Shrinking Bird" syndrome… (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_panic)...

----------

Went for a walk around my neighbourhood and saw a middle-aged woman selling snake oil on a street corner by hypnotising a pair of lizards. What evolutionary function does hypnotism serve? Steve Irwin used to hypnotise crocodiles (not so good with stingrays, apparently). A former Australian Agricultural (and erstwhile Deputy Prime) Minister used to try and win friends and influence visiting dignitaries by hypnotising a chicken. And humans can be hypnotised to act like chickens. Perhaps, along with sleep, a hypnotic state is a byproduct of a level of consciousness that incorporates a sense of individual ego in order to more effectively distinguish itself from the rest of its environment and thereby survive...when that gets turned off, lizards, chicken and people, lose their self-awareness and go to a temporary nirvana oneness with the universe…there is a heaven for animals, after all...

---------

Music Review

Missy Higgins' power ode to girl-girl love and synchronised menstruation- The Special Two. Aussie vowels so tortured even I need subtitles to follow.

"we'll need each other,

we'll breath together

we'll bleed together"

(i think she scratched out the next line- "we'll breed together")

Lesbians have all the fun.

Then again, maybe I've just got a dirty mind. It could be just an innocent paean to a teenage Myspace suicide pact.

She is surprisingly good live.

------

Movie Reviews

I am Legend- nice zombie flick. One quibble- Will Smith hasn't seen a woman in 5 years, his only companion is a dog and he has begun chatting up mannequins, then he wakes up to find a hot braziliana making him bacon and eggs...and they don't get it on! Just pricked my suspension of disbelief like a whoopy cushion…

Clerks 2 on DVD- profoundly depressing to see Dante and Randall, the paragons of slacker cynicism and cool, devolve into big fat jowly losers. Only in Hollywood does fat Dante get xxxx by Michelle Rodriguez. Before/After Sunrise infinitely my preferred before/after shots of my youth...

Tea Leone's death rattle as a silver screen sex symbol was doing a love scene with the bald bones of Ben Kingsley in straight-to-a-chinese-street-corner-pirate-dvd, "You Kill Me". Exactly 90 mins of putrid rubbish, but Kingsley is a lotus bloom in cow dung.

Jennifer Aniston's death rattle was getting raped by Vincent Cassel before impotent boyfriend Clive Owen in a tedious, tawdry, tortured thing that I don't even remember the title of anymore. Unfair, but probably reasonable, that these things are the graveyards for aging actresses escaping TV-land while they are just rodent roadkill speedbumps on the highway for the Kingsleys, Owens and Cassels of the world.

---------

I had a nightmare last night that last year's popular cardigans with horizontal stripes metastized this year into fullblown Mork fashion.

---------

Frontcover of HK tabloid mags feature photos of minor celebrities leaving hotels with non-spouses and close-ups of Andy Lau's snail trail. I sh%t you not.

-----------

I eat roast duck on rice in a café and watch a children's show on T. Overly jolly adults (over-compensating for their misery at having wandered down such a career cul-de-sac) trying to put Hongky kids off learning English by making them sing, "Row, Row, Your Boat."…."Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily" is hard enough to say for native English speakers, much less those possessing nascent linguistics pallettes light-on in "r"s and "l's...Sadistic bastards.

---------

Front page HK news in the South China Morning Post

"Maid Jailed for Aiding Molester"-

An Indonesian maid, earning less than USD$500 a month, regularly accepted USD$50 to let a teenage play centre employee take a 5yo girl under her care into a room, where he molested her. The maid was sentenced to 32 months while the teenager was not charged due to lack of evidence.

http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,153190,00.html

There are 114,000 Indonesian maids in Hong Kong. They are regularly exploited, raped, beaten and driven to suicide. These incidents never make it to the front page.

--------

To watch Chinese pedestrians is to understand why they are such bad drivers. Walking the street is a reenactment of the Warring States period in microcosm. If you are foolish enough to queue, you will soon understand that God was not joking when She said the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

---------

The Korean government has an English language channel at the end of the dial, along with Chinese CCTV (quite an apt acronym, really) and Japanese NHK… Starcraft and Warcraft computer game tournaments, period dramas and soap opera with Arabic subtitles, and unconvincing ads trumpetting Korea's diversity of race and culture…Did you know that historians agree that the Battle of Sacheon was the most important naval clash ever?

China and HK- Rumpy Pumpy Santa

2007-12-16T03:26:00.000+11:00

China and HK- Rumpy Pumpy Santa

Nov 30-Dec 2 Guangzhou

Guangzhou is a bloody big city and the best thing in it is my Taiwanese mate, the professional body-image distorter- he makes Asians think that they have too much melanin and need to buy his multinational cream which will make them whiter as well as "contemporary, liberated and unexpected". (I can't judge anyone- I used to do Satan's bidding...).

8.30 in the morning, 29 floors up, strident loudspeakers. My forgotten Chinese and the distortion makes it hard to understand what is being said. Perhaps someone advertising a sale on lychees at the local supermarket...perhaps the official response to the little old man at Hung Hom station in HK protesting for F@lun G0ng...lucky I didn't have a hangover or i'd start the revolution there and then!...flags, churchbells, loudspeakers, calls to prayer, billboards, public executions...agitprop...Turns out there is a military base nearby...My mate can feel at ease knowing he is well-defended should the Taiwanese decide to launch an attack….

