Prologue: I served as a reporter to the Toronto Youthforce during the Toronto International AIDS Conference from August 10-18th. What follows is a feature article written for the Youth AIDS conference site.
August 17, 2006.
It seemed like business as usual at the main pressroom on Day 3 of the International AIDS Conference in Toronto. Helene Gayle, President of the International AIDS Society, had just introduced Gregg Goncalves, of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), when the situation began to change rapidly. Gregg ceded his spot to two HIV positive black South African women, Sipho Mthathi and another TAC representative—a highly unusual act in such settings. As Sipho began to speak, a dozen members of TAC stood up together and loudly began to chant slogans and holding signs reading “Gates is not the voice of (People with AIDS)!” and “Media: Activist not ‘Hollywood’ Conference.” The previously somber crowd of mostly press reacted with surprise.
I had been waiting for this moment. Through personal sources, I'd previously embedded myself with a Northern activist organization, the Student Global AIDS Campaign, which provided additional support to TAC during the action. Moving from a protest outside the convention center against U.S. Free Trade Agreements which had taken place shortly beforehand, they had regrouped inside the building and coordinated with their South African colleagues via cell phone, awaiting permission to join the demonstration. A few minutes later, a member of TAC arrived to give them the green light.
“They’re now accepting white people,” Matt Kavanagh, Harvard graduate and executive director of the organization, informed his colleagues, his tone mixing both subtle humor and a sort of knowing liberal consciousness. Symbolic and literal representation of communities they view as marginalized or under-represented is an ever-present, almost obsessive concern for the AIDS activist community. TAC, which is largely comprised of HIV-positive black South Africans, but whose membership includes other ethnic groups, had previously expressed a desire to keep the demonstration as ‘black’ as possible.
Over 60 percent of all people living with HIV are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Africa has more than any other individual nation: 5.5 million, of whom the vast majority of those diagnosed are black.
Upon receiving the green light, the SGAC group discretely slid into the media center, where they joined TAC members in one of the unused interview rooms for a quick briefing on their message and action plan. Then, they walked into the press conference with signs concealed, before taking over and utilizing the entire event to voice their concerns in efficient, if dramatic fashion.
The whole process took about 15 minutes.
It was not the first time they had co-opted an event in such fashion. Rather, it has become a practically expected part of any large-scale AIDS event for activists to take main stage through direct action tactics. Since the inception of organizations such as Act UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York and Paris--whose “Silence Equals Death” slogan in the 1980s remains one of the most successful advocacy campaigns in recent history--through to today’s transnational advocacy movements, AIDS activists have played a historic, formative role in shaping the AIDS debate. Battling for media representation, activists have been influential in enlarging the circle of inclusion beyond traditional medical and political fields.
This conference is a case study of this process of consistent evolution. Originally starting as a research-centered conference for the scientific and medical communities, the International AIDS Conference has since grown to become an extraordinarily broad gathering of people involved in HIV from every country and sector of society, including community organizers, peer educators, sex workers, music celebrities, and, of course, activists. It now even boasts its own "global village," a colorful, lively hub of activity where music and street theatre takes place besides sex workshops and fashion shows.
AIDS is commonly described as the petri dish of social issues. It serves to magnify and bring to light a broad spectrum of contemporary social ills, including race, class, sexuality, increasing corporate power, democracy, trade liberalization, and U.S. hegemony. In similar fashion, the AIDS activist movement, with its own complex dynamics and varied worldviews, effectively captures the state and direction of other global social movements, serving indirectly as its own petri dish.
Ms. Gayle, whose glances of consternation towards TAC delegates before the ‘take-over’ suggested that this was not her first activist 'couped' event, attempted to keep the discussion as close to the original agenda as possible. However, following the conference’s unplanned transformation, she struggled to keep discussion on topic, and the majority of questions from the media were addressed to, or at least addressed by Ms. Mthathi, whose articulacy and well-informed response remained constant.
The general theme of Ms. Mthathi and her organization was the continued marginalization and lack of participation of those most affected by the virus: poorer people of color from developing countries. However, she touched on a variety of other issues, including what she viewed as her own government’s misinformation campaigns, difficulty in procuring second line treatment, and pharmaceutical lobby interests in the United States’ HIV/AIDS foreign policy.
Several times during the questioning process, one of the TAC’s leaders, who is a white man, condemned the moderator and several journalists for addressing their questions to Dr. Fauci, an American doctor.
“This is exactly the problem we’re talking about,” he shouted angrily. “Why don’t you ask Sipho to answer the question? Are only people who come from [English-speaking countries] allowed to answer?”
Meanwhile, media ravenously snapped up footage and photographs of the standing protesters, who continued to chant and cheer following particularly prescient points. More media gathered outside the pressroom, shooting their pictures with arms outstretched upwards, unable to squeeze into the now crowded entrance.
I noticed Frika Chiu, the young positive Indonesian woman who had spoken so eloquently at the Opening Ceremony, holding a sign towards the back which read “Face Reality About HIV/AIDS – People Are Dying,” another attack on the ‘celebrity circus’ nature of this year’s conference. This is, some might argue, an inevitable consequence of the more inclusive, populist direction that activists such as Frika herself have championed for the IAC. With increased media exposure comes increased commercial interest, in addition to a watering down, or perhaps more accurately, a “prettying up” of the event for lay audiences.
It was whilst swiveling the video camera around the room that I couldn’t help but realize that this was a perfect “petri dish” moment in itself. Perched at the front sat Helene Gayle, an African-American woman with seasoned roots in the establishment, and Dr. Fauci, from the upper crust of medical circles and representative of the white, educated, male elite in the North. Then, to his left, Ms. Mthathi and her colleague, two young 'community-level' women, aggressively representing the sentiments of the majority of people infected or affected by the virus. Finally, next to them, a Ugandan female minister, representing the oft-criticized African elite.
Before them in the audience lay more fragmented segments of international society. In one pocket stood the TAC protesters: angry, emotive, and black. Seated or kneeling around them, the media: mostly white if slightly more diverse, many of whom are busy in their own career-driven lives--capturing footage on expensive cameras, emailing it back to their bureaus, then flying off to cover another story next week. At the back of the room, protesters from outside South Africa: some of them Northern, others from the South, all very vigorous in righteously supporting TAC, whom they often refer to as their “brothers and sisters,” a glimpse into their model of global citizenship and social equity.
The room had become not only a perfect microcosm of the global AIDS society, but of current society in general. It would have looked fantastic in some introductory sociology or political science class for many a Fall college returnee.
In this heavily discussed globalizing world are mixed notions of choice, freedom and rights. As an activist example: the political and business leaders of the world have the choice to take decisive action in overcoming the epidemic; millions of people living with HIV without access to generic drugs do not have the choice to save their own lives. For them, many governments and pharmaceutical executives are denying the poor and disempowered the human right to life.
An opposing example: Pharmaceutical companies should have the freedom to patent and protect their intellectual property in a competitive global economy; the U.S. government has the freedom to encourage free trade agreements with poorer countries. For such individuals, activists do not understand the realities of macroeconomics or international trade, and their shouting and theatre provide more distraction than positive outcome.
Depending on where one stands, from a merely academic perspective, all of these arguments are relative constructions of the same titanic debate, and neither one nor the other party is entirely correct.
What does not seem to be non-unanimous is the notion of human worth. If human life is valuable, and indeed, the consensus in this AIDS debate is that it is, and if saving lives and overcoming the epidemic should come before profit or ideology or elements of faith, then why is it that 25 years into the epidemic, we’re not even at the point of curbing it, let alone close to eradicating it?
Depending on whom you talk to at this conference, the answer is sure to be different. And the answer will continue to change as new treatments are rolled out, and with new international trade agreements in flux. From what I’ve heard, it seems like we’re finally moving in the right direction. Positive statistical evidence from a recent UNAIDS report also suggests faint glimmers of improvement.
No matter the state of our efforts, however, at least one thing is assured: there will be angry, impassioned activists in whichever direction the AIDS response travels; demanding more minority participation, chastising anything short of universal access to drugs, steadfast in their belief that saving human life should come before all else. As the TAC members left the press conference today to go “tear down” the South African government’s booth, they sang together: it was a beautiful, mournful song which echoed out of the media center and into the main halls of the convention center.
The world’s response to AIDS is much better because of people such as Sipho Mthathi. Activists are just as necessary now as they were during the beginnings of the epidemic, so many years ago. And, let us hope, not too many years ahead. Enough life has been shed for my generation; I dare not to think what AIDS may bode for that of my children.
Mark Hiew is a reporter for the Toronto YouthForce. He can be reached at mark(dot)hiew(at)gmail.com
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Pete Yorn at Olssons
August 7, 2006.
Tonight, I filtered into a packed Olsson's in Dupont Circle to hear Pete Yorn play an in-store acoustic set. I was a little late getting in, and by the time I did, people were flowing right up to the front doors, squeezed in along book aisles, backed up along sight lines.
I put down an Orwell biography to find Pete, hair long and unkempt, shuffling up on to the small elevated stage Olsson’s uses for such events. He wore a faded black tee and a small, closed smile. After many unsuccessful occasions, it was nice to finally see the man behind one of my favorite records of my college years perform.
What struck me most about the show is how intimate and willing to open himself to strangers Pete was, given the circumstances. It was as if he opened up a big ole ‘Can of Truth N’ Love’ for us, or something similarly wonderful and rare in this town. He started with “Just Another Girl,” a beautiful ballad from his first album which he later explained to be about the down-to-earth character of a famous friend, rather than a brush-off towards a former flame, as I’d previously guessed. He followed this with an unreleased track which, struck me as unremarkable, but Yorn still struck nuggety gold with that slightly off-tune signature croon and the sort of breaking lines and Dylan aches that in a lesser vocalist comes off merely as overly affected.
Following a rollicking blues cover, he played “Bandstand in the Sky,” which he explained was written following his hearing of Jeff Buckley’s passing. Now there are many, many songs inspired by this influential artist—the album version of “Fake Plastic Trees” came following a Jeff concert in London, Rufus Wainwright, Jamie Cullem, Chris Stills, and so on have been vocally influenced, have covered or written elegies to him—but Pete’s is up there as one of the most poignant.
The second verse reveals Jeff as the song’s protagonist: “So come with me to a river I have seen/On the way, we can wash off in the stream/Time is waiting for the lightning to arrive/You can take my life but I’ll never die/You can tell that’s the way I’ll survive,” Pete croons, before launching into a full-bodied harmonica middle eight. I closed my eyes, partially to block out the buffoon browsing books during the performance, but mostly to imagine Jeff tuning in from wherever he happens to reside these days. A few days ago, I had re-watched the ‘Making of Grace’ documentary, and that tousle-haired, chanteuse-lipped muse I can picture so clearly swam into vision once more. It was a gorgeous performance, and the crowd was suitably gracious.
By the fifth song, Pete was asking the crowd for ‘fun songs to play.’ Instinctively, I called out “Strange,” and following a quieter voice closer to the front calling for the same tune, Yorn agreed to our joint request. “Strange Condition” is by far my favorite Pete Yorn song: a masterful combination of tunefulness and catchy narrative, it is one of the better pop songs of recent memory, beautifully constructed and simply bursting with musical ideas and economical instrumentation. He didn’t disappoint, though his calls for the crowd to sing along were met—this being after-work Washington—with little response.
I couldn’t have been more pleased. A Jeff elegy and the one song I’d hoped to hear…what could he possibly play now to top it all? I’d spoken too soon. Referring to the 1969 March on Washington and the Peter, Paul and Mary show which it included, Yorn was cloy: They played ‘If I Had a Hammer’ then this song…”
The first thing that jumped to my mind, alas, was “Puff the Magic Dragon.” But no, this was a protest song, and “no matter what side you stand on,” the crowd was completely struck when Pete leapt into his gut-wrenching, drawn out version of “Blowing in the Wind.” I closed my eyes once more, and recalled those pure, unadulterated feelings of activist idealism that flowed through my friends and I during protest after protest prior to the invasion of Iraq, some four years ago.
Later, as Pete signed my album and after I’d finally discovered how he came to write the key modulation in “Strange Condition,” I told him how much his version of “Blowing in the Wind” meant to me.
“ I took a look at the lyrics, and I just couldn’t believe how true they are today,” he explained, with an earthy candor that I found particularly rewarding. “Particularly in the last couple of weeks.”
I thought of a particularly prescient line from the song: “How many deaths will it take, ‘till he knows that too many people have died?”
And this, with a President who continues to play “Point the finger” from his vacation home, with thousands more troops entering Iraq, and an entire Middle East descending into tenuous chaos.
How right Bob and Pete are. Both then and now. Which leads me to ask:
Where are our Dylans and Baezes now, in this hour of need? Who will stand up as the Peter, Paul, and Mary of our generation?
Tonight, I filtered into a packed Olsson's in Dupont Circle to hear Pete Yorn play an in-store acoustic set. I was a little late getting in, and by the time I did, people were flowing right up to the front doors, squeezed in along book aisles, backed up along sight lines.
I put down an Orwell biography to find Pete, hair long and unkempt, shuffling up on to the small elevated stage Olsson’s uses for such events. He wore a faded black tee and a small, closed smile. After many unsuccessful occasions, it was nice to finally see the man behind one of my favorite records of my college years perform.
What struck me most about the show is how intimate and willing to open himself to strangers Pete was, given the circumstances. It was as if he opened up a big ole ‘Can of Truth N’ Love’ for us, or something similarly wonderful and rare in this town. He started with “Just Another Girl,” a beautiful ballad from his first album which he later explained to be about the down-to-earth character of a famous friend, rather than a brush-off towards a former flame, as I’d previously guessed. He followed this with an unreleased track which, struck me as unremarkable, but Yorn still struck nuggety gold with that slightly off-tune signature croon and the sort of breaking lines and Dylan aches that in a lesser vocalist comes off merely as overly affected.
Following a rollicking blues cover, he played “Bandstand in the Sky,” which he explained was written following his hearing of Jeff Buckley’s passing. Now there are many, many songs inspired by this influential artist—the album version of “Fake Plastic Trees” came following a Jeff concert in London, Rufus Wainwright, Jamie Cullem, Chris Stills, and so on have been vocally influenced, have covered or written elegies to him—but Pete’s is up there as one of the most poignant.
The second verse reveals Jeff as the song’s protagonist: “So come with me to a river I have seen/On the way, we can wash off in the stream/Time is waiting for the lightning to arrive/You can take my life but I’ll never die/You can tell that’s the way I’ll survive,” Pete croons, before launching into a full-bodied harmonica middle eight. I closed my eyes, partially to block out the buffoon browsing books during the performance, but mostly to imagine Jeff tuning in from wherever he happens to reside these days. A few days ago, I had re-watched the ‘Making of Grace’ documentary, and that tousle-haired, chanteuse-lipped muse I can picture so clearly swam into vision once more. It was a gorgeous performance, and the crowd was suitably gracious.
By the fifth song, Pete was asking the crowd for ‘fun songs to play.’ Instinctively, I called out “Strange,” and following a quieter voice closer to the front calling for the same tune, Yorn agreed to our joint request. “Strange Condition” is by far my favorite Pete Yorn song: a masterful combination of tunefulness and catchy narrative, it is one of the better pop songs of recent memory, beautifully constructed and simply bursting with musical ideas and economical instrumentation. He didn’t disappoint, though his calls for the crowd to sing along were met—this being after-work Washington—with little response.
I couldn’t have been more pleased. A Jeff elegy and the one song I’d hoped to hear…what could he possibly play now to top it all? I’d spoken too soon. Referring to the 1969 March on Washington and the Peter, Paul and Mary show which it included, Yorn was cloy: They played ‘If I Had a Hammer’ then this song…”
The first thing that jumped to my mind, alas, was “Puff the Magic Dragon.” But no, this was a protest song, and “no matter what side you stand on,” the crowd was completely struck when Pete leapt into his gut-wrenching, drawn out version of “Blowing in the Wind.” I closed my eyes once more, and recalled those pure, unadulterated feelings of activist idealism that flowed through my friends and I during protest after protest prior to the invasion of Iraq, some four years ago.
Later, as Pete signed my album and after I’d finally discovered how he came to write the key modulation in “Strange Condition,” I told him how much his version of “Blowing in the Wind” meant to me.
“ I took a look at the lyrics, and I just couldn’t believe how true they are today,” he explained, with an earthy candor that I found particularly rewarding. “Particularly in the last couple of weeks.”
I thought of a particularly prescient line from the song: “How many deaths will it take, ‘till he knows that too many people have died?”
And this, with a President who continues to play “Point the finger” from his vacation home, with thousands more troops entering Iraq, and an entire Middle East descending into tenuous chaos.
How right Bob and Pete are. Both then and now. Which leads me to ask:
Where are our Dylans and Baezes now, in this hour of need? Who will stand up as the Peter, Paul, and Mary of our generation?
Monday, July 24, 2006
New blog, same fop.
Howdy friends:
I have started a new blog about living in Shaw. It's called A Shaw Thing, and you can find it at the far more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly free blog host, wordpress, at ashawthing.wordpress.com.
I'll still be updating this blog periodically, perhaps with less lengthy pieces and more brief riffs and links on music, politics, and the like. But look for more consistent writing at the new blog, focused on the theme of class, race, and identity in Washington. What else is new?
I have started a new blog about living in Shaw. It's called A Shaw Thing, and you can find it at the far more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly free blog host, wordpress, at ashawthing.wordpress.com.
I'll still be updating this blog periodically, perhaps with less lengthy pieces and more brief riffs and links on music, politics, and the like. But look for more consistent writing at the new blog, focused on the theme of class, race, and identity in Washington. What else is new?
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Summertime in DC
Ahh, Summertime.
Where the rivers of love, bile, and sweat flow freely from genitalia, political institutions, and unlikely-to-second-date brows…
Where sun and urine-meets-sewerage-like light beer mixes with barbeque conversation, where crime rates soar, and 7-11 slurpee cups leave bright, corporate tags across the sad graffiti of post-Borf Washington…
Into this world step Colonel Noah and Seargent Mark, shipmen of the Q, anchor of the free world’s free radio waves: carrying with them to DC’s humor-droughted rank and file: ITSLATEAGAIN:The Podcast Series. V - Summer in DC!
