Burning Newspaper

I've been reading an amazing book, The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. It's an account of the recovery at the dawn of the Renaissance of a copy of the ancient Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things, a beautiful work that was considered the definitive Roman version of Epicurean philosophy. Epicureanism was a common-sense but at the time revolutionary take on life that combined prescient opinions of how the physical world works – including Darwinism and atomism – with atheism (or at least "the gods don't care about you-ism"), a philosophy of moderation and a belief that "the pursuit of happiness" is the aim of human life.

Epicureanism – along with much of pre-Christian Greek & Roman culture, Judaism, competing Near East cults, etc. – was viewed as a critical threat to the early Church, and as Christians increased in numbers and power in the Roman Empire in the first centuries of the common era books were burned, authors were slandered, intellectuals were murdered by mobs, and the vast Roman libraries that dotted the major cities of the Empire disappeared through both overt destruction and neglect. As the centuries wore on, even worse damage was wrought by non-human agents: fire, decay, overuse & especially the hungry microscopic insects known as “bookworms” swallowed up the vast majority of ancient literature without a trace.

The early Christians were no worse than most others. One need look no further than the destruction wrought by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution, or American bombs in Berlin and Baghdad to know that each fragment of our collective ancient heritage is a tenuous little miracle.

1000+ years after the triumph of Christianity in ancient Rome (and Rome’s subsequent destruction), a new breed of “humanist” scholars began to roam continental Europe’s monasteries, ruins & private collections in search of the odd surviving ancient Greek or Roman manuscript. What they recovered was invaluable, but they didn’t come up with much. Neither have we in the intervening 500+ years. A great quote from the Greenblatt book puts the totality of the destruction of the previous civilization into perspective:

“Apart from [a few] charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the Ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy, most often very far removed in time, place and culture from the original. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works even of the most celebrated writers of antiquity. Of Aeschylus’ 80 or 90 plays and the roughly 120 by Sophocles, only 7 each have survived…

These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace…At the end of the 5th Century CE an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world’s best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost. “

-- Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

What’s even more shocking is that many archaeologists think that our current civilization and its literature & documents will fare no better. I’m in the process of ripping all of my CDs into digital format & placing them on the cloud, then throwing them away – so I’m especially sensitive to this argument right now. Several generations of disk drive technologies have already been rendered obsolete, and a mere 10-20 years later data on their disks can be rendered only by hard-to-find computer antiquarians. A floppy disk drive from the late 1980s might as well be written in hieroglyphics before the Rosetta Stone. If this is what happens in 10-15 years, what will happen in 1000?

Even in the absence of technological obsolescence, file corruption occurs rapidly in digital formats, even faster than the physical decay of papyrus from the ancient world. Constant curation and backing up of files is necessary on a consistent basis to ensure non-corruption of data. Further challenge comes from encryption technologies, which are growing increasingly prevalent and render data untranslatable without appropriate salts & passcodes.

To the ancient Roman living in a major city of the Empire, the permanence of civilization’s great libraries & body of literature seemed obvious and eternal. It’s highly unlikely that they could have envisioned the incineration of their entire literary output. It’s unthinkable to us too, but it’s probably going to happen. Were it to follow previous patterns, one might expect a half-dozen Shakespeare plays to survive due to their massive circulation, perhaps a half-dozen Bibles & Korans, plus a random assortment of a couple dozen or so other texts.

It's moderately reassuring that in defiance of the annihilation of much of ancient culture Lucretius' poem was able to have profound influence on America's founders, and even left a fingerprint on the Declaration of Independence.

But how strange to think that our entire civilization, with its omnipresent glut of information, is in the long run as disposable as a fast food flyer left on the hood of a car in a parking lot.

Ten Things About Reality That Will Blow Your Mind

I’m really surprised at the low level of impact that various astounding scientific discoveries make in our everyday sense of ourselves and the world around us. For example, the past century has seen a series of breathtaking, startling and rigorously proven breakthroughs in our understanding of reality that have radically altered our view of what the universe is and how it works. But unfortunately by “our” I mean a very tiny handful of particle physicists plus a smallish coterie of amateurs who read avidly on the topic. The nature of reality appears to have been deemed too esoteric and counter-intuitive for dissemination to the general public, and you will learn precious little about it in our schools, in the media or anywhere else for that matter.