As if the Chinese constitution were some kind of blog, each leader since Mao has added their own special sauce to the august document, more honoured in the breach. Mao modestly inserted a commitment to Mao Zedong Thought (presumably the more lofty musings, not his puzzlement at his weakening bladder or unruly eyebrows). Deng xiaoping gave us "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics", which essentially means Stalinist Capitalism...Jiang Zemin inserted the Three Represents...Apparently Hu Jintao has staked his posterity on a "harmonious society"...the current joke is that if your wife is egregiously busting your balls, you can report her to the police for being "disharmonious"...does being disagreeable make one a counter-revolutionary in today's china? If so, then who would escape a whipping?...presumably "reeducation through labour" (which, incidentally, I think was Kevin Rudd's alternative election education policy slogan) has been replaced by "reeducation through enya and whalesong"...relaxed and comfortable…sound familiar?…I wonder if Chinese civilisation lasts another 5000 years they will eventually run out of slogans…the UN seems to be already scraping the bottom of the barrel by declaring 2008 the International Year of the Potato….

Was greeted at the restaurant by an automated rude santa thrusting his hips...probably an entire village somewhere in southern china devoted to nothing else but making rumpy-pumpy santas. Reminded me of the story about the Japanese shopping centre owners who knew Christmas had something to do with Santa and Jesus and so put a big crucified Santa in their atrium...

Amongst the thundering rush of China's development, good to see some things never change- on a busy street, a mother pulls down her daughter's pants and encourages her to take a dump next to a tree. Who's says the Chinese are not free? Who needs wikipedia, satellite tv, multiparty elections, freedom of conscience or expression when you can take a dump in the street with impunity? Incidentally, this right is under attack in India- (http://in.reuters.com/article/topNews/idINIndia-30272420071101). Of course, spitting remains a given.

The peasant's uniform of ill-fitting dirty business suit with the label still on the sleeve. The businessman's uniform of polo shirts and pleated slacks, belted somewhere between belly-button and nipple. PYTs with spiky colored manga hair.

The girl selling me pirated DVDs insisted Chinese people would never eat pandas or use their genitals for medicine and that it must be foreigners responsible for their dwindling numbers. I happily told her we eat cute kangaroos.

Endless constructions of residential complexes clad in toiletblock tiles that may have looked bright and gleaming as a model on the table of the municipal official who approved it, but in reality swiftly looks squalid and grubby with the stains and smears left by the passing wind of factories.The monotonous and monolithic ugliness of China's urban landscape makes you appreciate the challenge of China's urban planners- when you're trying to house 700 million country people who want to live in the city, aesthetics goes out the window.

Found a book in the Guanhzhou train station entitled "Wonder of The Life" that was obviously an excuse to put a naked white woman and a pissing baby on the front. There were also small books in time for the Chinese New Year which told your fortune, with each book featuring a front cover with the respective beast of the Chinese zodiac tastefully painted onto a woman's pubis...

Also saw a poster of a baby in a photo shop that was very wrong in about 30 different ways.-

Shanghai Dec 2-8

Shanghai- There is a card on my hotel desk with a menu of the the hotel's massage service.

Foot massage is 58 yuan an hour. Quite reasonable.

Chinese massage is 98 per hour.

Then......"Prostate care" for only 128 yuan. You can never be too careful with your prostate.

Finally "dil massage", which I think a typo for "oil massage"...very popular in Texas and Saudi...unless it is missing two final letters…

Massage houses abound- some like medical clinics, others with water features and piped-in Enya and Kenny G, others with girls in tight t-shirts. I got my massage from an obliging peasant boy from Hunan. Boys have stronger hands. I'm cool with it.

Of the 50 or so channels available, around 8 showed either Japanese behaving badly during WW2, Mao lookalikes and other revolutionary pap. There was one channel too many showing Police Academy 2 dubbed into Chinese, as if too press the imperial point that the west has nothing of interest to China (which would appear to be borne out in the trade imbalance…but not in the vast pirate archive of foreign movies and television series available for sale on every second street corner). BBC is broadcast on delay and blacks out occasionally without explanation. Its website is on the barbarian side of the Great Wall of China, as is Wikipedia.

Where would the Chinese be without the Japanese to hate? I tried to think of some equivalent...Perhaps NZ rampaging across Australia, raping and pillaging along the way, before going home and having the temerity to become 30 times richer than us...I guess that would be rather insufferable.

My hotel is on the outer western side of the Shanghai CBD, where a lot of Japanese and Korean companies are also quartered. It is a mixed-use building, meaning the first four floors are occupied by clubs where young Chinese women compete with their peers to fawn over old drunk Japanese men in order to eventually trade sex for money. Breakfast in the restaurant features a Yoko Ono interview on NHK and Japanese businessmen giggling and comparing notes from their previous evening of whoring. I nearly regurgitate my noodles.

The hotel looks out over a neighbourhood of old apartments waiting for God…and over the week I was there, God gnawed away at it at a goodly rate. In some places he sends birds to greet the dawn. In Shanghai he sends jackhammers, welders without masks, 3-peasants to a wheelbarrow, dusty bobcats…Construction and destruction.