Featuring the following delicious additions:
- A guide to white people in Shaw-Howard neighborhood
- Mark’s infamous “Ching Chong” story
- ITSYOUROPINION! A 2 minute debate on Global Warming
- Perfectly hummable summer melodies from Lilly Allen, Jorge Drexler* (gracias mi hermanita), The Zutons, Keane, Brazilian Girls, and my secret weapon: a Piaf-meets-Bjork temptress named Camille. She’s so perfect in fact that I mess up attributing “Ta Douleur” to her, instead re-citing Lilly. Apologies.
NB: What you hear during the intro is not a hurricane, nor an approaching earthquake. It is our fan.
My love and sweat to you all!
-Mark
Where the rivers of love, bile, and sweat flow freely from genitalia, political institutions, and unlikely-to-second-date brows…
Where sun and urine-meets-sewerage-like light beer mixes with barbeque conversation, where crime rates soar, and 7-11 slurpee cups leave bright, corporate tags across the sad graffiti of post-Borf Washington…
Into this world step Colonel Noah and Seargent Mark, shipmen of the Q, anchor of the free world’s free radio waves: carrying with them to DC’s humor-droughted rank and file: ITSLATEAGAIN:The Podcast Series. V - Summer in DC!
Featuring the following delicious additions:
- A guide to white people in Shaw-Howard neighborhood
- Mark’s infamous “Ching Chong” story
- ITSYOUROPINION! A 2 minute debate on Global Warming
- Perfectly hummable summer melodies from Lilly Allen, Jorge Drexler* (gracias mi hermanita), The Zutons, Keane, Brazilian Girls, and my secret weapon: a Piaf-meets-Bjork temptress named Camille. She’s so perfect in fact that I mess up attributing “Ta Douleur” to her, instead re-citing Lilly. Apologies.
NB: What you hear during the intro is not a hurricane, nor an approaching earthquake. It is our fan.
My love and sweat to you all!
-Mark
Thursday, June 29, 2006
An Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States: 22 Reasons to Fall in Love Again
Dear America,
We weren’t always friends.
It started off so innocently. A skinny Chinese boy, a West Australian town, and a dream by the name of John Starks, who wore a flat-top with his #3 New York Knickerbockers jersey during the early nineties. Later in life, I would grow to stand nowhere close to John’s muscular six-foot-five frame nor ever to gain the opportunity to be royally shat upon by Michael Jordan each playoff series, but you, good ma’m, were the Mother of All Things Cool, and John Starks was your most glorious son. Throw in Guile from Street Fighter 2, a kitchen-handy Colonel named Sanders, and $200 AU Reebok Pump sneakers and you were at once my Lady of the Night and super-hot babysitter, all rolled up together. If Australia was the tangible and immediate—sand grains in my pants from the beach, ‘No Hat, No Play’ schoolyard totalitarianism and kids with hair so light they bleached white during summer—then you were the surreal.
But really, thanks for (1) John Starks. He was, ineffably, the man.
Such slavish devotion at your altar of manufactured cool only grew in depth as the tortured pains of immigrant adolescence set in. I felt anger—(3) Kurt Cobain provided its sonic outlet. I hated Aussie grit—your blockbusters provided the glam. I lusted for classmates—Sharon Stone’s legs (4 and 5) sat down in a chair for interrogation (the rest is history). For every emotional pull and timorous impulse to push boundaries a 13-year-old with a diary might feel, you provided all the catharsis, pop psychology, and heart-warming cinematic dialogue I could have asked for, like a virtual Gaia from (6) Captain Planet (which in its own wonderfully absurd way, offered a pre-cursor to globalized youth activism of which I’ve actually taken to heart). However, this only hinted at the sort of religio-emotive intimacy we began to acquire following the release of Ally McBeal to broadcast television.
Having a grand total of two television stations in my hometown meant pickings were slim. However, it also meant that you developed abnormally obsessive relationships with prime time characters from David E. Kelley comic dramas, particularly those involving thin, flakey lawyers and their zany colleagues. So whereas less stunted viewers may have cooled to Ally’s limited array of “over-active” imaginative antics, I chose to travel another route. I began to become Ally McBeal. Not so much in terms of wan smiles and mini skirt suits—alas, gender roles and Anglican private schools appear only faint acquaintances—but mental excursions. Annoying kid on the bus? Cue Vonda Shepherd’s “Shoop Shoop” song and I was a million miles away, walking imagined snow-lined sidewalks as Bostonian suits admired my cheekbones. Don’t know how to dance? Watch Calista Flockhart and make like you’re the dancing baby.
I’ve since been told the story of one young woman who quit law upon discovering that her firm did not possess curious little men with vocal tics. To which I might reply: “Oogga Chaka, Oogga Chaka!,” “Snappish!”, or “Law and love are the same - romantic in concept but the actual practice can give you a yeast infection,” depending on my mood.
So thank you for (7) Ally, or at least, her team of scriptwriters.
On my very first highly anticipated trip to visit you, I had (8) two sixteenth birthdays. I suppose that has more to do with Greenwich Meantime than it does Los Angeleno hospitality, but I’ll take it.
On the same trip, whilst taking my first baby steps around the country--the Chinese Mann theatre, downtown Minneapolis, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, etc.—I found my journey to be thoughtfully soundtracked by the Backstreet Boys, and their irrepressible ballad: (9) “I Want it That Way.” During every cab ride, whilst entertained by each Marriott Inn television channel, you constantly opined that I was “your fire,” occasionally even “your one desire” (growl!), and it seemed at the time that both of us wanted it to be that way. Again, I think a Swedish fellow wrote that tune but I’m giving you all the love this year.
And then my family actually moved here.
When it occurred to me that the transition from the idyllic, pop culture-soaked realm of my youth into the murky, uncharted territories of transnational migration--with its clique-tastic (-1) public high schools and dystopian pre-existential loneliness--was not going to be remotely as charming as Ally’s relationship with ex-boyfriend Billy, nor somehow as romantically destructive as Kurt’s relationship with (-2) Courtney Love, I did not react particularly well. My junior year of high school was a harrowing mixture of peer rejection in which I alternated awkwardly between efforts at choking back my then-purebred rural Australian accent, and attempting to cash it in with various social groups like one might a little red Monopoly house:
“I’ll say ‘Fosters: Australian for beer!’ three more times; then you have to invite me over after school,” went the invisible screenplay;
“Fair dinkum, G’day mate, yes, bloody well…’shrimp on the barbie’: can we make out now?,” I would practically venture like a scene from Annie Hall, though uniformly without success.
I am now desperately attempting to maintain intimacy with my mother tongue, if for little more than the popular and occasionally awe-inspiring approval it wins from (+5 = 11) American women.
I recall the moment I was cleaning syrup off of bottles during recent tenure as a waiter, when during our conversation, one of the more sensual of my fellow wait staff let slip:
“Can you just keep talking…it really turns me on.”
Now as a straight, blood-flowing male I must say that I have never felt quite as immortal, quite as Zeus-esque, quite as wondrously close to the Himalayan heights of He-man majesty previously known only by the James Deans and Steve McQueens of our world as I did that otherwise mundane evening. There are many more sensible, readily quotable reasons to enjoy American society; say: (12) socio-economic upward mobility, (13) the overthrow of WASPish old money cultural hegemony, or (14) the man who invented wikipedia as off-the-cuff examples. But in all truthfulness, it is your magical ability to take what at face value is a particularly coarse, vowel-mutilating, ‘R’-tone erasing distant nephew of the English language, most heavily influenced by both convict descendents and gold miners, and to transubstantiate it into something that is (15) marketable, (16) inimitable (By God you have tried…and oh how you have failed), and…the thought still defies rationality: (17) SEXY, which causes this humble servant to kneel down at the temple of flesh and cry out in gasping awe:
“Thank you CROCODILE DUNDEE.”
But, unbelievably, there was a time when we clashed, Ms. America, so badly that I actually tried ceasing relations.
Somewhere between the (-1) Fox News Channel (despite it being technically owned by an Australian), the majority of Red state inhabitants’ (-2) moral efficacy and (-3) dress sense, and the (-4) competency levels of the current administration, we had a sizeable fall out.
“That’s it,” I told myself. “I don’t like America. Hell, why don’tcha just call me Anti-American, Pat Robertson,” I resolved, as I dived into “Cuba’s Great!” pamphlets from Socialist tables by the student union, staged sit-ins in the name of (+10 =18) Rachel Corrie, and declared my allegiance to the world of snooty, more-lifestyle-conscious-than-thou Chomsky devotees known as the “activist college student.” If there was an IMF protest on a Saturday--I was there; a spoken word coffeehouse talkshop on ecological anarchism or the evil excesses of non-biodegradable deodorant? It took top row in my Slingshot journal.
And yet it was only following backpacking trips through the former Soviet bloc and post-occupation Timor-Leste, during which I grew to love what the Atlantic Monthly describes as the “American Ideal.” Much lovelier than a simple dream, it championed the circuitous route over the path most straight in the name of political pluralism and minority dissent. It is the ability to transform cycles of pure Black sound, often borne of oppression and tumult (the Blues and Hip-Hop), into something universally profound and necessary (the anti-passiveness ability to “rock out” and “get down” respectively). And today, it is the current archetype of post-modern modernity: the (19) Bourgeois Bohemian Renaissance woman. We now have a generation of ultra-overachieving yuppies throughout the neo-New Worlds of East and South Asia, whose ability to balance modern art with chai tea, and go-small gardening with investment banking, was largely guided by one tome of choice, written by a soft-spoken Jewish columnist for the (20) New York Times (who happens to live 10 minutes drive from my work.)
It’s a gradual process, Ms. America, but one whose gentle pace I have come to savor. Every time I buy a platter of pupusas and flautas down the road from (21) Letty of Guatemala in my hackneyed Spanish, each time somebody reveals to me the ethnic history of a Brooklyn neighborhood, we grow a little closer.
And yet for each new friend with whom I swap family sagas of migrant struggle (the generations usually only go no more than thrice), there is a new Minuteman or Ku Klux Klan revivalist organizing against women and men who risk their lives for the very same dream that these nativists’ ancestors once dreamt. This, along with your notion of cardboard-packaged, installable democracy, is your most insoluble contradiction, and one that I firmly believe we shall overcome.
Several months ago, as my Southwest Airlines plane descended toward Baltimore-Washington International Airport, I looked out upon a landscape familiar to many: fresh suburban sprawl and endless lines of SUVs pulling through drive-thru Krispy Kremes, concrete box Walmart stores and gas stations…in essence: the clean, uncompromising face of Middle America. And where before I might have reacted with uppity distaste, burying my face in a New Yorker or spilling Kundera-aping stanzas across an iBook screen, instead I felt the unanticipated, gnawing sensation of a smile, spreading itself ever so gradually across my face.
Upon which it occurred to me that: No, I am not coming home. I know where home lies, and it’s a long way away from Washington DC. But this time, I was returning to a place that I no longer seem to mind, that I might even say I rather enjoy. And now, one day before I move into a rowhouse ensconced with African-American neighbors on the doorstep of the (22) Capitol building, and four days before the two of us celebrate our respective births (Mine: 22nd, Yours: 230th), I am ready to speak the phrase that too many young liberals find so difficult to form in their mouths:
“America, I love you.”
We weren’t always friends.
It started off so innocently. A skinny Chinese boy, a West Australian town, and a dream by the name of John Starks, who wore a flat-top with his #3 New York Knickerbockers jersey during the early nineties. Later in life, I would grow to stand nowhere close to John’s muscular six-foot-five frame nor ever to gain the opportunity to be royally shat upon by Michael Jordan each playoff series, but you, good ma’m, were the Mother of All Things Cool, and John Starks was your most glorious son. Throw in Guile from Street Fighter 2, a kitchen-handy Colonel named Sanders, and $200 AU Reebok Pump sneakers and you were at once my Lady of the Night and super-hot babysitter, all rolled up together. If Australia was the tangible and immediate—sand grains in my pants from the beach, ‘No Hat, No Play’ schoolyard totalitarianism and kids with hair so light they bleached white during summer—then you were the surreal.
But really, thanks for (1) John Starks. He was, ineffably, the man.
Such slavish devotion at your altar of manufactured cool only grew in depth as the tortured pains of immigrant adolescence set in. I felt anger—(3) Kurt Cobain provided its sonic outlet. I hated Aussie grit—your blockbusters provided the glam. I lusted for classmates—Sharon Stone’s legs (4 and 5) sat down in a chair for interrogation (the rest is history). For every emotional pull and timorous impulse to push boundaries a 13-year-old with a diary might feel, you provided all the catharsis, pop psychology, and heart-warming cinematic dialogue I could have asked for, like a virtual Gaia from (6) Captain Planet (which in its own wonderfully absurd way, offered a pre-cursor to globalized youth activism of which I’ve actually taken to heart). However, this only hinted at the sort of religio-emotive intimacy we began to acquire following the release of Ally McBeal to broadcast television.
Having a grand total of two television stations in my hometown meant pickings were slim. However, it also meant that you developed abnormally obsessive relationships with prime time characters from David E. Kelley comic dramas, particularly those involving thin, flakey lawyers and their zany colleagues. So whereas less stunted viewers may have cooled to Ally’s limited array of “over-active” imaginative antics, I chose to travel another route. I began to become Ally McBeal. Not so much in terms of wan smiles and mini skirt suits—alas, gender roles and Anglican private schools appear only faint acquaintances—but mental excursions. Annoying kid on the bus? Cue Vonda Shepherd’s “Shoop Shoop” song and I was a million miles away, walking imagined snow-lined sidewalks as Bostonian suits admired my cheekbones. Don’t know how to dance? Watch Calista Flockhart and make like you’re the dancing baby.
I’ve since been told the story of one young woman who quit law upon discovering that her firm did not possess curious little men with vocal tics. To which I might reply: “Oogga Chaka, Oogga Chaka!,” “Snappish!”, or “Law and love are the same - romantic in concept but the actual practice can give you a yeast infection,” depending on my mood.
So thank you for (7) Ally, or at least, her team of scriptwriters.
On my very first highly anticipated trip to visit you, I had (8) two sixteenth birthdays. I suppose that has more to do with Greenwich Meantime than it does Los Angeleno hospitality, but I’ll take it.
On the same trip, whilst taking my first baby steps around the country--the Chinese Mann theatre, downtown Minneapolis, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, etc.—I found my journey to be thoughtfully soundtracked by the Backstreet Boys, and their irrepressible ballad: (9) “I Want it That Way.” During every cab ride, whilst entertained by each Marriott Inn television channel, you constantly opined that I was “your fire,” occasionally even “your one desire” (growl!), and it seemed at the time that both of us wanted it to be that way. Again, I think a Swedish fellow wrote that tune but I’m giving you all the love this year.
And then my family actually moved here.
When it occurred to me that the transition from the idyllic, pop culture-soaked realm of my youth into the murky, uncharted territories of transnational migration--with its clique-tastic (-1) public high schools and dystopian pre-existential loneliness--was not going to be remotely as charming as Ally’s relationship with ex-boyfriend Billy, nor somehow as romantically destructive as Kurt’s relationship with (-2) Courtney Love, I did not react particularly well. My junior year of high school was a harrowing mixture of peer rejection in which I alternated awkwardly between efforts at choking back my then-purebred rural Australian accent, and attempting to cash it in with various social groups like one might a little red Monopoly house:
“I’ll say ‘Fosters: Australian for beer!’ three more times; then you have to invite me over after school,” went the invisible screenplay;
“Fair dinkum, G’day mate, yes, bloody well…’shrimp on the barbie’: can we make out now?,” I would practically venture like a scene from Annie Hall, though uniformly without success.
I am now desperately attempting to maintain intimacy with my mother tongue, if for little more than the popular and occasionally awe-inspiring approval it wins from (+5 = 11) American women.
I recall the moment I was cleaning syrup off of bottles during recent tenure as a waiter, when during our conversation, one of the more sensual of my fellow wait staff let slip:
“Can you just keep talking…it really turns me on.”
Now as a straight, blood-flowing male I must say that I have never felt quite as immortal, quite as Zeus-esque, quite as wondrously close to the Himalayan heights of He-man majesty previously known only by the James Deans and Steve McQueens of our world as I did that otherwise mundane evening. There are many more sensible, readily quotable reasons to enjoy American society; say: (12) socio-economic upward mobility, (13) the overthrow of WASPish old money cultural hegemony, or (14) the man who invented wikipedia as off-the-cuff examples. But in all truthfulness, it is your magical ability to take what at face value is a particularly coarse, vowel-mutilating, ‘R’-tone erasing distant nephew of the English language, most heavily influenced by both convict descendents and gold miners, and to transubstantiate it into something that is (15) marketable, (16) inimitable (By God you have tried…and oh how you have failed), and…the thought still defies rationality: (17) SEXY, which causes this humble servant to kneel down at the temple of flesh and cry out in gasping awe:
“Thank you CROCODILE DUNDEE.”
But, unbelievably, there was a time when we clashed, Ms. America, so badly that I actually tried ceasing relations.
Somewhere between the (-1) Fox News Channel (despite it being technically owned by an Australian), the majority of Red state inhabitants’ (-2) moral efficacy and (-3) dress sense, and the (-4) competency levels of the current administration, we had a sizeable fall out.
“That’s it,” I told myself. “I don’t like America. Hell, why don’tcha just call me Anti-American, Pat Robertson,” I resolved, as I dived into “Cuba’s Great!” pamphlets from Socialist tables by the student union, staged sit-ins in the name of (+10 =18) Rachel Corrie, and declared my allegiance to the world of snooty, more-lifestyle-conscious-than-thou Chomsky devotees known as the “activist college student.” If there was an IMF protest on a Saturday--I was there; a spoken word coffeehouse talkshop on ecological anarchism or the evil excesses of non-biodegradable deodorant? It took top row in my Slingshot journal.
And yet it was only following backpacking trips through the former Soviet bloc and post-occupation Timor-Leste, during which I grew to love what the Atlantic Monthly describes as the “American Ideal.” Much lovelier than a simple dream, it championed the circuitous route over the path most straight in the name of political pluralism and minority dissent. It is the ability to transform cycles of pure Black sound, often borne of oppression and tumult (the Blues and Hip-Hop), into something universally profound and necessary (the anti-passiveness ability to “rock out” and “get down” respectively). And today, it is the current archetype of post-modern modernity: the (19) Bourgeois Bohemian Renaissance woman. We now have a generation of ultra-overachieving yuppies throughout the neo-New Worlds of East and South Asia, whose ability to balance modern art with chai tea, and go-small gardening with investment banking, was largely guided by one tome of choice, written by a soft-spoken Jewish columnist for the (20) New York Times (who happens to live 10 minutes drive from my work.)
It’s a gradual process, Ms. America, but one whose gentle pace I have come to savor. Every time I buy a platter of pupusas and flautas down the road from (21) Letty of Guatemala in my hackneyed Spanish, each time somebody reveals to me the ethnic history of a Brooklyn neighborhood, we grow a little closer.
And yet for each new friend with whom I swap family sagas of migrant struggle (the generations usually only go no more than thrice), there is a new Minuteman or Ku Klux Klan revivalist organizing against women and men who risk their lives for the very same dream that these nativists’ ancestors once dreamt. This, along with your notion of cardboard-packaged, installable democracy, is your most insoluble contradiction, and one that I firmly believe we shall overcome.
Several months ago, as my Southwest Airlines plane descended toward Baltimore-Washington International Airport, I looked out upon a landscape familiar to many: fresh suburban sprawl and endless lines of SUVs pulling through drive-thru Krispy Kremes, concrete box Walmart stores and gas stations…in essence: the clean, uncompromising face of Middle America. And where before I might have reacted with uppity distaste, burying my face in a New Yorker or spilling Kundera-aping stanzas across an iBook screen, instead I felt the unanticipated, gnawing sensation of a smile, spreading itself ever so gradually across my face.
Upon which it occurred to me that: No, I am not coming home. I know where home lies, and it’s a long way away from Washington DC. But this time, I was returning to a place that I no longer seem to mind, that I might even say I rather enjoy. And now, one day before I move into a rowhouse ensconced with African-American neighbors on the doorstep of the (22) Capitol building, and four days before the two of us celebrate our respective births (Mine: 22nd, Yours: 230th), I am ready to speak the phrase that too many young liberals find so difficult to form in their mouths:
“America, I love you.”
Monday, June 19, 2006
Podcast 4: The Booty has been Upturned…
In a recent article for New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones—to my eyes, pop’s finest contemporary critic—describes what he calls “Americans’ fitful appetite for British pop.’
It made for nice timing, as I have long been an ardent enthusiast of the grand tradition of British rock music, as it seems, is much of the collegiate culturati of Anglo-America, and understandably so: the wordy, nervy character that has come to define much recent british guitar pop is often melodramatic in tone and linguistically region-specific, highly endearing qualities to those for whom the names Chaucer and Blake evoke more cheer than fear.
Frere-Jones argues that American audiences will swallow only that which is uplifting and self-helpish in tone, such as saccharine chaps like Coldplay or James Blunt. As he writes: “If your songs are cynical, ironic, or misanthropic, and loaded with references to Tesco or ‘tracky bottoms tucked in socks,’ Americans may simply turn the dial.”
There are several blips in pop history’s eventful turns that stand out in opposition to this argument. U2, they of the humungous, One-life, elevating choruses for those who know that sometimes they can’t make it on their own, falls clearly in Jones’ favor. But how does he explain the continued popularity of Radiohead, miserablist Oxford experimentalists who remain undoubtedly the most important rock band of our epoch, and whose American popularity—though far more extensive outside of the States—is well beyond anything definable as “cult status.”
Moreover, the tone of much post-Smiths State-side rock: the schools of grunge, rap-rock, and emo-pop respectively, owe far more to the melodramatism and alienated existential crises that Robert Smith and Morrissey articulated to such potent effect during the mid-80s, than to the excess and experientially-focused modes of psychedelica and jam, prog-rock or pop-metal which came before them. Indeed, Kurt Cobain, who so memorably covered the then-obscure Scottish band the Meat Puppets during his seminal Unplugged concert, can be seen as a Seattle antihero of distinctly British attribute.
But enough pontification…here’s the music already: Welcome to a world of British music you may or may not have met yet:
ITSLATEAGAIN: Podcast 4 – Britain’s Booty.
Featuring the Manics, Arctics, a countrified Stereophonics gem, Sandanista-era Clash, and a song from perhaps my favorite record of the 90s: “Different Class,” by Pulp.
It made for nice timing, as I have long been an ardent enthusiast of the grand tradition of British rock music, as it seems, is much of the collegiate culturati of Anglo-America, and understandably so: the wordy, nervy character that has come to define much recent british guitar pop is often melodramatic in tone and linguistically region-specific, highly endearing qualities to those for whom the names Chaucer and Blake evoke more cheer than fear.
Frere-Jones argues that American audiences will swallow only that which is uplifting and self-helpish in tone, such as saccharine chaps like Coldplay or James Blunt. As he writes: “If your songs are cynical, ironic, or misanthropic, and loaded with references to Tesco or ‘tracky bottoms tucked in socks,’ Americans may simply turn the dial.”
There are several blips in pop history’s eventful turns that stand out in opposition to this argument. U2, they of the humungous, One-life, elevating choruses for those who know that sometimes they can’t make it on their own, falls clearly in Jones’ favor. But how does he explain the continued popularity of Radiohead, miserablist Oxford experimentalists who remain undoubtedly the most important rock band of our epoch, and whose American popularity—though far more extensive outside of the States—is well beyond anything definable as “cult status.”
Moreover, the tone of much post-Smiths State-side rock: the schools of grunge, rap-rock, and emo-pop respectively, owe far more to the melodramatism and alienated existential crises that Robert Smith and Morrissey articulated to such potent effect during the mid-80s, than to the excess and experientially-focused modes of psychedelica and jam, prog-rock or pop-metal which came before them. Indeed, Kurt Cobain, who so memorably covered the then-obscure Scottish band the Meat Puppets during his seminal Unplugged concert, can be seen as a Seattle antihero of distinctly British attribute.
But enough pontification…here’s the music already: Welcome to a world of British music you may or may not have met yet:
ITSLATEAGAIN: Podcast 4 – Britain’s Booty.
Featuring the Manics, Arctics, a countrified Stereophonics gem, Sandanista-era Clash, and a song from perhaps my favorite record of the 90s: “Different Class,” by Pulp.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Podcast 3: Our Issue, Our Fight
Hello listener,
After a week of international negotiation advocacy craziness, I hereby present:
ITSLATEAGAIN...The Podcast! 3: Our Issue, Our Fight.
Being an UN-themed podcast, it's got an international feel to it, and being somewhat celebratory: happy songs. The competition, which was won by a colleague, has been replaced with long stories involving protest elation, and after far too much amateur editing, a final call-to-arms above a Bloc Party remix. Look for some Arcade Fire, Marvin Gaye, and more of that delectable Zap Mama, back by popular demand!
Indulge me, and join the mission. The global AIDS advocacy movement is just warming up.
Love,
Mark
After a week of international negotiation advocacy craziness, I hereby present:
ITSLATEAGAIN...The Podcast! 3: Our Issue, Our Fight.
Being an UN-themed podcast, it's got an international feel to it, and being somewhat celebratory: happy songs. The competition, which was won by a colleague, has been replaced with long stories involving protest elation, and after far too much amateur editing, a final call-to-arms above a Bloc Party remix. Look for some Arcade Fire, Marvin Gaye, and more of that delectable Zap Mama, back by popular demand!
Indulge me, and join the mission. The global AIDS advocacy movement is just warming up.
Love,
Mark
UNGASS Youth Wrap
UNGASS Blog 9: From Inclusion to Leadership
I am on my way back to Washington, rolling away from the rollicking clatter of New York City and the seat of international administration at which over the past week, dozens of brilliant young activists have made their presence felt as profoundly as possible. As didactic and occasionally enthralling as the meeting was, I can’t seem to shake the lingering sense of disappointment at the ultimately mediocre strength of the session’s results. The final political declaration to come out of the 2006 UNGASS review was a mixed bag; encouragingly, it included the strongest youth language ever seen in such a document, as well as a demand for national targets (if not specific quantitative nor global ones) and some mention of putting life before intellectual property rights through access to generic drugs.
Paragraph 26 reads: “(Therefore, we) commit to address the rising rates of HIV infection among young people to ensure an HIV-free future generation through the implementation of comprehensive, evidence-based prevention strategies, responsible sexual behaviours, including the use of condoms, evidence-and skills-based, youth specific HIV education, mass media interventions, and the provision of youth friendly health services.”
Though it fails to mention comprehensive sexuality education, which would have undoubtedly been preferable to “youth specific HIV education,” this paragraph at least allows civil society and non-state actors to push national governments as close to full accountability as possible.
On a less positive note, the declaration fails to make explicit mention of specific at-risk communities, including Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), preferring to use the politically ambiguous term “vulnerable groups.” It also makes mention of “cultural values” in a warping of their original use, in order to allow particular regimes to continue to ignore and repress groups based on ideology, rather than public health or human rights. The declaration does not commit states to reaching the necessary goal of $23 billion USD by 2010, merely calling for signed states to “ensure that new and additional resources are made available.” Finally, the document does not make mention of universal access, a visionary step pushed by the UN since 2001 which is deserving of full political support.
Despite these setbacks, and make no mistake, these are definite setbacks whose exclusion will certainly hinder a truly effective response to global AIDS, I have been filled with a sense of optimism that Harriet, the middle-aged fabric designer I met at a diner across from the UN, considers simply youthful naiveté.
It is an optimism that I derived in-part after speaking to a young HIV-positive homosexual man from the South Bronx who got arrested inside the US Mission through an act of courageous civil disobedience, when he told me: “Now I know…I have the right to do this, and I can do this.”
It is an optimism borne from observing and participating in a number of spectacularly intense and provocative meetings of civil society: where immensely influential veteran activists—such as Eric Sawyer of Act Up and Asia Russell of Health GAP—teamed with a range of professionals from throughout the global south, to analyze, critique, and demand more from the bureaucratic process of disappointing compromise that the UN is renowned for, whilst equipped with nothing more than the weapons of tenaciousness, outrage, and moral agency.
An optimism that witnessed fellow youth advocates take media center stage with grace and aplomb, be they Deidre of Memphis, Tennessee on CNN International, or Nino Susanto of Jogyakarta, Indonesia on BBC World, entering the stage of public affairs with a vigor and intelligence that our generation may possess in abundance, but which the world continually fails to fully utilize.
HIV/AIDS is a treacherous, venomous disease, a devastatingly dark pestilence whose life-stealing enormity far outweighs that of any other phenomenon, natural or man-made, in human history. There are numerous countries, some within Sub-Saharan Africa, in which it has already reconfigured and ravaged the natural cycle of our species—robbing societies of an entire generation of young leaders and breadwinners. If HIV is to destroy us in such a way, reversing many centuries of progress in global prosperity, longevity of life, and the struggle for social justice: it will not be because of the superior biological nor mutational ability of the disease itself. It is well-known that we have effective antiretroviral therapy which allows for the prolonged, healthy life of people living with HIV/AIDS, and that such drugs can be produced for less than a dollar a day. In similar fashion, progress in the development of preventive microbicides, which are critical to the empowerment of women and girls, more potent treatments, and ultimately, a permanent cure, is well within the reach of modern medicine as well as society’s final realization of health as a human right.
No, humankind shall not be defeated by the HIV virus, but only by humankind ourselves. If we allow the unfettered greed of the pharmaceutical industry, which spends less on research than it does on advertising, whilst profiting in far greater excess than both combined; or the hateful ideology of discrimination due to sexual orientation, race, or class to persist in modern society; or the myopic trappings of political relations, mainstream apathy, and inexcusable inaction to come between humankind and the conquest of its greatest challenge to date, than it shall be a hellish self-fulfilling descent upon which humanity is tumbling.
I firmly believe that this shall not be the case.
I believe that my generation, in partnership with and in the spirit of past social movements that have come before us, shall not allow a mere lack of political will to defeat us. Over the past week, I have been blessed to partake in a bounty of inspiration and action, as youth summit members rallied their national delegations, excelled on official panels, and led the shouts of protest from within the very heart of the United Nations, the General Assembly Hall. This group of individuals: women and men; lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, still deciding, and straight; Southern and Northern, short and tall; empowered and impatient, will wait no longer for their leaders to take decisive action to prevent new infections and provide access to treatment immediately.
We are Kuntal Krishna of India, who moved Mrs. Annan to visible effect when sharing the story of a 15-year-old HIV victim from his home, whom asked him to the Secretary-General’s wife with a painting of her deceased relatives. We are Keesha Effs of Jamaica, whose blistering presentation on the feminization of HIV shook UN delegates into congratulatory reverie. And we are Naina Dhingra of the United States, whose unyielding strength of character and mastery of the political process provides young people with a true leader at the highest levels of administration. As Incia Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian coordinator for the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS so eloquently stated: “We must be the generation of change.”
Jan Eliasson, President of the UN General Assembly, issued the following call to all signatory states during the closing remarks of this week’s meeting: “Take this Declaration, and take the new spirit and understanding of these three days, back to your countries, and implement it.”
It is up to us to make sure that they do just that.
I am on my way back to Washington, rolling away from the rollicking clatter of New York City and the seat of international administration at which over the past week, dozens of brilliant young activists have made their presence felt as profoundly as possible. As didactic and occasionally enthralling as the meeting was, I can’t seem to shake the lingering sense of disappointment at the ultimately mediocre strength of the session’s results. The final political declaration to come out of the 2006 UNGASS review was a mixed bag; encouragingly, it included the strongest youth language ever seen in such a document, as well as a demand for national targets (if not specific quantitative nor global ones) and some mention of putting life before intellectual property rights through access to generic drugs.
Paragraph 26 reads: “(Therefore, we) commit to address the rising rates of HIV infection among young people to ensure an HIV-free future generation through the implementation of comprehensive, evidence-based prevention strategies, responsible sexual behaviours, including the use of condoms, evidence-and skills-based, youth specific HIV education, mass media interventions, and the provision of youth friendly health services.”
Though it fails to mention comprehensive sexuality education, which would have undoubtedly been preferable to “youth specific HIV education,” this paragraph at least allows civil society and non-state actors to push national governments as close to full accountability as possible.
On a less positive note, the declaration fails to make explicit mention of specific at-risk communities, including Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), preferring to use the politically ambiguous term “vulnerable groups.” It also makes mention of “cultural values” in a warping of their original use, in order to allow particular regimes to continue to ignore and repress groups based on ideology, rather than public health or human rights. The declaration does not commit states to reaching the necessary goal of $23 billion USD by 2010, merely calling for signed states to “ensure that new and additional resources are made available.” Finally, the document does not make mention of universal access, a visionary step pushed by the UN since 2001 which is deserving of full political support.
Despite these setbacks, and make no mistake, these are definite setbacks whose exclusion will certainly hinder a truly effective response to global AIDS, I have been filled with a sense of optimism that Harriet, the middle-aged fabric designer I met at a diner across from the UN, considers simply youthful naiveté.
It is an optimism that I derived in-part after speaking to a young HIV-positive homosexual man from the South Bronx who got arrested inside the US Mission through an act of courageous civil disobedience, when he told me: “Now I know…I have the right to do this, and I can do this.”
It is an optimism borne from observing and participating in a number of spectacularly intense and provocative meetings of civil society: where immensely influential veteran activists—such as Eric Sawyer of Act Up and Asia Russell of Health GAP—teamed with a range of professionals from throughout the global south, to analyze, critique, and demand more from the bureaucratic process of disappointing compromise that the UN is renowned for, whilst equipped with nothing more than the weapons of tenaciousness, outrage, and moral agency.
An optimism that witnessed fellow youth advocates take media center stage with grace and aplomb, be they Deidre of Memphis, Tennessee on CNN International, or Nino Susanto of Jogyakarta, Indonesia on BBC World, entering the stage of public affairs with a vigor and intelligence that our generation may possess in abundance, but which the world continually fails to fully utilize.
HIV/AIDS is a treacherous, venomous disease, a devastatingly dark pestilence whose life-stealing enormity far outweighs that of any other phenomenon, natural or man-made, in human history. There are numerous countries, some within Sub-Saharan Africa, in which it has already reconfigured and ravaged the natural cycle of our species—robbing societies of an entire generation of young leaders and breadwinners. If HIV is to destroy us in such a way, reversing many centuries of progress in global prosperity, longevity of life, and the struggle for social justice: it will not be because of the superior biological nor mutational ability of the disease itself. It is well-known that we have effective antiretroviral therapy which allows for the prolonged, healthy life of people living with HIV/AIDS, and that such drugs can be produced for less than a dollar a day. In similar fashion, progress in the development of preventive microbicides, which are critical to the empowerment of women and girls, more potent treatments, and ultimately, a permanent cure, is well within the reach of modern medicine as well as society’s final realization of health as a human right.
No, humankind shall not be defeated by the HIV virus, but only by humankind ourselves. If we allow the unfettered greed of the pharmaceutical industry, which spends less on research than it does on advertising, whilst profiting in far greater excess than both combined; or the hateful ideology of discrimination due to sexual orientation, race, or class to persist in modern society; or the myopic trappings of political relations, mainstream apathy, and inexcusable inaction to come between humankind and the conquest of its greatest challenge to date, than it shall be a hellish self-fulfilling descent upon which humanity is tumbling.
I firmly believe that this shall not be the case.
I believe that my generation, in partnership with and in the spirit of past social movements that have come before us, shall not allow a mere lack of political will to defeat us. Over the past week, I have been blessed to partake in a bounty of inspiration and action, as youth summit members rallied their national delegations, excelled on official panels, and led the shouts of protest from within the very heart of the United Nations, the General Assembly Hall. This group of individuals: women and men; lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, still deciding, and straight; Southern and Northern, short and tall; empowered and impatient, will wait no longer for their leaders to take decisive action to prevent new infections and provide access to treatment immediately.
We are Kuntal Krishna of India, who moved Mrs. Annan to visible effect when sharing the story of a 15-year-old HIV victim from his home, whom asked him to the Secretary-General’s wife with a painting of her deceased relatives. We are Keesha Effs of Jamaica, whose blistering presentation on the feminization of HIV shook UN delegates into congratulatory reverie. And we are Naina Dhingra of the United States, whose unyielding strength of character and mastery of the political process provides young people with a true leader at the highest levels of administration. As Incia Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian coordinator for the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS so eloquently stated: “We must be the generation of change.”