Imagine Mexico was turned upside down and poured completely into California...or Vietnam into Australia...such is the challenge faced by China as its peasants wash into its cities...third world kingtiding into first...the West buries its head in the sand when it comes to the poverty of its neighbours, mouthing platitudes, and hoping the third world will one day magically bootstrap themselves to converge with the first, washing their hands of the poverty, illiteracy, corruption, malnutrition and misery, and defining the community of man not by the colour of skin, the shade of faith, but the print of passport. China cannot fall back on that convenient charade. One could hope that they may provide a template to the west for surviving and thriving in a world where the poor are not born with life prison sentences of hard labour. But one would probably be stupid to imagine the West would take any notice.

And today's Shanghai seems not so different to that of the Imperial and colonial past- where peasants' lives were available at a pittance for the profit and pleasure of princes.

"Welcome to Shanghai maglev station. The train is now arriving. Please take care of your children and bel.. unofficial slogan of the new China.The train does jack up to 430kph...

Hong Kong-8th December

As if I didn't get my cult-of-personality fill in China, I came back to Hong Kong to find Kevin Rudd's huge prissy Tim Brooke-Taylor mug on a leftover campaign billboard, staring down from on high amongst the neon-and-fairy-lights of Tsim Sha Tsui…expat postal votes…could have been worse…could have been Mr Sheen…But back in the mainland, Chinese folk seemed to know more about Big Kev than I do- "I hear your new Premier speaks Mandarin fluently…and his son went to the same university in Shanghai that I went to…and his daughter married a Chinese man…" Quite a contrast to his dog-whistling, no-Asians-please-we're-Australian predecessor…

There's a community health centre near my building with pictures on the walls of rats and, in big letters, "Prevent Disease- Eliminate Rodent Nuisance" (which I think was Kevin Rudd's alternative election health policy slogan).

Finally mustered the courage to enter the Foreign Correspondent's Club and was pleased to find the guard was there to stop terrorists from hitting the jackpot, not to stop me. Admired the oak-panelled bar and Kristie Lu Stout from CNN.

Jet Li suckles at the teat of the Chinese Communist Party. I first thought this from his earlier movie, Hero. Wrapped in the beauty of Christopher Doyle's cinematography, the charisma of its stars and the beauty of Sichuan, lurked a political message so poisonous and blatant that I remember trying to apologise for it by saying Zhang Yimou must be trying to deliberately invoke an opposite reaction in the viewer and thereby subvert the propaganda. In the final scene, Jet Li declines to assassinate a tyrant because the only alternative is anarchy. This is the standard Chinese government response to its critics- you are either for us, warts and all, or for anarchy.

To prove that his fawning was no fluke, Jet Li has followed this up with Warlords. I was looking forward to this, for it features the Holy Trinity of Chinese cinema- Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro. Takeshi is probably the only chink in my heterosexual armour (so to speak) and Andy Lau's songs taught me Chinese. After wading through a fug of hyper-realistic gore and homoerotic testosterone, as popularised by 300, Jet Li again blatantly pontificates that slaughter and tyranny are acceptable in the pursuit of unity and stability, and that idealism and compassion are for the foolish and naïve.

(made me think of how the Chinese laud Zhou EnLai for his wily appeasement of Mao's madness and snub General Peng Dehuai, Mao's wartime comrade and strategic superior who had the courage to tell Mao his Great Leap Forward was stumbling and was tortured and killed for his troubles…I think of this as I look at Mao's fat, molely, self-important face on every yuan note that passes my hands)…

I despair at the currency these arguments deployed by governments are finding- we will narrowly define the alternative ends, you are either for our ends or against us, and the ends justifies the means. If you don't support an Iraq invasion, you must be for Saddam and want him to attack the West with WMD. If you are against torture in interrogation/Chechnya invasion/Israeli policies in Palestine/Chinese policies in Tibet and Xinjiang/detention without trial/the Pentagon budget/the continued support of dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia etc. you must be for the terrorists.

Nations used to cloak themselves in religion, ideology, culture, racial superiority as they pursued their raw national interest. It is depressing that as history is coming to an end and these cloaks are increasingly being seen as threadbare, instead of an upswell of the recognition of our common humanity and connectedness, somehow the dynamics of sport seem to predominate. We follow our countries like we follow our football teams- for no particular reason except that they are ours. Our politicians encourage this and somehow extract more passion and blind support than they did under the old banners. Putin declares nothing about Russia except for its right to be great and respected again. An educated Chinese will defend self-serving CCP drivel because the CCP stands for China and nothing else. In America, people wave Old Glory from their SUVs and woof "USA 1" rather than "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Aussie, aussie, aussie. Oi. Oi. Oi. My country, right or wrong. I hope this is a necessary stage of the historical dialectic that will soon be met by a countervailing force. And that things do not get too nasty in the meantime…

Its such a shame that so many people died for the right to have their own country, because while a country is surely better than a colony, it is still a very arbitrary and rather silly thing, and the blood-stained flags are fetters holding us back from the world and humanity…Not too dissimilar to the tragedy of the millions who died for their right to worship imaginary beings…Is it really rocket science to devise economic and political systems that guarantee everybody security and freedom? Everything else derives from, and is secondary, to that…In a world where the majority are poor and excluded from the table, we rich seem to put every dollar we can find into seeing who can pay the most for each other's houses…

In many parts of the Islamic world, a women's testimony is worth only half that of a man. This is patently ridiculous. Anyone who's spent any time at all with a woman knows that they remember every single event in minute detail. They'll remember if you put your keys on a different shelf four days ago. And for more serious matters, they will not let you forget forever! If anything, a women's testimony should be worth twice that of a man. Never forget that Mohammed's first wife was his boss.

HK- Never dumpling the President-of-Vices

2007-11-28T02:49:00.000+11:00

I've got a mate who works for Procter & Gamble across the border in China. In Africa and Asia they sell cream by making people think they are not white enough. In America and Europe they try and make people think they are not dark enough. Bablylon system is a vampire, suckin' the blood of the sufferers. Samsara. Too dark. Too white. Who among us has been blessed with that elusive exalted state of melanin grace? I'll tell you who. Darkie. They spell his name Darlie nowadays, but one look at his minstrel face, smiling from a billion tubes of Chinese toothpaste, lets everyone know that's just a typo (and the Chinese, always happy to call a shovel a spade, still use the label ?? ("Heiren" or "Black man")). He is patently black, but they've shone a spotlight or a searchlight on him, so his blackness can be inferred by the shadow that falls across half his face. Black but white, smiling happily from the shadows. Colgate-Palmolive own him.

Girl on the bus reading "Executive Mandarin for Beginners". If you're a beginner, you shouldn't be speaking about anything to executives unless you want to sound like a chinglish t-shirt..."I am respectful leveraged buyout. Never dumpling the President-of-Vices from mergers and executions division, don't you not agree?"

Tiny ancient fellow, all boxy like a lego man, unfurls the quiet rage of his last days on the Hung Hom KCR railway station concourse in banners and placards- "H3aven Destroys CCP", "F@lun D@fa is Good". I wonder how many similar little old men across the border have had their few remaining teeth knocked out in prison for such actions...surely purveyors of perms are a greater threat to the Chinese nation...

There are some so moon-faced that the speakers and mics on their mobile phones do not align with their ears and mouths. They alternate between speaking and listening, like truckers on a CB radio....Hmmm, a niche market there perhaps...along with sunglasses for the pug-nosed...and bikinis for the distressingly gunt-ed...gimp ball gags for the profoundly bucktoothed.....and I've got a feeling in my waters that monocles and codpieces are due for a revival...and penny-farthings...and phlogiston...and arsenokoites...

BTW- If you try and read this particular blog entry in China, all you will get is the date followed by blankness...Probably something to do with a certain religious movement I mentioned..It would seem Myspace internally censors things that run through its China server because the Chinese Government censoring is much more crude...for example you'll just get a timeout message if you try to go to Wikipedia or the BBC website...nice, huh? Let's see what happens if I just change a few letters...

HK- Know your meat

2007-11-26T02:48:00.000+11:00

HK- Know your meat

Went for a walk round my neighbourhood...saw an old man in pajamas and slippers going to the ATM. An oldish woman carrying folded cardboard boxes and paper hanging from a rod across her shoulders. Children strolling with filipina nannies. A filipina mall, where maids gather and gossip around shops blaring tagalog television and music and selling pinoy food, fashion and phone cards. They seem to have no menfolk...nor, I suppose, do the filipino men building castles in the Arabian sand have any womenfolk. I hate that babies are born into this world circumscribed by passport and gender as to where they can go in it. One world. One love. Dogs in too small petshop cages. Neglected legitimate dvds and vcds. Apples sold in celophaned packs of 4. In shaded paved areaa that constitutes the local park, an old woman has her feet up in her husband's lap, receiving a foot massage (she must have had that clause put in the marriage contract all those years ago) while nattering away as contentedly as Cantonese will allow.

My morning ferry dodges cruise ships and tinny tiny fishing boats and tyre festooned junks bobbing in the wake. Not sure i'd trust anything that emerges from these waters, not even aphrodite herself...we go past the slick contoured homage to sydney's opera house, towers of varying fengshui and vintage, dyke walls and floating cranes and dredgers reclaiming land from the sea and singing to my dutch soul, bearing in on the ifc building, a massive pointed erection to Greater China's potency.

What's the collective noun for models...? I'll make one up...I passed a nong of models in central station last night, travelling in numbers for mutual protection against mirror paralysis. I made a gesture to one implying he had something on the back of his neck and he spent the next 3 minutes inconsolably twirling round and round in distress, trying to see what it was...

Along with bubble tea, I can't seem to find roast duck to save myself...maybe they'd all been premptively martyred in the jihad against SARS or bird flu...anyway, thought i'd gotten lucky today at lunch but it turned out to be roast goose instead. Very yummy but misidentifying animal meat is a bad habit to get into in this part of the world...

"HK- I know something you would never believe. I wish I was finally able to make you a queen."

2007-11-19T02:44:00.000+11:00

HK- "I know something you would never believe. I wish I was finally able to make you a queen."
Current mood: priapic

Have moved to Hong Kong.