Jan Eliasson, President of the UN General Assembly, issued the following call to all signatory states during the closing remarks of this week’s meeting: “Take this Declaration, and take the new spirit and understanding of these three days, back to your countries, and implement it.”
It is up to us to make sure that they do just that.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Mark at the UN
Hi friends!
After some high-level dealing and shaking with my boss, I’ve managed to scamper off from work for a week, in order to do something some of you may wonder whether I should be given more time to do:
I’m going to blog.
But this time, it’s actually going to be about something other than that the life of Mark. It’s going to be about the life of Mark, and 60 other youth HIV activists, at the UN’s High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS in New York City. I’ve been given the title of “Youth Web Correspondent,” which is formalese for “Young, Angry Polemic Blogger.” Seriously though, I’m absolutely stoked to be given this outlet for articulating the needs and demands of my generation at such an influential gathering.
Rather than flood inboxes, I’ll point you to the Reproductive Health Reality Check, which is where my postings will be updated with some regularity.
I am hoping to acquire a microphone, through which I may be able to record a podcast of youth voices from the summit. I’ll work on vlogging (video log) next time!
Hope all is well, feel free to send some thoughts on youth empowerment and global health and HIV/AIDS if you’ve got a minute…I know it’s what most of you think about during your spare time anyway. ☺
Live from the concrete jungle of Manhattan,
Mark
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Podcast 2: The Other Side Needs Toasting
Hello Dear Listener,
For all those who listened to the first podcast, this will come as a nice gentle step up in production value. The mic volume has been suitably adjusted, only this time I have a cold, which more or less balances the level of listenability to a mere tolerance.
ITSLATE AGAIN...The Podcast! 2: The Other Side Needs Toasting
That is why, in order to boost numbers and win advertising contracts from Clear Channel Corporation or Corporate Values, I have included a brand new sement to the podcast. Yes indeed, ITSLATEAGAIN…The Podcast! Is proud to present its first ever radio contest…
The WHO’S WHO OF 1990 Podcast Competition! After listening, you’ll want to send your submissions to me at Mark dot Hiew at Gmail dot com, or, start looking for consolation gifts for yourself.
Also heavy in the mix this week are Matt Costa, Minus the Bear, Beck—remixed—Of Montreal, Gnarls Barkley and those blessed Strokes. Look out for my take on the omnipresent shampoo/conditioner dilemma and that lovable, somewhat indulgent Mark-commentary readers of this blog are already familiar with.
With love,
Mark
For all those who listened to the first podcast, this will come as a nice gentle step up in production value. The mic volume has been suitably adjusted, only this time I have a cold, which more or less balances the level of listenability to a mere tolerance.
ITSLATE AGAIN...The Podcast! 2: The Other Side Needs Toasting
That is why, in order to boost numbers and win advertising contracts from Clear Channel Corporation or Corporate Values, I have included a brand new sement to the podcast. Yes indeed, ITSLATEAGAIN…The Podcast! Is proud to present its first ever radio contest…
The WHO’S WHO OF 1990 Podcast Competition! After listening, you’ll want to send your submissions to me at Mark dot Hiew at Gmail dot com, or, start looking for consolation gifts for yourself.
Also heavy in the mix this week are Matt Costa, Minus the Bear, Beck—remixed—Of Montreal, Gnarls Barkley and those blessed Strokes. Look out for my take on the omnipresent shampoo/conditioner dilemma and that lovable, somewhat indulgent Mark-commentary readers of this blog are already familiar with.
With love,
Mark
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Podcast 1: Exploding Dreams of America
Hello Dear Listener,
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of ITSLATEAGAIN, where slightly dodgy editing work and unrehearsed verbiage are painstakingly thrown together in "It's meant to sound like that" fashion.
Tonight, we begin with the first edition of ITSLATEAGAIN…The Podcast!: "Exploding Dreams of America." (Right click: Save Link As)
A title of unsuitable grandiosity and semi-racy irrelevance, I came up with it at four in the morning after several alternating bouts of bafflement and elation, attempting to fit mp3 and mpeg4 files into wav. format. And that was before exporting and uploading.
So strap yourself in, because streaming live or downloaded onto your handheld Nugget of Nutrition (the iPod), this podcast is loaded with spring-action audio, accessories included! Featuring the indie-love wholesomeness of Ben Lee, M.I.A., Calexico, Stars, My Morning Jacket, Zap Mama, and some mash-up Mac DJ.
Illal Liqaa (Until we meet again),
Mark
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of ITSLATEAGAIN, where slightly dodgy editing work and unrehearsed verbiage are painstakingly thrown together in "It's meant to sound like that" fashion.
Tonight, we begin with the first edition of ITSLATEAGAIN…The Podcast!: "Exploding Dreams of America." (Right click: Save Link As)
A title of unsuitable grandiosity and semi-racy irrelevance, I came up with it at four in the morning after several alternating bouts of bafflement and elation, attempting to fit mp3 and mpeg4 files into wav. format. And that was before exporting and uploading.
So strap yourself in, because streaming live or downloaded onto your handheld Nugget of Nutrition (the iPod), this podcast is loaded with spring-action audio, accessories included! Featuring the indie-love wholesomeness of Ben Lee, M.I.A., Calexico, Stars, My Morning Jacket, Zap Mama, and some mash-up Mac DJ.
Illal Liqaa (Until we meet again),
Mark
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Sri Lalang and the Ethnic Issue
Published April, 2006
My guise is up as soon as I reach into my pocket. It’s just too Lonely Planet-perfect to resist: the smoky coals, the roasting satay ayam, the Malay man’s skilful fanning wrist. As I gingerly ease the camera out into the open, two young girls behind the stall shriek and take cover, suddenly self-conscious of the foreigner in their midst. After purchasing five satay sticks for one ringgit, I quickly wander off to explore another part of the bustling Friday night market where, as long as I don’t attempt any verbal communication, my Chinese blood can temporarily bleed into the crowd, passing me off as simply another local.
I linger with unnecessary caution at Sri Lalang’s main intersection, a crossing traveled more commonly by motorbike than by car. Helmet-less mothers, sometimes with as many as three child passengers: two toddlers up front against the handles and the oldest clutching on from behind, chug by dutifully. Most of the storefronts have closed up, leaving oil palm bunches out front for collection and the quiet rumble of Cantonese telenovelas and buzzing games from Japan to fill the warm dusk. Laughter erupts from a couple of weathered Chinese men in wifebeaters, sipping pulled tea in the coffeehouse of a tired-looking Malay sporting a black songkok, the rotund hat commonly worn by Muslims throughout Malaysia.
I notice how much more overtly race-conscious this past few weeks here has made me. Sectatranism dominates political debate and social discourse throughout this small island state with even greater command than it does in the United States. There, political correctness has only managed to stifle and elongate discussion (largely through clarificatory qualifiers repeated unto meaningless redundancy, such as “Now I’m not a racist, but…”) on issues such as affirmative action and poverty measurement, rather than lend the clarity and dignity of debate which may have been its original intention. In Malaysia, the Anti-Sedition Act is well-known for its selective use, often employed to prevent criticism of contentious state policies which selectively target bumiputeras (non-Chinese and non-Indians) as recipients of a variety of benefits. In the former, minority rights are the target of liberal protection; in the latter, majority (Malay) rights are guarded by an incumbent party whose platform is rooted in ethnic assistance.
Sri Lalang, whose name starts off sounding like that of another small Asian country but finishes with a certain Sino-lyricism, has a short but interesting history. It was founded as a concentration camp of sorts for Chinese by the British during the “Emergency,” the 12 year long civil war between Chinese communist guerrillas entrenched deep in the interior jungle and the waning British authorities. In its original incarnation, the village was fenced off, and those leaving and returning to the compound had their possessions inspected to ensure no food or goods were being smuggled out to support the revolutionary “terrorists”, who had been fighting since prior to the departure of the Japanese following World War II for an independent republic. Even bicycle tyre tubes were routinely checked in order to ensure that air was not being replaced with grains of rice.
My mother reminisces occasionally about how the leftists would come marching around the village, singing catchy anti-imperialist songs and encouraging the children to follow them – a “Little Red Pied Pipers” fairytale mash-up, one might say. Some of the more adventurous children would take up the offer, joining the others in order to combat capitalist oppression before the Federation crushed what little resistance was left. Perhaps because her father was a proud member of the anti-insurgent Home Front, my mother focused her time on school prefecture, tapping rubber and the acquisition of a bachelor’s degree overseas, eventually leaving Sri Lalang far behind.
I recently returned to the village without her. A quick motorbike tour of its small streets provided a microcosmic insight into the current state of the country’s race relations. New low-income Malay settlements were popping up on land previously used for rubber plantation, augmenting the previously Chinese-dominated town. The distinction is not difficult to see: their homes use slightly different architecture (though the same concrete and stucco material) and lack the red lanterns and altars which adorn practically every Chinese home. Prayer houses and mosques can be found nearby, rather than Buddhist temples that Chinese women could be seen making morning offerings at. Though I witnessed a couple of Indian siblings playing soccer on one street, the majority of them can still be found in a separate Tamil settlement across the highway.
Ethnicity in Malaysia is a fascinatingly complex beast. Whereas the post-native populating of the United States can be spaced reasonably accurately through a series of events (British settlement, Slavery, Irish potato famine, etc.), the same cannot be said of Malaysia. The distinction between the bumiputeras (“Sons of the soil,” meaning Malays and Natives) and the Chinese and Indians may be validated by ethnicity but certainly not through chronology: swathes of Chinese-Malaysians arrived through trade relations long before many current bumiputeras arrived from other reaches of the Southeast. At the birth of its federation, the Chinese actually comprised Malaysia’s largest ethnic group, until Singapore’s secession in 1965, selective immigration and declining birth rates landed the Malays in the lead. Such ambiguities comprise a large part of the reason why legislation which quite obviously privileges Malays—95 percent of government contracts, for example, are distributed to Malays—ahead of minority groups is greatly resented by the remainding 40 percent of the population.
Whilst being carted about by one overly-generous set of relatives and family friends after the other, I found the parallel dimensions of their Chinese existence quite striking. A Chinese in Malaysia may be born in a Chinese Maternity Hospital, educated entirely in private Chinese-language schools, eat and shop at Chinese businesses, read and consume exclusively Chinese media and observe only Buddhist practices before finally being buried, naturally, in a Chinese public cemetery. Malay need only be spoken during brief public exchanges, whilst English remains almost exclusively the language of science and foreign business. It is only when taking a break from my well-intentioned but cloying family that I was able to observe life outside of this transplanted Sino existence, wandering through mosques and Hindu temples in Kuala Lumpur between delicious roti snacking in Malay hawker stalls, admiring the graceful movement of the women and smiling at the oddly endearing veil-to-head-size ratio of pint-sized schoolgirls.
It wasn’t always the case that ethnic groups lived in such separated parallel dimensions, walking the same streets but in virtually different planes as they do now. I recently visited a street in the old capitol of Melaka where two temples, a mosque and a Tamil church laid practically beside each other. It seemed a suitable symbol of a pre-Federation Malaysia that my parents’ childhoods can harbor only nostalgia for at this point. My mother played amongst Malays and Indians and my father the same, but with Kadazans and other indigenous children thrown into the mix. When inviting Malay neighbors over for dinner, they simply made sure not to cook pork separately. It was a multiculturalism through small town practicality: folks tolerated each other because they had little reason not to, nor to interrupt their mutually beneficial economic relations.
This changed dramatically following the ascent of the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) party to national leadership. Islam became the national religion, Bahasa Malaya the formally recognized language. Malays were by law Muslims, the Chinese and Indians classified as “minority groups” and a series of legislation involving quotas and business schemes were introduced, supposedly to “pull up” the bumiputeras. Perhaps because of this, minorities banded together, setting up private institutions or even moving overseas where state ones denied them access, and marrying amongst their own rather than face forced conversion. I find it sad yet understandable that the Chinese and Malays in Sri Lalang socialize at separate cafes on the weekends, though see glimpses of good will in the oft-colour blind commerce of the weekly market. I took hope in the “plural society” speeches my cousin’s classmates made during a school competition, though their lofty assertions also struck me as even hoarier than the naive multicultural grandstanding that hides far deeper problems for Aboriginal communities across Australia, and Dutch-Muslim relations in Western Europe.
Prime Minister Badawi has made claims that his moderate Islamic vision for Malaysia will successfully equip it for a planned technological and industrialized leapfrog toward Western standards of living while remaining true to Malaysian moral and religious standards. In Sri Lalang, I found rows of new “garden” developments, where hardworking families were moving into Western-standard homes purchased on the back of years of honest hard work. I was reminded of something my 22 year-old cousin said to me quietly: “What’s the point of (sectarianism) anyway? We’re all Malaysian.” I think it’s even simpler than that. By keeping religion out of state affairs and focusing on a merit-based system of advancement, a lot of this current ethnic distancing could easily be closed. Rather than existing as an officially united but in practice segregated society of Malays, Chinese and Indians, the country could serve as a timely example of successful Asian development and moderate Islamic practice. Unfortunately, with a comfortably entrenched bumiputera electorate and meddling Malay elite, ethnic relations in towns such as Sri Lalang throughout the country will likely remain as segregated as at present for some time to come.
i) Malay: Melayu, referring to the ethnic group which currently comprises the majority in Malaysia, that is: not of Indian, Chinese, or “indigenous” descent
ii) Malaysian: A citizen of the state of Malaysia, referring to nationality. Ex: Chinese-Malaysian, Australian-Malaysian, etc.
My guise is up as soon as I reach into my pocket. It’s just too Lonely Planet-perfect to resist: the smoky coals, the roasting satay ayam, the Malay man’s skilful fanning wrist. As I gingerly ease the camera out into the open, two young girls behind the stall shriek and take cover, suddenly self-conscious of the foreigner in their midst. After purchasing five satay sticks for one ringgit, I quickly wander off to explore another part of the bustling Friday night market where, as long as I don’t attempt any verbal communication, my Chinese blood can temporarily bleed into the crowd, passing me off as simply another local.
I linger with unnecessary caution at Sri Lalang’s main intersection, a crossing traveled more commonly by motorbike than by car. Helmet-less mothers, sometimes with as many as three child passengers: two toddlers up front against the handles and the oldest clutching on from behind, chug by dutifully. Most of the storefronts have closed up, leaving oil palm bunches out front for collection and the quiet rumble of Cantonese telenovelas and buzzing games from Japan to fill the warm dusk. Laughter erupts from a couple of weathered Chinese men in wifebeaters, sipping pulled tea in the coffeehouse of a tired-looking Malay sporting a black songkok, the rotund hat commonly worn by Muslims throughout Malaysia.
I notice how much more overtly race-conscious this past few weeks here has made me. Sectatranism dominates political debate and social discourse throughout this small island state with even greater command than it does in the United States. There, political correctness has only managed to stifle and elongate discussion (largely through clarificatory qualifiers repeated unto meaningless redundancy, such as “Now I’m not a racist, but…”) on issues such as affirmative action and poverty measurement, rather than lend the clarity and dignity of debate which may have been its original intention. In Malaysia, the Anti-Sedition Act is well-known for its selective use, often employed to prevent criticism of contentious state policies which selectively target bumiputeras (non-Chinese and non-Indians) as recipients of a variety of benefits. In the former, minority rights are the target of liberal protection; in the latter, majority (Malay) rights are guarded by an incumbent party whose platform is rooted in ethnic assistance.
Sri Lalang, whose name starts off sounding like that of another small Asian country but finishes with a certain Sino-lyricism, has a short but interesting history. It was founded as a concentration camp of sorts for Chinese by the British during the “Emergency,” the 12 year long civil war between Chinese communist guerrillas entrenched deep in the interior jungle and the waning British authorities. In its original incarnation, the village was fenced off, and those leaving and returning to the compound had their possessions inspected to ensure no food or goods were being smuggled out to support the revolutionary “terrorists”, who had been fighting since prior to the departure of the Japanese following World War II for an independent republic. Even bicycle tyre tubes were routinely checked in order to ensure that air was not being replaced with grains of rice.
My mother reminisces occasionally about how the leftists would come marching around the village, singing catchy anti-imperialist songs and encouraging the children to follow them – a “Little Red Pied Pipers” fairytale mash-up, one might say. Some of the more adventurous children would take up the offer, joining the others in order to combat capitalist oppression before the Federation crushed what little resistance was left. Perhaps because her father was a proud member of the anti-insurgent Home Front, my mother focused her time on school prefecture, tapping rubber and the acquisition of a bachelor’s degree overseas, eventually leaving Sri Lalang far behind.
I recently returned to the village without her. A quick motorbike tour of its small streets provided a microcosmic insight into the current state of the country’s race relations. New low-income Malay settlements were popping up on land previously used for rubber plantation, augmenting the previously Chinese-dominated town. The distinction is not difficult to see: their homes use slightly different architecture (though the same concrete and stucco material) and lack the red lanterns and altars which adorn practically every Chinese home. Prayer houses and mosques can be found nearby, rather than Buddhist temples that Chinese women could be seen making morning offerings at. Though I witnessed a couple of Indian siblings playing soccer on one street, the majority of them can still be found in a separate Tamil settlement across the highway.
Ethnicity in Malaysia is a fascinatingly complex beast. Whereas the post-native populating of the United States can be spaced reasonably accurately through a series of events (British settlement, Slavery, Irish potato famine, etc.), the same cannot be said of Malaysia. The distinction between the bumiputeras (“Sons of the soil,” meaning Malays and Natives) and the Chinese and Indians may be validated by ethnicity but certainly not through chronology: swathes of Chinese-Malaysians arrived through trade relations long before many current bumiputeras arrived from other reaches of the Southeast. At the birth of its federation, the Chinese actually comprised Malaysia’s largest ethnic group, until Singapore’s secession in 1965, selective immigration and declining birth rates landed the Malays in the lead. Such ambiguities comprise a large part of the reason why legislation which quite obviously privileges Malays—95 percent of government contracts, for example, are distributed to Malays—ahead of minority groups is greatly resented by the remainding 40 percent of the population.
Whilst being carted about by one overly-generous set of relatives and family friends after the other, I found the parallel dimensions of their Chinese existence quite striking. A Chinese in Malaysia may be born in a Chinese Maternity Hospital, educated entirely in private Chinese-language schools, eat and shop at Chinese businesses, read and consume exclusively Chinese media and observe only Buddhist practices before finally being buried, naturally, in a Chinese public cemetery. Malay need only be spoken during brief public exchanges, whilst English remains almost exclusively the language of science and foreign business. It is only when taking a break from my well-intentioned but cloying family that I was able to observe life outside of this transplanted Sino existence, wandering through mosques and Hindu temples in Kuala Lumpur between delicious roti snacking in Malay hawker stalls, admiring the graceful movement of the women and smiling at the oddly endearing veil-to-head-size ratio of pint-sized schoolgirls.
It wasn’t always the case that ethnic groups lived in such separated parallel dimensions, walking the same streets but in virtually different planes as they do now. I recently visited a street in the old capitol of Melaka where two temples, a mosque and a Tamil church laid practically beside each other. It seemed a suitable symbol of a pre-Federation Malaysia that my parents’ childhoods can harbor only nostalgia for at this point. My mother played amongst Malays and Indians and my father the same, but with Kadazans and other indigenous children thrown into the mix. When inviting Malay neighbors over for dinner, they simply made sure not to cook pork separately. It was a multiculturalism through small town practicality: folks tolerated each other because they had little reason not to, nor to interrupt their mutually beneficial economic relations.
This changed dramatically following the ascent of the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) party to national leadership. Islam became the national religion, Bahasa Malaya the formally recognized language. Malays were by law Muslims, the Chinese and Indians classified as “minority groups” and a series of legislation involving quotas and business schemes were introduced, supposedly to “pull up” the bumiputeras. Perhaps because of this, minorities banded together, setting up private institutions or even moving overseas where state ones denied them access, and marrying amongst their own rather than face forced conversion. I find it sad yet understandable that the Chinese and Malays in Sri Lalang socialize at separate cafes on the weekends, though see glimpses of good will in the oft-colour blind commerce of the weekly market. I took hope in the “plural society” speeches my cousin’s classmates made during a school competition, though their lofty assertions also struck me as even hoarier than the naive multicultural grandstanding that hides far deeper problems for Aboriginal communities across Australia, and Dutch-Muslim relations in Western Europe.
Prime Minister Badawi has made claims that his moderate Islamic vision for Malaysia will successfully equip it for a planned technological and industrialized leapfrog toward Western standards of living while remaining true to Malaysian moral and religious standards. In Sri Lalang, I found rows of new “garden” developments, where hardworking families were moving into Western-standard homes purchased on the back of years of honest hard work. I was reminded of something my 22 year-old cousin said to me quietly: “What’s the point of (sectarianism) anyway? We’re all Malaysian.” I think it’s even simpler than that. By keeping religion out of state affairs and focusing on a merit-based system of advancement, a lot of this current ethnic distancing could easily be closed. Rather than existing as an officially united but in practice segregated society of Malays, Chinese and Indians, the country could serve as a timely example of successful Asian development and moderate Islamic practice. Unfortunately, with a comfortably entrenched bumiputera electorate and meddling Malay elite, ethnic relations in towns such as Sri Lalang throughout the country will likely remain as segregated as at present for some time to come.
i) Malay: Melayu, referring to the ethnic group which currently comprises the majority in Malaysia, that is: not of Indian, Chinese, or “indigenous” descent
ii) Malaysian: A citizen of the state of Malaysia, referring to nationality. Ex: Chinese-Malaysian, Australian-Malaysian, etc.
Squatter's Confessional
Published April, 2006.
Some cultural trade-offs are harder to accept than others. Take squat toilets for instance, which I used to hate with a passion. I loathed them as I do snakes. “How dare you pass yourself off as worthy of my sanctified toosh and it’s business!,” I might have sneered, if I hadn’t been so concerned with steering so far clear of them. Those two white tiles for traction, and that miserable little hole in place of where I expected not only a bowl, but also a comfortable seat and a cover to boot. During one particular trip home to my mother’s town of Sri Lalang, I reacted as any stubborn eight-year-old might: I just refused to use them. Full stop.
Now that only gets you so far. Before long, my parents tired of taking me out on exclusive journeys to the local shopping centre and its modern plumbing facilities. Thus began the famous conflict between Mark’s will and his lower intestine. An epic battle of attrition that lasted well into the fourth day -- most likely pushed over the edge by some sneakily placed tofu during the thirteenth confrontational meal – nature worked its unstoppable force and unsurprisingly my will eventually gave in (as my colon gave out). But not to the squat toilet. Oh no, it would take more than mere excrement to hole me up in such a dungeon, with its foul odour and icky wet concrete.
Now as with any resistance movement that faces uphill odds, I had gone on several scouting missions in the backyard of my grandmother’s house beforehand. My thoughts followed the approximate reasoning: So it has to come out. That variable was as fixed as Newton’s third law. The real question was “Where?” Other components of the issue at hand were the need for disguise, accessibility and speed. I couldn’t just leave my loaves on the front door step like a dog, nor could I drop them off at the base of a tree, which Po-Po would inevitably stumble across during her daily vegetable gardening. Digging a hole and then covering over the matter – camper style – might have been the way, but for the fact that the whole backyard was being cultivated and I would inevitably be destroying something she’d been growing. Even self-righteous guerillas have to think about their grandmothers.
The next option was to dash beyond the confines of the family land altogether and off into the thick jungle with its huge banana foliage and overgrown vine vegetation, perfect cover for all manner of rank deeds. And I probably would have gone with that method of release, but for the fact that I was eight and still genuinely fearful of the local terrain. Malaysia itself was a source of continuous mystery and frustration to me at the time; dropping my daks in the bush and leaving my behind privy to various snakes and leeches was something my creative imagination would not allow. This dilemma over the sanity of my sphincter and the frightful clutches of Mr. Squat had by this point reached truly explosive proportions.
It was around this stage, whilst urinating my way along in the stream that runs through our backyard, that I had my “Eureka” moment. Of course, I’d found much simpler means of relieving my bladder, and this waterhole was but one of a number of locales at which I’d spilled my own golden stream. Casually observing urine disperse into water, I noticed that this particular channel appeared to flow straight out of the house, down towards the deeply sunken, well-shaded river. Connecting the dots, I concluded that if timed correctly, a quick drop of the short pants, 180 degree rotation by the stream’s edge and speedy expunging of the digested remnants of four days worth of rice and Hainan cooking would set the battle straight. My Number Twos would waltz right on down the stream and into the river, probably disintegrating into lovely soil nourishing food for all I cared. The triumphant result: Mark – 1, Squatter – 0. I would walk away the bigger man, and nobody, especially not my parents, would ever know.
Almost immediately, the point of no return arrived, when all a child can do is plead to self: “Hang on a minute, just don’t do it in your pants.” As previously scripted, I carried out Operation Bomb the Stream in the backYard (OBeSitY) in meticulous fashion, seemingly without a snag. I’d even remembered a roll of toilet paper. The trouble came only after I had pulled up my trousers. Letting out a small but satisfied sigh of relief, I came to the nasty realization that there had been a hitch. Alas, the current’s strength would not move my recently deposited brownness downstream. It stayed put, exactly where I had dropped it, and not even several rather panicked pebble throws could cause it to dislodge.
I returned to the house a sad and disillusioned boy. Counting down the minutes before the inevitable discovery, angry finger pointing, and useless but plaintive denial process would begin, I tried to console myself with the refreshing return of lightness to my lower stomach. But oh the humility! I could have died with shame that night. I didn’t, and I return to the same house today, only to find that the squat toilet has been replaced with a lovely plastic seater. I’ve long since overcome my aversion to the former, but shall never forget the bemusement it caused my grandmother, who has passed away since I last visited this house, that sunny afternoon some years ago.
Some cultural trade-offs are harder to accept than others. Take squat toilets for instance, which I used to hate with a passion. I loathed them as I do snakes. “How dare you pass yourself off as worthy of my sanctified toosh and it’s business!,” I might have sneered, if I hadn’t been so concerned with steering so far clear of them. Those two white tiles for traction, and that miserable little hole in place of where I expected not only a bowl, but also a comfortable seat and a cover to boot. During one particular trip home to my mother’s town of Sri Lalang, I reacted as any stubborn eight-year-old might: I just refused to use them. Full stop.
Now that only gets you so far. Before long, my parents tired of taking me out on exclusive journeys to the local shopping centre and its modern plumbing facilities. Thus began the famous conflict between Mark’s will and his lower intestine. An epic battle of attrition that lasted well into the fourth day -- most likely pushed over the edge by some sneakily placed tofu during the thirteenth confrontational meal – nature worked its unstoppable force and unsurprisingly my will eventually gave in (as my colon gave out). But not to the squat toilet. Oh no, it would take more than mere excrement to hole me up in such a dungeon, with its foul odour and icky wet concrete.
Now as with any resistance movement that faces uphill odds, I had gone on several scouting missions in the backyard of my grandmother’s house beforehand. My thoughts followed the approximate reasoning: So it has to come out. That variable was as fixed as Newton’s third law. The real question was “Where?” Other components of the issue at hand were the need for disguise, accessibility and speed. I couldn’t just leave my loaves on the front door step like a dog, nor could I drop them off at the base of a tree, which Po-Po would inevitably stumble across during her daily vegetable gardening. Digging a hole and then covering over the matter – camper style – might have been the way, but for the fact that the whole backyard was being cultivated and I would inevitably be destroying something she’d been growing. Even self-righteous guerillas have to think about their grandmothers.
The next option was to dash beyond the confines of the family land altogether and off into the thick jungle with its huge banana foliage and overgrown vine vegetation, perfect cover for all manner of rank deeds. And I probably would have gone with that method of release, but for the fact that I was eight and still genuinely fearful of the local terrain. Malaysia itself was a source of continuous mystery and frustration to me at the time; dropping my daks in the bush and leaving my behind privy to various snakes and leeches was something my creative imagination would not allow. This dilemma over the sanity of my sphincter and the frightful clutches of Mr. Squat had by this point reached truly explosive proportions.
It was around this stage, whilst urinating my way along in the stream that runs through our backyard, that I had my “Eureka” moment. Of course, I’d found much simpler means of relieving my bladder, and this waterhole was but one of a number of locales at which I’d spilled my own golden stream. Casually observing urine disperse into water, I noticed that this particular channel appeared to flow straight out of the house, down towards the deeply sunken, well-shaded river. Connecting the dots, I concluded that if timed correctly, a quick drop of the short pants, 180 degree rotation by the stream’s edge and speedy expunging of the digested remnants of four days worth of rice and Hainan cooking would set the battle straight. My Number Twos would waltz right on down the stream and into the river, probably disintegrating into lovely soil nourishing food for all I cared. The triumphant result: Mark – 1, Squatter – 0. I would walk away the bigger man, and nobody, especially not my parents, would ever know.
Almost immediately, the point of no return arrived, when all a child can do is plead to self: “Hang on a minute, just don’t do it in your pants.” As previously scripted, I carried out Operation Bomb the Stream in the backYard (OBeSitY) in meticulous fashion, seemingly without a snag. I’d even remembered a roll of toilet paper. The trouble came only after I had pulled up my trousers. Letting out a small but satisfied sigh of relief, I came to the nasty realization that there had been a hitch. Alas, the current’s strength would not move my recently deposited brownness downstream. It stayed put, exactly where I had dropped it, and not even several rather panicked pebble throws could cause it to dislodge.
I returned to the house a sad and disillusioned boy. Counting down the minutes before the inevitable discovery, angry finger pointing, and useless but plaintive denial process would begin, I tried to console myself with the refreshing return of lightness to my lower stomach. But oh the humility! I could have died with shame that night. I didn’t, and I return to the same house today, only to find that the squat toilet has been replaced with a lovely plastic seater. I’ve long since overcome my aversion to the former, but shall never forget the bemusement it caused my grandmother, who has passed away since I last visited this house, that sunny afternoon some years ago.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
A Wild Man in Borneo
I recently purchased a book from the Sabah State Museum entitled With the Wild Men of Borneo by a missionary named Elizabeth Mershon. It begins thusly:
"Borneo! What does the name suggest in your minds? The first thing probably is the 'wild man from Borneo.'...All I knew about the country was that it was where the wild men lived, and I always imagined that they spent most of their time running around the island cutting off people's heads. Before you finish reading what I am going to tell you about distant Borneo and its people, I hope you will have learned that the 'wild man from Borneo' is not such a bad fellow after all."
That was written in 1922. I have just gotten back from a helter skelter two-day trek through the island's northern interior from west coast to east coast, Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan. And I can gladly report back that, 84 years on, and with a world which remains largely oblivious to its existence, the people of Borneo are still not such bad fellows after all.
The party—14 Hiews of varying shapes and sizes, ranging from Uncle Yun-Loi, a small, agile chap of about 70 to the ever-bouncy six-year-old, Hua—set out early enough from Beaufort, scooping me up in KK, as the capital city is known (thank goodness its not Kota Kota Kinabalu!; many Malay words are doubled so it might've been possible). The previous night, my cousin Yong, who lived with my family in Australia during our high school years and now works in the city for Ernst & Young, had taken me out to sample the local nightlife. It was quite surreal going from the rural jungle living I had just observed, where lifestyles remain largely removed from or incapable of affording modern technological and economic change, to the rather bangin' scene at Shenanigans nightclub, at which a lively Filipino cover band played renditions of "My Humps" and "You're Beautiful" to a demure crowd with its fair share of popped collars and grinding that wouldn't appear out of place in Soho or Adams Morgan.
The outward journey was long and trying, compounded by the lack of air conditioning in my uncle's people mover (van). This might have been bearable but for said uncle's driving methodology: best described as a mix of rally car driver and bank robbery escapee. Caked in multiple layers of sweat and grime and being jostled around incessantly from my back corner, I discovered a newfound sympathy for Shake N' Bake Chicken. So this is what it feels like to be seasoned and thrown into an oven, simultaneously even! Because of such conditions, I found my motivation to sight-see somewhat dampened (if not drenched), however, Mount Kinabalu, its rocky black peak appearing from behind a veil of consistent mist, remained a sight of untrammeled tranquility. For several reasons, I shall not be ascending its 1401 metres on this trip, having to make do with imagined sunrises over the South China Sea instead.
The Borneo jungle is at this point a very different affair in comparison to its pre-logging glory. Between the nineteen seventies and eighties, 90 percent of its natural wood was clear cut and shipped out, largely in joint ventures between the federal government and Japanese businesses. Most of my uncles were employed, sadly, in the all too efficient destruction of their homeland's natural habitat, operating bulldozers and clearing roads in often-miserly conditions. The result is a mixed picture: though still outright beautiful and humbling, with its hilly green lushness, steep cliffs and picturesque waterfalls, the jungle itself is almost entirely new regrowth or oil palm plantations, which are currently the most profitable cash crop for the state's inhabitants. Apparently, over 64 native mostly agrarian tribes once roamed the island--some of who used blowguns and darts, and a few of who were headhunters, which appeals greatly to the omnipresent eleven-year-old in me—but, during my trip, the only employment I saw them involved in was the selling of Orang-utan dolls and traditional weaves at tourist stands by the roadside, occasionally in their native attire (which is dazzling) but most often in western garb.
Along the way, my father pointed out the road to the copper mine at which he and my mother worked immediately before moving to Australia, adding that it was the place of my conception. Now there are several things that people should not do, regardless of culture or heritage. One of them is pissing on somebody's grave. You just don't do it! Another is providing your children with details about their conception: the imagery is uniformly disturbing in a Freudian nightmare reality sort of way. Besides learning extraneous proto-Mark details, along the road I observed numerous dilapidated, faded wooden shacks, often featuring green creepers at various stages of eventual natural reconquest of these homes, which belong to subsistence and cash crop farmers. In uber-stereotypical third world form, I saw several naked children standing in front of open windows. Construction remains a consistent eyesore. Illegal immigrants from Indonesia and the Philippines, their faces protected from the dust by makeshift cotton rags, hung from rickety wooden scaffolding.
We reached Sandakan not long before dark, greeted by a tacky Orang-utan statue in the town's entry roundabout. Blessed with potentially the least romantic name in history—it means "to be pawned" in Sulu, the Sultanate to which it used to belong—Sandakan successfully puts the "shit" in "hole," providing fresh new meaning to the word "fugly." Possessing none of the subtle majesty of traditional Malay architecture or any of the Hong Kong charm of its former major trading partner, it appears to have shuddered into the 21 st Century through an utterly indelicate shove from modern industry. A port for largely Chinese and Japanese-owned oil palm and fishing distributors, in its wake Sandakan makes Detroit look like Paris, Glasgow sound like Venice. Its main sights of interest involve a three-legged rock and a pungent fish market, the latter of which my seafood-adverse self was spared the odour. We stayed for only a short while, meeting up with my politician Aunt's fellow party cadre for a seafood restaurant dinner. (I had the venison.) We chose to stay outside of Sandakan for fear of desperate Filipino robbers, choosing a hotel at the more-suitably Chinese "Mile 4." Outlying suburbs, in keeping with the town's utilitarian spirit, are named according to their distance from downtown.
The following day, after a noodle soup breakfast at one of the local market stalls—where one enjoys the dubious pleasure of seeing your food cooked and dishes washed in quite squalid conditions—we set off on our return journey. Along the way, we passed shanty kampungs built over the bay, home to the absolute poorest of the poor. If Malaysia wishes to become a developed country by 2020, which its former Prime Minister announced several years ago—it must come up with a way to cope with the rural/urban divide, a pervasive problem certainly not limited to its borders. After revisiting the farmland where our family once lived, we stopped at a crocodile farm. Young Ah-Hua raised a bit of a ruckus amongst the largely immobile, sun baking reptiles when she stomped up and down excitedly on the wooden walkway above, allowing me to snap some quality Steve Irwin-without-Steve Irwin photos of the animals play-wrestling. One humorously straightforward description read:
"My name is TAKO from Lahad Datu, around 60 year old. My length is 17 feet and weigh 800 kg. Wild Life removed me to this place, because I ate 4 residents in the wild, Now I eat only one chicken everyday." (Sic)
Following, we visited the Sandakan War Memorial, the site at which thousands of Australian and British POWs were held towards the tail end of World War II. The Japanese forced my grandmother to work on construction of a new airfield, and the photographs of skeletal Aussie soldiers working away on the same war project brought home to me how easily the pendulum of history can change course. Interestingly enough, I learned that an underground network existed between Australians and locals, through which guerilla resistance fighters could plan ambush attacks. I walked along the wooden walkway which followed the identical path that the troops were once forced, along with my grandfather, to take during the Sandakan-Ranau death marches with Ah-Hua's hand in mine, attempting to visualize the scene some 61 years ago. Through terrible torture, measly rations and hellish labour, it's not difficult to see how so few Allied POWs survived out in this humid terrain, in conditions so far removed from the dry dust of the Australian plains or of grassy, temperate England.