Opened an account at a bank. Laughingly easy. Just a passport and some documentation purporting to sPost Optionshow a home address was all it took. I waited in line with a menagerie of other terrorists, eager to avail themselves of a respectable, comprehensive, few-questions-asked financial service. I think I saw a descendant of Anais Nin's bounding Basque and more Palestinian headscarves than would be warranted even by its current chicness. There was also a large American chap trying to look inconspicuous despite the "kick me, I'm CIA" sign stickytaped to his back...

The waiting room also showed a sign with Chinese characters and "6.35%" in big numerals. I asked an attendant if that referred to their current mortgage rates and was told it was actually a promotion they were running on Australian Dollar deposits. While John Howard has the country believing he has delivered record low rates, we probably have the highest in the developed world. If only Hongkies could vote in the upcoming election, the Reign of Mr Sheen might continue for another term.

I saw a place selling cheap boneless Hainan chicken and had promised myself, after a long day in the office, that it would be mine. Dreadfully disappointed. Bland, undercooked, tough and gut-breaking. But in a Hong Kong minute, I eat it at a table with a chap who turns out to be a DJ in a funky new club, and I get a guided tour...

The office overlooks the genteel Foreign Correspondents Club and I have to hold myself back from defecting...

Towering silos of people march up and down the island. Billions spent on purchasing land up, down and, if billboards count, sideways...yet my local ferry port looks like it hasn't seen a cent's investment in 30 years and the toilet cleaner seems to live on site, if the laundry hanging next to the entrance is any guide. The is what you get when noone pays tax- private splendour, public squalour (and good-for-nothing foreigners like me). The ferry itself only costs a dollar for a journey that must rank with Sydney's Manly-Circular Quay service for world's best commute.

From the window of my 27th floor eyrie, I see an eagle riding up the thermals, something white and fluffy in its talons for belly or nest.

Widescreen TV in my apartment. Watched Lawrence of Arabia as it was meant to be watched. And NBA, too. I think it is a condition of ESPN's broadcasting license in this part of the world that every game must feature Yao Ming's Houston Rockets...

Can't find bubble tea to save myself...offset by Poccari Sweat and Iced Tea on tap...

I think I saw Christopher Doyle lying in a gutter like a pok gai, slurring Chinese opera and poetry...

Found an elevator in the middle of the city...took it to find another one...then another one...til, like Icarus, I feared I had risen too high and decided to get off near a lonely mosque populated only by a few old Confucian gents, sunning their bellies. Continued on to the Botanic Gardens where I found catatonic orang-utans in cages where bars painted green were the only concession to their desire for natural habitat. I wondered why the school children insisted on yelling "hello, hello!" to the ape, only to finally realise the ape was me.

While technically an agnostic, as the only certainty is uncertainty, I was born a Christian and I have for quite awhile been functionally an atheist, as rejection is a good default position to have to any faith-based proposition, with Buddhist leanings. Yet I think I technically found God the other morning on the Hung Hom-Central ferry on the following lines- "One cannot take a reductionist approach to reality. There is either a reality that is infinite and eternal (from which I, for the sake only of survival and the argument, hold myself to be conceptually aloof, even though there is nowhere where I can say I definitively begin or end) or there is nothing- there cannot be anything in between. And by thinking, I disprove the latter and confirm the former. So to the extent I accept an infinite and eternal reality, I suppose I can equate such a thing to God, as It/He is broadly understood. So mark me down as a theist, though not a Christian, along with Pascal, Spinoza, Jefferson and Einstein (who once said "reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one")"...doesn't really change anything, though...Just an accounting fudge...

Love is like shogi, where the pieces we lose come back to haunt us.

My first Chinglish contribution-

"I know something you would never believe. I wish I was finally able to make you a queen."
Worn on a t-shirt of a girl in front of me in the Park N'Carry supermarket check-out line...

Bonobo- Gentle Sages to the Slaughter

2007-10-21T01:27:00.000+10:00

Imagine someone travelled back in time and assassinated Aristotle, Confucius, Da Vinci, Voltaire, Buddha, Shakespeare, Jesus, Newton- all the great souls who had done so much to teach us about humanity. We would never know what we had lost and we would continue in our lives, poorer and more ignorant of ourselves.

Deep in the green heart of the Congo, sages from our evolutionary past go about their lives, waiting to share with us vital insights into the eternal questions of good and evil, sexual morality and equality, nature and nurture, and war and peace, if we would only stop killing them and each other and take the time to learn. They are called bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees (pan paniscus) and future generations may look back on us as the assassins of historic wisdom if we do not stop driving them into extinction.

Don't tell the Creationists, but taxonomically speaking, bonobos are officially part of our family- the hominids (better known as the Great Apes), which consists of we humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. Bonobos share 98.7% of our DNA. For a long time we mistook them for their common chimpanzee (pan troglodyte) cousins, despite their trendier centre-part hairstyles. They are also slightly more slender, their infants have darker faces and redder lips and their adults retain the white rump tuft that common chimpanzees lose after infancy.