We then set off back to KK, this time I was in the other, far more sensibly driven four-wheel-drive, and thus was able to read and reflect on the journey home. Close to home, the mists of Mount Kinabalu descended upon the road, and my uncle turned on the headlights. That night, it was back to Shenanigans for the same cover band's stirring rendition of "Y'all Gonna Make Me Lose My Mind" by DMX. The bipolarism of Malaysia's urban-rural gap had never sounded more incongruous.
"Borneo! What does the name suggest in your minds? The first thing probably is the 'wild man from Borneo.'...All I knew about the country was that it was where the wild men lived, and I always imagined that they spent most of their time running around the island cutting off people's heads. Before you finish reading what I am going to tell you about distant Borneo and its people, I hope you will have learned that the 'wild man from Borneo' is not such a bad fellow after all."
That was written in 1922. I have just gotten back from a helter skelter two-day trek through the island's northern interior from west coast to east coast, Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan. And I can gladly report back that, 84 years on, and with a world which remains largely oblivious to its existence, the people of Borneo are still not such bad fellows after all.
The party—14 Hiews of varying shapes and sizes, ranging from Uncle Yun-Loi, a small, agile chap of about 70 to the ever-bouncy six-year-old, Hua—set out early enough from Beaufort, scooping me up in KK, as the capital city is known (thank goodness its not Kota Kota Kinabalu!; many Malay words are doubled so it might've been possible). The previous night, my cousin Yong, who lived with my family in Australia during our high school years and now works in the city for Ernst & Young, had taken me out to sample the local nightlife. It was quite surreal going from the rural jungle living I had just observed, where lifestyles remain largely removed from or incapable of affording modern technological and economic change, to the rather bangin' scene at Shenanigans nightclub, at which a lively Filipino cover band played renditions of "My Humps" and "You're Beautiful" to a demure crowd with its fair share of popped collars and grinding that wouldn't appear out of place in Soho or Adams Morgan.
The outward journey was long and trying, compounded by the lack of air conditioning in my uncle's people mover (van). This might have been bearable but for said uncle's driving methodology: best described as a mix of rally car driver and bank robbery escapee. Caked in multiple layers of sweat and grime and being jostled around incessantly from my back corner, I discovered a newfound sympathy for Shake N' Bake Chicken. So this is what it feels like to be seasoned and thrown into an oven, simultaneously even! Because of such conditions, I found my motivation to sight-see somewhat dampened (if not drenched), however, Mount Kinabalu, its rocky black peak appearing from behind a veil of consistent mist, remained a sight of untrammeled tranquility. For several reasons, I shall not be ascending its 1401 metres on this trip, having to make do with imagined sunrises over the South China Sea instead.
The Borneo jungle is at this point a very different affair in comparison to its pre-logging glory. Between the nineteen seventies and eighties, 90 percent of its natural wood was clear cut and shipped out, largely in joint ventures between the federal government and Japanese businesses. Most of my uncles were employed, sadly, in the all too efficient destruction of their homeland's natural habitat, operating bulldozers and clearing roads in often-miserly conditions. The result is a mixed picture: though still outright beautiful and humbling, with its hilly green lushness, steep cliffs and picturesque waterfalls, the jungle itself is almost entirely new regrowth or oil palm plantations, which are currently the most profitable cash crop for the state's inhabitants. Apparently, over 64 native mostly agrarian tribes once roamed the island--some of who used blowguns and darts, and a few of who were headhunters, which appeals greatly to the omnipresent eleven-year-old in me—but, during my trip, the only employment I saw them involved in was the selling of Orang-utan dolls and traditional weaves at tourist stands by the roadside, occasionally in their native attire (which is dazzling) but most often in western garb.
Along the way, my father pointed out the road to the copper mine at which he and my mother worked immediately before moving to Australia, adding that it was the place of my conception. Now there are several things that people should not do, regardless of culture or heritage. One of them is pissing on somebody's grave. You just don't do it! Another is providing your children with details about their conception: the imagery is uniformly disturbing in a Freudian nightmare reality sort of way. Besides learning extraneous proto-Mark details, along the road I observed numerous dilapidated, faded wooden shacks, often featuring green creepers at various stages of eventual natural reconquest of these homes, which belong to subsistence and cash crop farmers. In uber-stereotypical third world form, I saw several naked children standing in front of open windows. Construction remains a consistent eyesore. Illegal immigrants from Indonesia and the Philippines, their faces protected from the dust by makeshift cotton rags, hung from rickety wooden scaffolding.
We reached Sandakan not long before dark, greeted by a tacky Orang-utan statue in the town's entry roundabout. Blessed with potentially the least romantic name in history—it means "to be pawned" in Sulu, the Sultanate to which it used to belong—Sandakan successfully puts the "shit" in "hole," providing fresh new meaning to the word "fugly." Possessing none of the subtle majesty of traditional Malay architecture or any of the Hong Kong charm of its former major trading partner, it appears to have shuddered into the 21 st Century through an utterly indelicate shove from modern industry. A port for largely Chinese and Japanese-owned oil palm and fishing distributors, in its wake Sandakan makes Detroit look like Paris, Glasgow sound like Venice. Its main sights of interest involve a three-legged rock and a pungent fish market, the latter of which my seafood-adverse self was spared the odour. We stayed for only a short while, meeting up with my politician Aunt's fellow party cadre for a seafood restaurant dinner. (I had the venison.) We chose to stay outside of Sandakan for fear of desperate Filipino robbers, choosing a hotel at the more-suitably Chinese "Mile 4." Outlying suburbs, in keeping with the town's utilitarian spirit, are named according to their distance from downtown.
The following day, after a noodle soup breakfast at one of the local market stalls—where one enjoys the dubious pleasure of seeing your food cooked and dishes washed in quite squalid conditions—we set off on our return journey. Along the way, we passed shanty kampungs built over the bay, home to the absolute poorest of the poor. If Malaysia wishes to become a developed country by 2020, which its former Prime Minister announced several years ago—it must come up with a way to cope with the rural/urban divide, a pervasive problem certainly not limited to its borders. After revisiting the farmland where our family once lived, we stopped at a crocodile farm. Young Ah-Hua raised a bit of a ruckus amongst the largely immobile, sun baking reptiles when she stomped up and down excitedly on the wooden walkway above, allowing me to snap some quality Steve Irwin-without-Steve Irwin photos of the animals play-wrestling. One humorously straightforward description read:
"My name is TAKO from Lahad Datu, around 60 year old. My length is 17 feet and weigh 800 kg. Wild Life removed me to this place, because I ate 4 residents in the wild, Now I eat only one chicken everyday." (Sic)
Following, we visited the Sandakan War Memorial, the site at which thousands of Australian and British POWs were held towards the tail end of World War II. The Japanese forced my grandmother to work on construction of a new airfield, and the photographs of skeletal Aussie soldiers working away on the same war project brought home to me how easily the pendulum of history can change course. Interestingly enough, I learned that an underground network existed between Australians and locals, through which guerilla resistance fighters could plan ambush attacks. I walked along the wooden walkway which followed the identical path that the troops were once forced, along with my grandfather, to take during the Sandakan-Ranau death marches with Ah-Hua's hand in mine, attempting to visualize the scene some 61 years ago. Through terrible torture, measly rations and hellish labour, it's not difficult to see how so few Allied POWs survived out in this humid terrain, in conditions so far removed from the dry dust of the Australian plains or of grassy, temperate England.
We then set off back to KK, this time I was in the other, far more sensibly driven four-wheel-drive, and thus was able to read and reflect on the journey home. Close to home, the mists of Mount Kinabalu descended upon the road, and my uncle turned on the headlights. That night, it was back to Shenanigans for the same cover band's stirring rendition of "Y'all Gonna Make Me Lose My Mind" by DMX. The bipolarism of Malaysia's urban-rural gap had never sounded more incongruous.
On Qingming and Family
I am the son of a Malaysian Hakka metallurgist who stepped through the cracks of a bipolar world, from the humble poverty of his kampong home and into the opportunity and upward mobility afforded by the progressive politics and anti-colonial sentiment of 1970s Australasia. In turn, he is the son of a fatherless farmer, who escaped the abject poverty of early 20th Century China and—as a teenager—entered into a binding three-year term as an indentured laborer for the British, tapping rubber at a plantation in North Borneo in exchange for a boat ride to a better life.
I knew this man as “Gong-gong,” or grandfather, in my occasional face-to-face encounters with him as a child. Taking month-long breaks from the school holiday centres my working parents would drop me off at during those dry, hot Australian summers, my brother and I would whinge and whine our way through the grime and humidity of the Third World, my parents winning brief respite by shoving KFC or Cornetto ice creams into our ever-insolent mouths. Being ignorantly assimilationist, “White-culture-is-better” children, we made no effort to learn either Mandarin or the local Hakka dialect, thus leaving our myriad cousins the privilege of attempting to communicate with we high-and-mighty Australians in the 4th language English they learnt in grade school.
I never exchanged a single sentence of conversation with my grandfather, who was illiterate and did not acquire Malay, let alone the tongue of his white colonial masters. He did, however, willfully weather my then five-year-old brother’s gleeful assault by water pistol, much to my parents’ chagrin. And once, when he was already into the 10th decade of his life, I recall him slowly climbing the steep set of stairs in the creaky two-story home that he built with his own hands in order to call me to dinner. My most vivid memories of Gong-Gong involve him rocking in his chair, contentedly watching as his thirteen children and dozens of grandchildren puttered by as he rolled tobacco, crossed legs swaying gently.
These are the bridges I attempt to cross in returning to Borneo and its dilapidated, stagnant ways for Qingming. Utterly crippled by my inability to comprehend nor articulate, I sit at the table as my father and his siblings play catch up, exchanging gossip and stories of the West over Chinese tea and cans of Tiger beer. Hakka, which passes unruffled through my monolingual brain, sounds like a courser, more rural Mandarin (Sentences ring with suffixes like “num,” “phat,” and “sit”) and has a surprisingly potent hypnosis effect. I find myself zoning out, before subsequently passing out (work colleagues, Nikki, may not find this surprising!), before being tapped back to consciousness when it is time to leave. At once frustrating and boredom-inducing, my linguistic incompetence makes the process of reconnecting with my roots—those curious, meta-historical pieces of immigrant make-up which hover in the sub-conscious, always resisting one’s subjugating tendencies—an exercise comprised largely of inferrence and abstraction.
A few days ago, we journeyed to my grandparents’ grave in a humble Chinese cemetery a few miles from the Hiew clan estate. It is built straight into the steep hillside for feng shui, the tombs surrounded dramatically by the voracious, tropical Borneo jungle which often seems to swallow up its inhabitants’ clearings. After greeting the caretakers and praying to the Protector God who oversees the dead, we walked around the hill to my grandparents’ graves. They lie side by side, their tombstones reading “Chinese Public Cemetery: Guanxi, Hiew Nee” and “Bao On, Kwangtung, Nyam Choi Yu” respectively, providing only place of birth and name for identification purposes. Each of us symbolically swept clean both cement graves with the palm leaves my cousin had cut down from our back yard earlier, then laid down food and drink as offerings. Oranges and apples, a couple of whole boiled chickens, peanuts and biscuits, rice wine and soy milk – a glance around the cemetery proffered similar scenes as numerous other Chinese families went about their business. Aunt Moi-Yun handed me a bundle of joss sticks as my father provided guidance: “Bow three times to Gong-Gong and place three sticks in the dirt in front of him. Do the same thing for Po-Po.”
After the burning of incense came the offering of money and possessions for the underworld. Though few of my family members are practicing Buddhists, they made sure to bring a bountiful amount of goods. At first, I was surprised to see they were burning actual shoes and actual shirts. “They sure take this offering business seriously,” I thought, before sheepishly realizing that they were made of cardboard, designed expressly for Qingming. My cousins spread out fake paper money, some of which looked like Taoist scrolls, others like bills and still others like silver coins. Each bill had a numerical amount of 1,000,000,000 UWC (Underworld currency) listed upon it.
“Unfortunately, the exchange rate is very low,” my father joked.
As the wealth of paper and cardboard burned away before the tomb of my grandparents, I looked around me at my fellow Hiews, of whom I spend such little actual time with. They chatted light-heartedly, dressed casually in the rag-tag t-shirts and shorts Western fashion has conferred upon us. One cousin, a gentle eighteen-year-old named Ming Jai, asked me how Christians worship their ancestors. Black ashes rose and fluttered through the air, wafting slowly upwards, perhaps towards my grandparents. I tried to imagine the life experiences that Hiew Nee took to his grave and of all the quiet drama and scrappy tribulations of rural Sabahnese life: arriving with little but the clothing upon his back, being abandoned by his first wife (a half-Jamaican), losing two children during infancy, surviving Japanese occupation and then watching his family prosper until passing, just two years short of a century.
I looked for the parallels in our subsequent generations. Where the British shipped him to North Borneo from China in servitude, my Uncle Fook Choi and the New Zealand government flew my father to the University of Otago, following which a multi-national chemical producer expatriated my own family from Southwestern Australia to Maryland. In all honesty, it’s a hard act to follow. Unless I “go corporate” (a most sinful deed indeed in the eyes of my liberal, activist mates) and settle into a vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard, Miami beach or the Greek isles, our exponential rise in standard of living appears destined to plateau. I think of all the nouveau riche Indians I met in London, of the warm gaze of the Salvadorean woman who served me pupusas in West Los Angeles, of the fiery Palestinian neurologist PhD student I ate with in the student union and of the West Bengali paralegal I recently started dating. There are millions of stories such as my family’s, ones which anti-immigrant legislators and their economic data will never encapsulate, and an enduring supply of long-distance love that remittances only hint at.
As the fires burned, a warm rain began to fall and we hastily farewelled my grandparents before rushing for cover. A feral dog skipped past with a chicken offering in its mouth, welcoming our annual ritual as a free feast in its immoral mind. We drove off to my recently deceased Uncle’s grave at a nearby cemetery, leaving Hiew Nee and his wife to rest peacefully.
I knew this man as “Gong-gong,” or grandfather, in my occasional face-to-face encounters with him as a child. Taking month-long breaks from the school holiday centres my working parents would drop me off at during those dry, hot Australian summers, my brother and I would whinge and whine our way through the grime and humidity of the Third World, my parents winning brief respite by shoving KFC or Cornetto ice creams into our ever-insolent mouths. Being ignorantly assimilationist, “White-culture-is-better” children, we made no effort to learn either Mandarin or the local Hakka dialect, thus leaving our myriad cousins the privilege of attempting to communicate with we high-and-mighty Australians in the 4th language English they learnt in grade school.
I never exchanged a single sentence of conversation with my grandfather, who was illiterate and did not acquire Malay, let alone the tongue of his white colonial masters. He did, however, willfully weather my then five-year-old brother’s gleeful assault by water pistol, much to my parents’ chagrin. And once, when he was already into the 10th decade of his life, I recall him slowly climbing the steep set of stairs in the creaky two-story home that he built with his own hands in order to call me to dinner. My most vivid memories of Gong-Gong involve him rocking in his chair, contentedly watching as his thirteen children and dozens of grandchildren puttered by as he rolled tobacco, crossed legs swaying gently.
These are the bridges I attempt to cross in returning to Borneo and its dilapidated, stagnant ways for Qingming. Utterly crippled by my inability to comprehend nor articulate, I sit at the table as my father and his siblings play catch up, exchanging gossip and stories of the West over Chinese tea and cans of Tiger beer. Hakka, which passes unruffled through my monolingual brain, sounds like a courser, more rural Mandarin (Sentences ring with suffixes like “num,” “phat,” and “sit”) and has a surprisingly potent hypnosis effect. I find myself zoning out, before subsequently passing out (work colleagues, Nikki, may not find this surprising!), before being tapped back to consciousness when it is time to leave. At once frustrating and boredom-inducing, my linguistic incompetence makes the process of reconnecting with my roots—those curious, meta-historical pieces of immigrant make-up which hover in the sub-conscious, always resisting one’s subjugating tendencies—an exercise comprised largely of inferrence and abstraction.
A few days ago, we journeyed to my grandparents’ grave in a humble Chinese cemetery a few miles from the Hiew clan estate. It is built straight into the steep hillside for feng shui, the tombs surrounded dramatically by the voracious, tropical Borneo jungle which often seems to swallow up its inhabitants’ clearings. After greeting the caretakers and praying to the Protector God who oversees the dead, we walked around the hill to my grandparents’ graves. They lie side by side, their tombstones reading “Chinese Public Cemetery: Guanxi, Hiew Nee” and “Bao On, Kwangtung, Nyam Choi Yu” respectively, providing only place of birth and name for identification purposes. Each of us symbolically swept clean both cement graves with the palm leaves my cousin had cut down from our back yard earlier, then laid down food and drink as offerings. Oranges and apples, a couple of whole boiled chickens, peanuts and biscuits, rice wine and soy milk – a glance around the cemetery proffered similar scenes as numerous other Chinese families went about their business. Aunt Moi-Yun handed me a bundle of joss sticks as my father provided guidance: “Bow three times to Gong-Gong and place three sticks in the dirt in front of him. Do the same thing for Po-Po.”
After the burning of incense came the offering of money and possessions for the underworld. Though few of my family members are practicing Buddhists, they made sure to bring a bountiful amount of goods. At first, I was surprised to see they were burning actual shoes and actual shirts. “They sure take this offering business seriously,” I thought, before sheepishly realizing that they were made of cardboard, designed expressly for Qingming. My cousins spread out fake paper money, some of which looked like Taoist scrolls, others like bills and still others like silver coins. Each bill had a numerical amount of 1,000,000,000 UWC (Underworld currency) listed upon it.
“Unfortunately, the exchange rate is very low,” my father joked.