However it's what goes on between their ears and their legs that makes them so special. In 1954, German scientists Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck described behavioural differences between chimpanzees and bonobos in the Munich Zoo by noting, among other things, that bonobos were more sensitive and lively, much less violent and had more sex face-to-face. They concluded by saying, "the bonobo is an extraordinarily sensitive, gentle creature, far removed from the demoniacal primitive force [Urkraft] of the adult chimpanzee." This sensitivity is demonstrated by Kanzi, perhaps the first primate multi-media superstar, who has performed music with Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel and been featured on the Discovery Channel. He is regarded by many as the first ape to demonstrate full comprehension of human speech, recognising more than 3000 words, and can communicate sophisticated concepts and grammar using more than 300 symbolic pictures.

It would be harder, however, to do a primetime television special on the bonobos' vivid and rich s3x lives. Along with human females, bonobo females are believed to be the only mammals not to be aware or give signs of their fertile period. As with human females, bonobo sex is therefore not only for procreation, but can be used for other purposes e.g. bonding, recreation, pleasure, trade, tension release and conflict resolution. A bonobo may have sexual contact with males, females, young and old, singly or all at once. Tongue kissing, mast&rbation and oral s3x are common for both sexes. Males may hang from trees and engage in "penile fencing", rub their pen&ses together in the missionary position, or stand back-to-back and rub their scrotal sacs together in reconciliation after a conflict. When different groups approach a single food source, they have been observed to dispel the tension by engaging in sex before sharing the bounty. A female has been seen wooing a male only to filch the orange he was carrying after succumbing to her charms. In fact, it is through female sexuality that bonobos chalk up another remarkable characteristic- their matriarchal social structure.

Despite being somewhat physically smaller than their male counterparts, bonobo females dominate. Females get first access to food and band together to punish males who assault other females, or who even have the temerity to try and snatch food first. This female solidarity is cemented by frequent passionate bouts of vigorous mutual vulva frottage, often to org&sm. It is unknown why males do not respond by forming alliances of their own. Perhaps they lack the social skills or are resigned to the fact that their interests may be better served by having females in charge. Or both.

Bonobos provide a marked contrast to common chimpanzees, where males constantly scheme and form tenuous alliances to physically intimidate females and other males to gain preferential access to ovulating females. And rather than having sex with rival groups, chimpanzees have been known to systematically wage war on each other until only one group remains.

While biology is not necessarily destiny, we share a common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees who probably lived around six million years ago. Both provide glimpses into our evolutionary heritage and it is tempting to see elements of bonobo and chimp behaviour in human interaction. In this regard it is fortunate our primate cousins are so limber for they are increasingly being contorted to suit the varied positions of various commentators on the human condition. In many ways, they are proxies for our own moral, sexual and social conflicts.

Advocates of realism in International Relations theory can find succour in the zero-sum machinations of chimp politics and their war-of-all-against-all, while pacifists and idealists draw lessons from the cooperative and reconciliatory bonobos. The natural exuberance of bonobo sexuality, free of guilt and shame, gives anthropological weight to the hippy motto, "make love, not war", and their same-s3x shenanigans lends alternative examples to those oppressed by the notion that man is created in the image of a heterosexual god. Their matriarchal social structure demonstrates that brutal patriarchy is not necessarily the default primate position, while Kanzi's sophisticated language capabilities suggest a level of consciousness that blurs the boundaries typically reserved only for humanity. Bonobos provide new perspectives, if not complete answers, to ancient and profound questions

And yet we have barely begun to understand them, and some think that much of what we do know is tainted. Bonobos are only found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, deep in the Congo Basin, the world's second largest rainforest. Historically, they have been hard to visit, hard to find and hard to observe in their natural habitat. The bulk of bonobo observations to date, therefore, have been from captive animals or from wild animals drawn to a clearing with provisioned food. Science has also been a victim of recent wars that have killed nearly four million people, the greatest human slaughter since World War II. Only in the last few years has the security situation stabilised enough to allow researchers to return.

But the difficulties experienced by bonobo researchers pale next to the challenges faced by the bonobo as a species. While habitat destruction through logging is a significant threat, the bushmeat trade is the biggest killer. Bonobos are eaten by many who are starving and have no other protein source or killed by poor hunters who have no other financial source but to feed the growing demand in urban centres for bushmeat. It is extremely difficult to see bonobos, let alone conduct a census, but some experts estimate a decline from 200,000 in 1976 to possibly less than 10,000 today.

Socrates instructed, "Know Thyself". Plato said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Similarly, Shakespeare told us, "to thine own self be true". Bonobos have so much to teach us about ourselves but we are likely to slaughter them all within a generation. That we could do such a thing may be the bonobos' final lesson and indictment on who we are. But it's not too late.
More information on bonobos and their conservation is available from the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (www.bonobo.org) and the Great Ape Survival Project (www.grasp.org.au).

The Red Baron Takes a Hit!

2007-09-02T19:11:00.000+10:00

I drive a decrepit 1987 Toyota Seca (AKA the Red Baron). I never thought that I or the humble Baron could have such an effect on the world, but I suspect that between us, we lower the property value of our swanky street by at least 5%...which probably adds up to at least $30 million....