As the wealth of paper and cardboard burned away before the tomb of my grandparents, I looked around me at my fellow Hiews, of whom I spend such little actual time with. They chatted light-heartedly, dressed casually in the rag-tag t-shirts and shorts Western fashion has conferred upon us. One cousin, a gentle eighteen-year-old named Ming Jai, asked me how Christians worship their ancestors. Black ashes rose and fluttered through the air, wafting slowly upwards, perhaps towards my grandparents. I tried to imagine the life experiences that Hiew Nee took to his grave and of all the quiet drama and scrappy tribulations of rural Sabahnese life: arriving with little but the clothing upon his back, being abandoned by his first wife (a half-Jamaican), losing two children during infancy, surviving Japanese occupation and then watching his family prosper until passing, just two years short of a century.
I looked for the parallels in our subsequent generations. Where the British shipped him to North Borneo from China in servitude, my Uncle Fook Choi and the New Zealand government flew my father to the University of Otago, following which a multi-national chemical producer expatriated my own family from Southwestern Australia to Maryland. In all honesty, it’s a hard act to follow. Unless I “go corporate” (a most sinful deed indeed in the eyes of my liberal, activist mates) and settle into a vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard, Miami beach or the Greek isles, our exponential rise in standard of living appears destined to plateau. I think of all the nouveau riche Indians I met in London, of the warm gaze of the Salvadorean woman who served me pupusas in West Los Angeles, of the fiery Palestinian neurologist PhD student I ate with in the student union and of the West Bengali paralegal I recently started dating. There are millions of stories such as my family’s, ones which anti-immigrant legislators and their economic data will never encapsulate, and an enduring supply of long-distance love that remittances only hint at.
As the fires burned, a warm rain began to fall and we hastily farewelled my grandparents before rushing for cover. A feral dog skipped past with a chicken offering in its mouth, welcoming our annual ritual as a free feast in its immoral mind. We drove off to my recently deceased Uncle’s grave at a nearby cemetery, leaving Hiew Nee and his wife to rest peacefully.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
A Listener's Journey: Travelling a path with Ben Lee
First published March 17, 2006.
I: REPRESENTATION:
I throw my hockey bag into the boot, then climb into the front passenger seat of Mum’s Holden Commodore. We drive out of the leafy grounds of Bunbury Cathedral Grammar School, past bushland coloured by eucalyptus trees and kangaroo paw plants and out onto Old Coast Road. In its entirety, the highway extends from Perth all the way south to Walpole, near the bottom of Western Australia. On this occasion, it’s use will be limited to the quiet 20 minute drive from high school back to my home town of Australind. Originally a failed English colony designed to combine qualities of both Australia and India, it was in my time a place of smaller adventure and scope. It is here that Dad had first taken the tricycle wheels off of my bike, here where I would hunt down tennis balls struck over the backyard fence in father-son cricket tussles which employed gumboots for wickets and firewood for bats.
As Mum chats loosely in my direction about my brother and the prospect of Dad going on another business trip to America, I duly change the radio station from the local news to Triple J, the public national youth station whose attentive listenership played a not insignificant part in any aspiring high schoolers shot at true popularity. I roll down my knee-length gold-and-blue socks in order to remove the sweaty, grimy leg guards which save young hockey players from the dual perils: fast-moving balls and errant flying sticks. As we pull into the community centre to scoop up my brother from his tutoring program, the deejay spins “Cigarettes Will Kill You,” Ben Lee’s breakthrough hit song. With its skipping electronic beat, irrepressible piano vamp and plaintive vocals, the song is only narrowly pipped by the Offspring’s unmistakably heartfelt composition—“Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)”—for the number one song in Australia for 1998.
“It must feel good to stand above me / While I make you so proud of me /It must feel good that I’m now gone / I wish I could say that everyone was wrong,” Ben sings during the song’s climax. And I sing along, shielding the glare of the bright Australian sun with my hand, mulling over pubescent crushes on girls in blue uniform frocks with names like Nicola and Cassandra. At the time, balancing a routine built around piano eisteddfods, hawk-like observation of the hem length of schoolgirl skirts and birthday parties (often a cover for 14 year-old pyromaniacal gallivanting), I was consuming a pop diet limited almost exclusively to heavy rock along the lines of Korn and Nirvana. But that afternoon, something about the singer’s straight-forwardness and fragility resonated sharply with me.
II. REVIVAL:
I slide the two thin wires of my iPod earbuds inside my scarf. Leavng my Globalization and Governance course, I mention to my professor an apparent theoretical bias in the assigned reading. Ascending the spiraling stairway, packed in amongst dozens of undergraduates adorned in red University of Maryland sweatshirts, I glance over headlines involving off-campus robbery and basketball spectator etiquette (or lack thereof) in the campus daily. “Catch My Disease,” the lead single from Ben’s most recent album and one of the most dangerously catchy pieces of bubblegum pop this decade, re-enters my aural stream. I walk across the streaming sidewalks and into the student union, where I will volunteer an hour at a vegetarian co-op, making sandwiches for computer programmer types from Italy and singers in training from the Ukraine. In the midst of completing a degree in the often somber field of international politics amongst classes peppered with future Defense Department Osama-hunters, the warmth and purity of Ben’s vocal offers startling contrast to my immediate surrounds. “So please / Open your heart / And catch my disease,” he pleads. (Live, courtesy of Joy from Pinkbeltrage)
And the disease he speaks of is jubilation. Awake is the New Sleep, which won Record of the Year at the most recent Australian music industry awards, is filled with sugary, pick-me-up slices of tuneful secular preaching which champions “making eye contact with strangers” and being “all in this together.” Which, in this time of Christian anti-ism and Islamophobafascism, seems strangely revelatory.
III: REALIZATION:
A chill wind blows through the deserted cobbled streets of Fells Point as we make our way from local music oasis Soundgarden to Fletcher’s Bar in Baltimore. It takes approximately two minutes for me to meet another Aussie expat, a rangy bloke from Melbourne whose accent displays far less sway to the hegemonic tongue of his adopted community than my own. Inside, Ben receives a good-humoured reception from the mostly 20-something, mostly white, mostly female audience. Wearing trousers that I can’t imagine him paying more than seven dollars for at some tour stop thrift store, grandpa-meets-Jay Z white reeboks, an unruly tangle of Jewfro hair and a broad smile, he looks comfortable and occasionally ecstatic on stage. His partner on stage, a disarmingly cute red-head who “kicks a deep groove” while seated on a cabron, reminds me of some Australian actress whose name is not Nicole Kidman.
“I’m going to make everybody feel as not-cool as possible,” he says jokingly, following an obscure kick-off song from one of his early albums. “If you were a kitty / I’d be the litter / But I don’t think that’s a suitable metaphor,” I croak along, in my flu-strangled tenor. The crowd warms quickly to songs from his latest album, laughter erupting at Ben’s self-deprecating stage humour and reverent silence upheld for the ballads. On numerous occasions, he stops mid-way through songs to provide impromptu back-up vocal advice to the crowd or to take suggestions for improvised lyrics. The strength of his stage presence and mandate is readily apparent: as requested, the show is almost completely devoid of pretension or indier-than-thou oneupsmanship. The Johns Hopkins couple, of which the Y chromosone half is sporting an unfortunate double Polo popped collar ensemble, leave early. The one goon whose attempt at the sideswept emo coiffe is actively failing stands alone as the sole audience member who refuses to give in to the geeky charms and simplicity of Ben’s songs.
After the show, I ask Ben about his recent interest in Eastern spirituality and the personal growth that is clearly apparent in his energy on stage. Avoiding affiliation of any sort, he stresses the importance of the individual’s own journey. “For me, it’s really about unconditional love,” he offers. When I explained to him how I recently took his song “Gamble Everything for Love” a little too literally during a painful recently aborted relationship, he provides similar guidance: “Have the courage to take your own path, to follow something you believe in,” he explains.
The next morning, I receive a call. After an apprehensive week of waiting, I have been hired full-time as a development officer for CHF International. Soon afterward, my thoughts began to stretch out beyond the confines of 21-year-old existential vocation crisis and towards the people I entered the business for in the first place. I am reminded of three-year-old Carla’s playful hands, oceans away in Timor-Leste. Of the unconditional love and the precious gifts that have been showered upon me. And the dream of seeing those gifts showered upon thousands of others, from the unemployed of the West Bank and Mongolia, to the HIV-ravaged of Rwanda and Honduras.
“Tell me the truth and I’ll tell you the truth / If you gamble everything for love / You’re gonna be alright,” Ben sings. It isn’t the first time our thoughts have fused together in the sort of listener/performer dialectic popular music is built upon. And it certainly won’t be the last.
I: REPRESENTATION:
I throw my hockey bag into the boot, then climb into the front passenger seat of Mum’s Holden Commodore. We drive out of the leafy grounds of Bunbury Cathedral Grammar School, past bushland coloured by eucalyptus trees and kangaroo paw plants and out onto Old Coast Road. In its entirety, the highway extends from Perth all the way south to Walpole, near the bottom of Western Australia. On this occasion, it’s use will be limited to the quiet 20 minute drive from high school back to my home town of Australind. Originally a failed English colony designed to combine qualities of both Australia and India, it was in my time a place of smaller adventure and scope. It is here that Dad had first taken the tricycle wheels off of my bike, here where I would hunt down tennis balls struck over the backyard fence in father-son cricket tussles which employed gumboots for wickets and firewood for bats.
As Mum chats loosely in my direction about my brother and the prospect of Dad going on another business trip to America, I duly change the radio station from the local news to Triple J, the public national youth station whose attentive listenership played a not insignificant part in any aspiring high schoolers shot at true popularity. I roll down my knee-length gold-and-blue socks in order to remove the sweaty, grimy leg guards which save young hockey players from the dual perils: fast-moving balls and errant flying sticks. As we pull into the community centre to scoop up my brother from his tutoring program, the deejay spins “Cigarettes Will Kill You,” Ben Lee’s breakthrough hit song. With its skipping electronic beat, irrepressible piano vamp and plaintive vocals, the song is only narrowly pipped by the Offspring’s unmistakably heartfelt composition—“Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)”—for the number one song in Australia for 1998.
“It must feel good to stand above me / While I make you so proud of me /It must feel good that I’m now gone / I wish I could say that everyone was wrong,” Ben sings during the song’s climax. And I sing along, shielding the glare of the bright Australian sun with my hand, mulling over pubescent crushes on girls in blue uniform frocks with names like Nicola and Cassandra. At the time, balancing a routine built around piano eisteddfods, hawk-like observation of the hem length of schoolgirl skirts and birthday parties (often a cover for 14 year-old pyromaniacal gallivanting), I was consuming a pop diet limited almost exclusively to heavy rock along the lines of Korn and Nirvana. But that afternoon, something about the singer’s straight-forwardness and fragility resonated sharply with me.
II. REVIVAL:
I slide the two thin wires of my iPod earbuds inside my scarf. Leavng my Globalization and Governance course, I mention to my professor an apparent theoretical bias in the assigned reading. Ascending the spiraling stairway, packed in amongst dozens of undergraduates adorned in red University of Maryland sweatshirts, I glance over headlines involving off-campus robbery and basketball spectator etiquette (or lack thereof) in the campus daily. “Catch My Disease,” the lead single from Ben’s most recent album and one of the most dangerously catchy pieces of bubblegum pop this decade, re-enters my aural stream. I walk across the streaming sidewalks and into the student union, where I will volunteer an hour at a vegetarian co-op, making sandwiches for computer programmer types from Italy and singers in training from the Ukraine. In the midst of completing a degree in the often somber field of international politics amongst classes peppered with future Defense Department Osama-hunters, the warmth and purity of Ben’s vocal offers startling contrast to my immediate surrounds. “So please / Open your heart / And catch my disease,” he pleads. (Live, courtesy of Joy from Pinkbeltrage)
And the disease he speaks of is jubilation. Awake is the New Sleep, which won Record of the Year at the most recent Australian music industry awards, is filled with sugary, pick-me-up slices of tuneful secular preaching which champions “making eye contact with strangers” and being “all in this together.” Which, in this time of Christian anti-ism and Islamophobafascism, seems strangely revelatory.
III: REALIZATION:
A chill wind blows through the deserted cobbled streets of Fells Point as we make our way from local music oasis Soundgarden to Fletcher’s Bar in Baltimore. It takes approximately two minutes for me to meet another Aussie expat, a rangy bloke from Melbourne whose accent displays far less sway to the hegemonic tongue of his adopted community than my own. Inside, Ben receives a good-humoured reception from the mostly 20-something, mostly white, mostly female audience. Wearing trousers that I can’t imagine him paying more than seven dollars for at some tour stop thrift store, grandpa-meets-Jay Z white reeboks, an unruly tangle of Jewfro hair and a broad smile, he looks comfortable and occasionally ecstatic on stage. His partner on stage, a disarmingly cute red-head who “kicks a deep groove” while seated on a cabron, reminds me of some Australian actress whose name is not Nicole Kidman.
“I’m going to make everybody feel as not-cool as possible,” he says jokingly, following an obscure kick-off song from one of his early albums. “If you were a kitty / I’d be the litter / But I don’t think that’s a suitable metaphor,” I croak along, in my flu-strangled tenor. The crowd warms quickly to songs from his latest album, laughter erupting at Ben’s self-deprecating stage humour and reverent silence upheld for the ballads. On numerous occasions, he stops mid-way through songs to provide impromptu back-up vocal advice to the crowd or to take suggestions for improvised lyrics. The strength of his stage presence and mandate is readily apparent: as requested, the show is almost completely devoid of pretension or indier-than-thou oneupsmanship. The Johns Hopkins couple, of which the Y chromosone half is sporting an unfortunate double Polo popped collar ensemble, leave early. The one goon whose attempt at the sideswept emo coiffe is actively failing stands alone as the sole audience member who refuses to give in to the geeky charms and simplicity of Ben’s songs.
After the show, I ask Ben about his recent interest in Eastern spirituality and the personal growth that is clearly apparent in his energy on stage. Avoiding affiliation of any sort, he stresses the importance of the individual’s own journey. “For me, it’s really about unconditional love,” he offers. When I explained to him how I recently took his song “Gamble Everything for Love” a little too literally during a painful recently aborted relationship, he provides similar guidance: “Have the courage to take your own path, to follow something you believe in,” he explains.
The next morning, I receive a call. After an apprehensive week of waiting, I have been hired full-time as a development officer for CHF International. Soon afterward, my thoughts began to stretch out beyond the confines of 21-year-old existential vocation crisis and towards the people I entered the business for in the first place. I am reminded of three-year-old Carla’s playful hands, oceans away in Timor-Leste. Of the unconditional love and the precious gifts that have been showered upon me. And the dream of seeing those gifts showered upon thousands of others, from the unemployed of the West Bank and Mongolia, to the HIV-ravaged of Rwanda and Honduras.
“Tell me the truth and I’ll tell you the truth / If you gamble everything for love / You’re gonna be alright,” Ben sings. It isn’t the first time our thoughts have fused together in the sort of listener/performer dialectic popular music is built upon. And it certainly won’t be the last.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Sexy boy
A fellow blogger shared this little gem of a podcast with me recently and I must speak to its gloriously shallow, Hollywood homosexual brilliance. Bryanboy, a teen male prostitute with an eye for fashion and occasionally tasteless quips ("we should just shoot all ugly people...") is apparently the most popular blogger in the Philippines.
What strikes me is how naturally he peppers his commentary on living "like a king" in the Philippines to being gangraped by Russian sailors to Hilary Duff, Tagalog translation and unashamed self-centrism. He is such an incredibly perfect carbon casted model of every possible flamer trait that it almost feels like he read the "Gay Man's Guide to the Gay Archetype." Actually, in this age of double-irony and self-reference, I wouldn't be surprised if an equivalent actually exists.
Podcasting can be such a shot in the arm.
What strikes me is how naturally he peppers his commentary on living "like a king" in the Philippines to being gangraped by Russian sailors to Hilary Duff, Tagalog translation and unashamed self-centrism. He is such an incredibly perfect carbon casted model of every possible flamer trait that it almost feels like he read the "Gay Man's Guide to the Gay Archetype." Actually, in this age of double-irony and self-reference, I wouldn't be surprised if an equivalent actually exists.
Podcasting can be such a shot in the arm.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Kangaroo Boy
- From Kurt to Jeff.
Then came hallelujah sounding like mad Ophelia
for me in my room living
So kiss me, my darling stay with me till morning
Turn back and you will stay
Under the Memphis Skyline
Rufus Wainwright - “Memphis Skyline”
------
There are numerous points during the transcendental journey that is Grace, Jeff Buckley’s only completed studio album, which never fail to move me. But none will ever top that which occurs exactly 17 seconds into the recording, on the opening cut, “Mojo Pin.” For that is the very first entrance of his voice.
That voice.
It hangs for a long moment, suspended over one’s head, sounding so unlike any voice I have heard sing a note before or since that you’d be easily forgiven for not realizing that it is indeed a man singing, and not some angelic apparition. One of my other favorite singers, Bono, describes Jeff as “a pure drop in an ocean of noise,” and yet, there are still times on the record where voice, guitar and strings become so rapturously entwined together that such distinctions begin to lose all meaning.
I have listened to my well-worn copy of Grace at least one hundred times, such use interspersed with carefully administered loans to many friends. At present, it is in the hands of a colleague who I overheard listening to Rufus Wainwright at her workstation. Before delivering the album to her, I issued a warning that for most artists would be offered with a grain of salt. For Jeff, however, I could not have been more serious.
“This will change your life,” I said.
For how it has mine. It came into my possession almost accidentally. Soon after returning from a summer trip back to Australia—where Jeff gained far more mainstream recognition during his life than he did in the States—I purchased it on eBay, on a whim. It immediately became my primary source of all inspiration. Good music changes the way you feel; great music changes the way you feel. Grace not only best captures and relates to its listener in his most personal daily circumstance; it re-phrases and re-conceptualizes his life experience so that it begins to carry more meaning than one had previously conceived possible, making sentiments like jubilation, wonder, anger, sorrow and love far more real. Anything that I might remember feeling before Grace is now subconsciously understood through Grace. Like a lost sheep upon sighting his shepherd, I found Jeff’s trail soon after Kurt Cobain’s stopped carrying me past pubescence.
Though he may have been only a mysterious white boy, Jeff played soul music, first and foremost. His musical furnishing may have had more immediate genealogical ties to Led Zeppelin and Edith Piaf, but the force behind his art came through pious devotion at the altar of Black privation: Rhythm and Blues. He soaked in the darkest waters of its progenitors, learning his trade through Billie, Nina and Al Green, thus becoming as worthy a vessel of its timeless power as any “outsider” vocalist could hope to become. That he would ultimately combine this with the Sufi timbre of his self-proclaimed “Elvis,” Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, inspired me to explore deeper within the music that I so dearly loved in an effort to discover the soul behind its sound.
Embarrassing as it is, I dared to name my short-lived high school rock band after one of his songs. We were, but of course, The Mojo Pins. Thankfully, our first and final gig at a local church did not include any covers of his songs. That most ill-advised of efforts was spared for a solo performance at a high school’s coffeehouse, where, with sweaty fingers and faltering falsetto, I tip-toed my way through an earnest version of “Last Goodbye.” It was in fact only a small piece of my multiple appearances that night, where I mixed angsty anti-Bush poems with several emo covers in a bid to strike at least a glimmer of sensitive-songwriter-Asian-white-boy gold with the eligible women in the audience. I didn’t, but have since justified this failure upon the stage crew’s inability to cart in the piano from the art room for my scheduled performance of Mozart’s “Six Variations in G on a Theme of Salieri,” a lady killer if ever there was one. Playing “Last Goodbye” did, however, introduce me to two of my best high school friends; fellow Jeff devotees with whom a devotion to his music and mourning of his passing would form the core of our friendship.
I recall dragging another close friend around the East Village on one of my first visits to the Big Apple, in search of Jeff’s early regular gig venue, a hole-in-the-wall café named Sin-e (“Shin-ay,” Gaelic for “That’s It”). After an extended period of fruitless searching, we finally came upon it, only to find that at 21 and over, our entry was not permitted. Forgoing disappointment, I lingered at Sin-e’s doorstep, peering in through the window and then closing my eyes, invoking the musical muse that had so profoundly shaken his traveling devotee. At the beginning of his first live E.P. (recorded inside the café), Jeff whispers: “this is a song about a dream” before launching into his signature croon. Well, reaching Sin-e had become my hajj, and I’d come here before: if not in prayer than certainly in dream. Standing on the sidewalk of that grimy, dark alley of a street, Jeff’s lingering presence for a moment brought into clarity more of the pain and frustration, the longing and bohemian wonder, the celebration and artistic hunger of the East Village and New York City than I would otherwise have ever known.
Grace crossed the Atlantic with me during a semester spent in London. On one of those most triumphant of Spring occurrences, which come so rarely as to elicit genuine joy throughout the entire city (and seemingly, British Kingdom), that is: when the sun momentarily breaks the shackles of its cloud captors, splashing her glorious light across Mother England’s pale brow, I celebrated with a stroll through Hyde Park. “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” was washing its gospel yearning across my ears. At the very point where Jeff exalts: “Sometimes a man must awake to find that really…he has no one,” I noticed a small Indian girl playing innocently in the grass with her parents. It was such a slight, ordinary event, played out across millions of lives each day. But under the spell of this music, of this wrenching line, I became a bearer of an epiphany so much larger and more awesome than any Mass I ever sat through during childhood Catholic school. I felt closer to God than the existentialist-absurdist seminars I would attend years later could endeavour to re-distance me from, and basked in an impossibly fiercer love than the relationship-based narrative of “Lover” originally evokes.
The critic James Wood writes that reading Saul Bellow “is a special way of being alive.” In this case, listening to Jeff is an approximate experience, but one that not only intensifies one’s aliveness, but actually raises it beyond the realm of the subjective or symbolic and into an eternal place. One which, unlike heaven, remains grounded in all of the joyous treachery and miserable mortality of its human condition. In the penultimate chapter of Grace, Jeff screams: “There’s no time for hatred, only questions/Where is love, where is happiness, what is life, where is peace?”
The right reply, I have gradually but increasingly come to find, can be found in the living body of the original source itself. Qawwals, employing the extended, throaty ululations and modal melodies which Jeff would eventually stylize into a voice uniquely his own, bring their audience into a state of religious ecstasy and greater devotion through the power of their singing. An evening/car ride/drink with Grace then, is by leaps and bounds the most profound secular service an album has thus far proven to be for me. It feels slightly ironic, if unsurprising, that an artist like Jeff, who remains best known for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” who named his only completed album after a phrase commonly associated with Christianity, and whose early passing and father’s inescapable shadow bring to mind another highly deified son, should detest organized religion.
In my own short, unfolding journey, it is the accompaniment of Jeff’s dreams and struggle for meaning that have breathed constant vitality into my own search for understanding of faith, meaning and above all else, love. As Daphne Brooks--who inspired me to write this love note--explains: more than anything else, Grace is an act of love. If this musician’s tragically short career is to be celebrated in some way, I would put forth that lives renewed be most appropriate. In which case, I am born anew with each listen. Again, and again, and again.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Oy Vegg!
- The True Confessions of an Eggonomic Hitman
Bad pun: 1. Cheesy, contrived, lame, “you so stoopid!” play-on-words known to be a common cause of irritation when repeated
2. Employment as a server at a restaurant called “Eggspectation”
I began the ingratiating journey from simple-minded civilian to well-eggquipped eggspert of all things Egg last Monday. In one marathon training session, I was provided with all manner of trade secrets into becoming a well-oiled waiting machine. The art of the up-sale, pivot points, how to wash my hands (apparently, servers have to wash their hands) and what constitutes seggsual harassment (apparently, men/cocks are not permitted to handle women/hen’s ‘eggs’ without permission these days) were all dealt with accordingly.
For dinner, our small group of future eggployees were served a selection of dishes to acclimatize us with the restaurant’s offerings, thereby allowing for at least half-truthful future recommendations. I found the 'Muffin Eggsplosion' pipped the Apple Pie Cheesecake as my favorite sweet dish. Most recently, I have taken to carrying my 24-page extended menu around on my person, hunting for pneumonic devices to differentiate the 'Eggsileration' morning special from the 'Uneggspected*.' I’m yet to try the Eggchilada, though, whose preparation this morning I greatly admired at the hands of small Mario, whose fellow Salvadorean colleague taught me to refer to him as “ciervito**.”
Although I’ve never waited before, I have bartended in London. Which is to say, I made kalimotos (wine and coke, hardly a garnished cocktail) for drunken Spaniards at private parties and snakebites for American college girls in London’s International Student House. Although a generally positive experience, the pedestrian nature of the work means that I’d be only a half step above the next sod in terms of mixology experience, and still an unbroken-in schmuck with three plates in my arms. In Ellicott City, however, the location alone earns one a degree of respect.
Amongst DC students, spending time in London is only slightly more noteworthy than visiting your parents in North Carolina over winter break. In fact, Georgetown students would raise greater eyebrows if one was to boast of exotic journeys to Wyoming (to visit the Cheney shrine perhaps; not to be confused with Yasukuni) or Idaho, far from the cosmopolitan cultural islands of Tokyo, Lagos or, most run of the mill of all, old London town. Such is the duality of living on the border of the political machinery of Washington and its surrounding tri-state corporate suburbatopia. In DC, my own background quietly mixed into the pulse of a whole city of fleeting encounters amongst cultural hop-skotchers, most of whom cross time zones as rapidly as Baltimore natives use Old Bay seasoning (all the time). Here, playing my Aussie card hand lends an artificial yet useful air of celebrity to my existence.
Now, with this short post-college stint back in the town in which I last lived during 12th grade, and at a restaurant which originates from Montreal but whose clientele is mostly from the immediate area, I have the opportunity to add some zesty Australian-Asian spice to this benign yet bland middle-class omelette. I could be the soy sauce accompaniment to Ellicott City’s mini crab cakes, if you will (actually, I probably wouldn’t). I’ve previously used being from somewhere unusual as a social tool for remembering my name, exploiting the gullible for good-natured laughs and so forth. However, this may be the first time I actually acquire tangible—and by tangible, I mean green and taxable—benefits from my home country’s favored reputation. The question is: do I really intend on unashamedly milking my background to beef up my measly supplementary income?
Why, like a farmer to his cow with teats pouring liquid gold, that’s what!
So, depending on my assigned, unassuming diner, they can look forward to a caricature-based variety of Markissed, Mark-glish linguistic dew drops, all loosely rooted around the history of British Empire and the wonderful language it forcefully instilled upon we Yellow yolk…I mean, folk.
For instance, when the host assigns me a 50-something WASPish couple, my razor-like waiter-brain will visualize the husband occasionally hosting distant cousins from Bournemouth and his wife enjoying PBS Dickensian TV adaptations (such as my mother’s recent addiction, “Bleak House”)...
“Good day Sir! How do you do Madame?! Excuse my nosiness, but may I inquire as to whether you have dined at our humble establishment prior to this most exquisite occasion?...Oh, how positively delightful!”, I shall intone, sounding like an Asia-fied Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Now as I toddle off to fix the couple their drinks (Earl Grey tea, they'd of course request), the table conversation would at this point have switched from tax cuts to tickled culture-guessing:
“My goodness! I wonder where he’s from! Doesn’t look English, does he? Sounds like a butler from ‘Bleak House!’…”
Later on, when deliberating over the tip, this unexpected rhetorical treat should result in a sympathy/surprise offering of at least 20 percent, 30 to 50 being ideal.
Or, alternatively, they could see through my mostly-artificial server identity, exclaim: “What sort of bad high-school production ballyhoo accent is that joker trying to put on?!” and neglect to tip at all. It’s all a bit of a gamble, really, but one that I’m sure shall make the routine and bad pun overkill of working at Eggspectation pass more merrily.
For large, rowdy weekend groups of young business sorts looking for some excitement, I could selectively employ my rough-and-tumble Australian tongue, the dialect I was raised speaking but which in more recent times only escapes my lips following several strong drinks or in the rare company of my compatriots:
“The Surf N’ Turf, mate? You bloody betcha I like it, it has to be almost as de-lish as barbequed Emu!...”
And when the topic of drinks comes up, and inevitable questions about the consumption of Fosters arise, I’ll use my role as charming sommelier to subtly turn their attention toward more premium offerings:
“Australian Shiraz certainly goes well with a kangaroo steak, but for your particular dish, might I recommend the ($449/bottle)1966 Chateau Margaux? We drink it all the time in Oz!”
I’ll admit that these dreamy, lucrative shenanigans are fanciful to the point of absurdity. More than likely, rather than delight and entertain my table with such verbal idiosyncrasies, I’ll simply confuse.
“Ba-narh-narh? What on earth is that? Is it a vegetable?...Ohhhhh, Bill, he means ‘Banana!’ (or, “ba-neh-ner” to the un-American ear), a guest will decipher with latent irritation. That is, before declining dessert altogether in favor of the check, in which she can show me what just what she thinks of my unintelligible variation of her beloved Mid-Atlantic coast vernacular.
Looking forward, how this all actually works out is going to be a useful case study in terms of gauging sources of future income. I hope to perform bartending/serving work similar to this in a variety of countries (and, with any luck, languages), and a successful stint in my adopted hometown would bolster my confidence considerably. Accelerating one’s immersion into a new environment can be done in a number of ways. Feeding and/or intoxicating locals, however, happens to be one of the most universal and personally appealing. There’s much that the self-anointed pop-anthropologist can discover through observing from behind the waiter’s apron: How do Americans eat crepes compared to the French? How do mute Ethiopians converse over a first date (the food being eaten without cutlery)? What is the real meaning behind General Tso, international man of mystery, and his chicken?
Irregardless, you can be sure that I’ll find it all an utterly eggcellent eggsperience...
And now that, dear friends, is a bad pun.
---------------
* In case you were wondering: the Uneggspected has steak, instead of chicken
** "Small donkey," from what I gathered
Bad pun: 1. Cheesy, contrived, lame, “you so stoopid!” play-on-words known to be a common cause of irritation when repeated
2. Employment as a server at a restaurant called “Eggspectation”
I began the ingratiating journey from simple-minded civilian to well-eggquipped eggspert of all things Egg last Monday. In one marathon training session, I was provided with all manner of trade secrets into becoming a well-oiled waiting machine. The art of the up-sale, pivot points, how to wash my hands (apparently, servers have to wash their hands) and what constitutes seggsual harassment (apparently, men/cocks are not permitted to handle women/hen’s ‘eggs’ without permission these days) were all dealt with accordingly.
For dinner, our small group of future eggployees were served a selection of dishes to acclimatize us with the restaurant’s offerings, thereby allowing for at least half-truthful future recommendations. I found the 'Muffin Eggsplosion' pipped the Apple Pie Cheesecake as my favorite sweet dish. Most recently, I have taken to carrying my 24-page extended menu around on my person, hunting for pneumonic devices to differentiate the 'Eggsileration' morning special from the 'Uneggspected*.' I’m yet to try the Eggchilada, though, whose preparation this morning I greatly admired at the hands of small Mario, whose fellow Salvadorean colleague taught me to refer to him as “ciervito**.”
Although I’ve never waited before, I have bartended in London. Which is to say, I made kalimotos (wine and coke, hardly a garnished cocktail) for drunken Spaniards at private parties and snakebites for American college girls in London’s International Student House. Although a generally positive experience, the pedestrian nature of the work means that I’d be only a half step above the next sod in terms of mixology experience, and still an unbroken-in schmuck with three plates in my arms. In Ellicott City, however, the location alone earns one a degree of respect.
Amongst DC students, spending time in London is only slightly more noteworthy than visiting your parents in North Carolina over winter break. In fact, Georgetown students would raise greater eyebrows if one was to boast of exotic journeys to Wyoming (to visit the Cheney shrine perhaps; not to be confused with Yasukuni) or Idaho, far from the cosmopolitan cultural islands of Tokyo, Lagos or, most run of the mill of all, old London town. Such is the duality of living on the border of the political machinery of Washington and its surrounding tri-state corporate suburbatopia. In DC, my own background quietly mixed into the pulse of a whole city of fleeting encounters amongst cultural hop-skotchers, most of whom cross time zones as rapidly as Baltimore natives use Old Bay seasoning (all the time). Here, playing my Aussie card hand lends an artificial yet useful air of celebrity to my existence.
Now, with this short post-college stint back in the town in which I last lived during 12th grade, and at a restaurant which originates from Montreal but whose clientele is mostly from the immediate area, I have the opportunity to add some zesty Australian-Asian spice to this benign yet bland middle-class omelette. I could be the soy sauce accompaniment to Ellicott City’s mini crab cakes, if you will (actually, I probably wouldn’t). I’ve previously used being from somewhere unusual as a social tool for remembering my name, exploiting the gullible for good-natured laughs and so forth. However, this may be the first time I actually acquire tangible—and by tangible, I mean green and taxable—benefits from my home country’s favored reputation. The question is: do I really intend on unashamedly milking my background to beef up my measly supplementary income?
Why, like a farmer to his cow with teats pouring liquid gold, that’s what!
So, depending on my assigned, unassuming diner, they can look forward to a caricature-based variety of Markissed, Mark-glish linguistic dew drops, all loosely rooted around the history of British Empire and the wonderful language it forcefully instilled upon we Yellow yolk…I mean, folk.
For instance, when the host assigns me a 50-something WASPish couple, my razor-like waiter-brain will visualize the husband occasionally hosting distant cousins from Bournemouth and his wife enjoying PBS Dickensian TV adaptations (such as my mother’s recent addiction, “Bleak House”)...
“Good day Sir! How do you do Madame?! Excuse my nosiness, but may I inquire as to whether you have dined at our humble establishment prior to this most exquisite occasion?...Oh, how positively delightful!”, I shall intone, sounding like an Asia-fied Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Now as I toddle off to fix the couple their drinks (Earl Grey tea, they'd of course request), the table conversation would at this point have switched from tax cuts to tickled culture-guessing:
“My goodness! I wonder where he’s from! Doesn’t look English, does he? Sounds like a butler from ‘Bleak House!’…”
Later on, when deliberating over the tip, this unexpected rhetorical treat should result in a sympathy/surprise offering of at least 20 percent, 30 to 50 being ideal.
Or, alternatively, they could see through my mostly-artificial server identity, exclaim: “What sort of bad high-school production ballyhoo accent is that joker trying to put on?!” and neglect to tip at all. It’s all a bit of a gamble, really, but one that I’m sure shall make the routine and bad pun overkill of working at Eggspectation pass more merrily.
For large, rowdy weekend groups of young business sorts looking for some excitement, I could selectively employ my rough-and-tumble Australian tongue, the dialect I was raised speaking but which in more recent times only escapes my lips following several strong drinks or in the rare company of my compatriots:
“The Surf N’ Turf, mate? You bloody betcha I like it, it has to be almost as de-lish as barbequed Emu!...”
And when the topic of drinks comes up, and inevitable questions about the consumption of Fosters arise, I’ll use my role as charming sommelier to subtly turn their attention toward more premium offerings:
“Australian Shiraz certainly goes well with a kangaroo steak, but for your particular dish, might I recommend the ($449/bottle)1966 Chateau Margaux? We drink it all the time in Oz!”
I’ll admit that these dreamy, lucrative shenanigans are fanciful to the point of absurdity. More than likely, rather than delight and entertain my table with such verbal idiosyncrasies, I’ll simply confuse.
“Ba-narh-narh? What on earth is that? Is it a vegetable?...Ohhhhh, Bill, he means ‘Banana!’ (or, “ba-neh-ner” to the un-American ear), a guest will decipher with latent irritation. That is, before declining dessert altogether in favor of the check, in which she can show me what just what she thinks of my unintelligible variation of her beloved Mid-Atlantic coast vernacular.
Looking forward, how this all actually works out is going to be a useful case study in terms of gauging sources of future income. I hope to perform bartending/serving work similar to this in a variety of countries (and, with any luck, languages), and a successful stint in my adopted hometown would bolster my confidence considerably. Accelerating one’s immersion into a new environment can be done in a number of ways. Feeding and/or intoxicating locals, however, happens to be one of the most universal and personally appealing. There’s much that the self-anointed pop-anthropologist can discover through observing from behind the waiter’s apron: How do Americans eat crepes compared to the French? How do mute Ethiopians converse over a first date (the food being eaten without cutlery)? What is the real meaning behind General Tso, international man of mystery, and his chicken?
Irregardless, you can be sure that I’ll find it all an utterly eggcellent eggsperience...
And now that, dear friends, is a bad pun.
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* In case you were wondering: the Uneggspected has steak, instead of chicken
** "Small donkey," from what I gathered
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