So I shouldn't have been surprised to find that some disgruntled neighbour had launched an egging on the Baron- bits of shell and dried yolk caking in the morning sun...just imagining some Toorak wasp winding up to throw the egg in the middle of the night in his smoking jacket and slippers and muttering, "By the Eyebrows of Menzies, I'll send that lumpen unwashed peasant back to whatever outer suburban mangrove swamp he crawled out off...you can always pick the renters..." Me and the Baron took it in our stride...bring on the Clockwork Orange Home Invasion crew, I say!

Philippines and Japan

2007-08-04T19:10:00.000+10:00

Philippines and Japan

The flight from Manila to Tokyo was, as expected, full of Japanese men with Filipina wives, girlfriends, ladies of negotiable affection, and children. I looked at the men and recalled the words of the Japanese Health Minister who recently described Japanese women as an inadequate supply of "baby-making machines". These men then were doing their patriotic duty to fill up the dangerously underpopulated home isles…

And I thought of a little story-

"They had been married for 54 years and on the last day of their lives they lay down on the tatami matting in their underpants, held hands and spoke soft words of the life they'd shared. The heat was unbearable, they had noone to call and nowhere to go and they were found like that some weeks later, on the tatami, in their underpants, holding hands, dead. Amongst their last words, they did not need to mention that noone would tend their grave or give offerings to their ashes.

Across Japan, thousands died together en masse, alone. In flat after flat of the bland apartment buildings the Japanese called "mansions" (and by 2015, most Japanese lived alone), the old, the weak and the lonely died and were only discovered when the heat had passed, when they were finally remembered, and when they smelled. The morgues could not hold all the bodies and ice-skating rinks and the refrigerators of breweries were pressed into service. Corpses were still being found six-months later. Japanese authorities, nothing if not meticulous, eventually put the death toll from the heat wave of 2015 at exactly 89,372, surpassing the incineration of Hiroshima and leaving far behind the 14, 802 Frenchmen who succumbed to the heat in 2003.

The government blamed global warming for two weeks of 40+ degree weather. They blamed tectonic movement for the earthquake that shut down key nuclear reactors, leading to power blackouts as everyone turned on their air-conditioners at once only to get nothing at all. And they blamed the Iran War and the mined Straits of Hormuz for limited supplies of oil at $130 a barrel. They blamed medical staff for being away on summer holiday and young people for neglecting their elderly relatives. The Opposition blamed government complacency and incompetence. The demographers smugly asked "what did you expect when a quarter of your population (more than thirty million) is over 65?". The actuaries, who can usually be relied upon to predict the chances of a piano falling on your head, strangely got this one wrong.

If old people have an occupation, it is dying. Yet is something they do grudgingly. We use 90% of our medical expenditure in the last five years of our life. One would expect the mass slaughter of the elderly by the elements would invoke some urgency. And for a few weeks afterwards, the Heatwave was all the talk of the ever-popular TV talkshows…until the national consciousness moved on to more important matters…like the failed engagement between the sumo champion and the swimsuit model, the latest sighting of a duck pierced by a crossbow, and the new craze for genetically modified guppies.

Several hundred Filipina nurses, some who had been in Japan for more than 15 years, had their working visas revoked as their services were no longer required at suddenly empty nursing homes."

Some observations today-

I walked past a primary school and saw a little, little person. A dwarf in prep was pushing her little matie on a skateboard. So cute! Then I saw a Grade 5 girl beat up a Grade 5 boy and recalled repressed memories of that difficult time when girls are often bigger than boys.

On the way home I saw a blonde girl try to shelter from the rain under a tennis racket….

Philippines- "we are a short people who's favourite sport is basketball"

2007-07-17T19:08:00.000+10:00

The last time I'd flown to the Philippines was a long, long time ago, and I'd forgotten the sad cast of tiny Filipinas shackled to corpulent moustachioed taxi-drivers and angelic halfy children that attend such flights.

In the departure lounge, one Filipino gentleman spoke on his mobile phone in a voice familiar to anyone acquainted with a call-center- "I'm sorry, sir. The RM Williams store in the airport did have brown moleskin pants, but not in XXXL size.", as I imagined a disappointed fat-arsed relative at the other end of the line.

Qantas hostesses in pooh brown aboriginal print dresses, seemingly swiped from a 70s curtain rack.

Oh how the Filipinos love Mr Bean!

Such a bitter bastard am I to find him so tedious.

I have a window seat with Jorge Louis Borges next to me, speaking incessantly of Buenos Aires and humanity.

So beautiful- the grand towering thunderheads of the tropics, like glacial explosions detonated by promethean lightning within, pinkened by the incipient sunset.

There goes Zamboanga. What a name!

What is a dithyramb?

The bubbly presenter on the Qantas "welcome to Manila" piece helpfully suggests that its better to make withdrawls from ATMs in the malls, rather than in the street, without explaining exactly why…

I see the map of Asia on the screen in front of me, a simple diagram of a plane plotting our course, which, if drawn to scale, would appear as an angel of death, shadowing entire nations (admittedly the smaller ones) beneath its vast wings. I see the names of familiar places I've been to. I reflect what a life I've led to have walked in so many, a vague sentiment of hubristic omnipresence. Then wonder why any place is better than another…and how many more places would be revealed on the map if sea levels fell and the blue sprawl became land, diminishing my travel achievements. And chuckle at the silliness of it all.

There is a big ad in the Manila Times from the Manila Times School of Journalism, which has the motto, "preparing our youth to become better journalists". Apparently the school feels it urgent that the nation's youth be aware of its "Effective Call-Centre Training Program" in order that they may "learn to speak with a midwest American accent", "develop effective telephony skills" and "get to know American culture and geography". All for only 9800 pesos (USD$200).

Its not like the country couldn't do with some more journalists, their depleted ranks indicated by their prominent representation on the newspaper front-page in a list of 863 innocent victims suspected killed with impunity by military, police and their "special agents and auxiliaries"…along with teachers, lawyers, human-rights advocates…probably safer and more lucrative to be a call-center worker with a spiffy mid-western accent….

Headline on today's Manila Times- "New Terrorist Law Passed- Critics Urged to Give it a Chance" (to which I mentally added…"and Report Themselves to Nearest Authorities".)

Went out drinking Saturday night with my local colleague, Mina. She took me to a comedy club, where camp gays get their revenge by making everybody else feel uncomfortable. SEAsia likes to make use of their committed homosexualists. Apparently if you try to escape conscription in Singapore by pleading an affection for the male members, they put you in the entertainment corps. Imagine if Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great or Lawrence of Arabia had been made to titillate the troops, rather than lead them. Anyway, I blame alcohol for straining out "sweet child of mine" on stage with a trinity of simpering gaybos- the short, the fat and the skinny. And for coming home and brushing my teeth with shaving cream…

When it rains, all the little kids in the semi-shanty huts of corrugated iron and cardboard splash about laughing in the street in the nuddy. A colleague said "you would too if you lived in corrugated iron shacks in constant 30+ degree heat"...

I had a massage on Sunday.

On the menu was a regular 1 hour massage for 400 pesos (about USD$8), a deluxe for 600 (where you get to take a shower before your massage), VIP for 700 (where you get to take a shower with a girl who scrubs you before your massage) and an Exclusive for 950 (where you get to take a shower with a girl who scrubs you before taking you upstairs for a downstairs massage). Believe me or not, but I just took the regular massage (otherwise, I probably wouldn't be telling you about it).

In a darkened hall, the scene reminded me of the steamy bathhouse in Miyazaki's "Spirited Away", where the loathsome silent semi-naked bodies of slothful fat creatures (in this case, Japanese businessmen/sex tourists) and stink spirits were being worked on by teams of industrious little girls.

My joy in finding four channels showing basketball matches (Filipino national team playing a heated match against Syria, a local league game, the WNBA All-Star match and televised NBA Summer League of has-beens and wannabes) offset by at least four showing preachers (which quite effectively push Pascal's Wager (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager)...to which I constantly have to remind myself that the wager, taken to its logical conclusion requires vigourous and indiscriminate belief in any and all religions espousing salvation).

Lyrics from a Filipino video clip in MTV-
"I'll be at the call centre
Until something better
Comes my way

Party all morning, work all night
Get my loving when the sun shines
Bright."
Good song.

I've been stuffing my face with cheap, good Japanese food here but I asked a local for an example of typical Pinoy (Filipino) fare- "well, do you like sugar on your pasta? Seriously, go and order the bolognaise at Jolibees, the Filipino McDonalds."

Odes to a day

2007-03-21T19:02:00.000+11:00

I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap;
Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall fast asleep,
When the bitch growing bold, to my pocket does creep.

Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge the affront,
At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage.
And missing my whore, I bugger my page.
Then crop-sick all morning I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning till eleven again.

- Regime de Vivre, John Wimot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (aka "The Libertine", played by Johnny Depp), 17th Century

I get up around seven
Get outta bed around nine
And I don't worry about nothin' no
Cause worryin's a waste of my... time.

-Mr Brownstone, Guns and Roses, 1987

Woke up, got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, i noticed i was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
Somebody spoke and i went into a dream
Ah.

-A Day in the Life, Beatles 1967

Yes indeed, I'm alone again.
And here comes emptiness crashing in.
It's either love or hate,
I can't find in between,
'cause I've been with witches and I've been with a queen.

It wouldn't have worked out anyway.
So now it's just another lonely day.
Further along we just may.
But for now it's just another lonely day.

-Another Lonely Day, Ben Harper, 1995

Iran- We wouldn't be surprised if the moon blows up

2007-02-27T19:01:00.000+11:00

"Here it always red-alert
The siren never ends its moaning
Over corpses that didn't finish their night's sleep,
Where bat-like jets which hate the light
Bomb the cracks in our blind blackout curtains
We can't even trust the stars in case they're spies,
We wouldn't be surprised if the moon blows up..."

Iranian poet, Ghayasar Amin Pour, while his home city of Dezful came under nightly air attack in the war waged against Iran by Iraq (with the full political, financial and military support of the US and Arab world) in which half a million Iranians died (and half a million Iraqis).

Must such poems be written again there soon...?

Iraq 1920

2007-02-26T18:59:00.000+11:00

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady witholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows...We are not today far from a disaster."

T.E Lawrence (Of Arabia)
Article in the Sunday Times of London
August 1920

Lest we forget....