It’s an understandable predicament – this stuff is genuinely difficult and mostly counter-intuitive – but nevertheless unfortunate. And so, to signpost some of the high-level general implications of these discoveries for myself and to share them with my friends I’m posting 10 discoveries that we have made over the past century that radically alter our understanding of what reality is and how it works. Buckle your seatbelts! The universe is a far stranger and more awe-inspiring place than we originally imagined.

1. Possibility is a real thing, not just a human concept.

Quantum mechanics has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that possibility is a physical force every bit as concrete and real as gravity or electro-magnetism. And it flows across the universe in waves, as if it were a liquid. Every constituent component of our universe travels along in “probability waves” that contain every possible location and path that they might possibly have taken, and they collapse into actual things with definite locations and trajectories only when they bump up against one another. Until then there is a very real sense in which they are riding a wave that simultaneously places them at every possible location where they could be, and those possible locations can also bump up against one another and create interference patterns that we can observe in labs.

2. Our one-way, linear experience of time is an illusion.

To the best of our current understanding, it appears that time is not linear and there is no “arrow of time” that we flow across, all reasonable appearances to the contrary. Objects (including ourselves) move through time, but all directions of time are equal, just as they are for space.

Our illusory experience of time’s flow is due to two things (1) the law of entropy, which shows that highly ordered things invariably break down into a rest state of disorder, and (2) the original state of our universe, which was extremely, extremely ordered and is constantly breaking down into further disorder, because it was so ordered at its inception. This is the only linear aspect of our universe across time, and it provides a physical constraint that prevents conscious beings from mapping memories of the future, in addition to the past. Therefore whatever moment you happen to be in appears to “flow” in an orderly fashion from past to present because our memories go only one way and many kinds of things (like the breaking of an egg) can’t be undone in this universe.

In a universe that was less orderly in its beginning, by the way, consciousness probably would not even be possible because in a rest state of high disorder it is phenomenally rare that order ever increases.

It's important to note that, while this is the leading theory at the moment, it has not been absolutely proven as of yet, and it's still possible that something else may be at work in our one-way perception of time. There’s still a lot for us to learn and its pretty certain that more revelations are (were?) in store for us in the “future”.

3. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.

Believe it or not this has been experimentally verified and is now beyond doubt. Time slows proportionately depending on how fast you are moving through space. Because we can only move relatively slowly through space, these effects are never apparent to us. But if you could get in some sort of magical space ship that went almost as fast as the speed of light you would be able to travel through time much more rapidly than those on Earth and arrive back millions of years in the future in a matter of days.

4. When you jump out of an airplane, you are not falling toward the Earth; the Earth is falling on you.

Objects made of matter, whether humans or planets or subatomic particles, warp the fabric of space-time and cause grooves to form in it across which other, smaller objects will now travel. It’s as if a fat person made an ass-print in the comfy chair of our universe. This is called gravity. The pressure that we feel for virtually all of our lives (except when we’re jumping out of airplanes) is a combination of (1) our body’s natural rest state moving at a steady velocity down the warp in the fabric of space created by the massive object that we live on, and (b) that same massive object obstructing our body’s ability to continue in that rest state. Therefore when you jump out of an airplane (not counting the impact of the wind) you are not really moving relative to other objects around you; rather, they are moving toward you. And the Earth is flying at you like the ultimate Mack Truck.

5. Particles can communicate and align themselves with one another instantly across space, even if they’re on opposite ends of the universe.

There are ways in which matter’s constituent particles are not constrained by space at all, and can communicate with one another instantaneously from one end of the universe to the other. We know this largely because Einstein hated quantum physics and was constantly trying to come up with ways to debunk it. Unfortunately, every time he did he only prove it further, and proved how strange it is. His most ingenious method was to show that quantum mechanics predicted that if you emit two particles that are linked from a quantum mechanical perspective and allow them to fly off to opposite ends of the universe, then alter one of them in some manner, quantum math predicts that the other will be instantaneously altered as well. Sure enough, a decade or so later it was proven that this actually works. So if for example you split a photon into two and shoot them off in opposite directions, it has been proven that one immediately knows if the other has been bumped up against or not and changes itself accordingly, faster than the speed of light and instantaneously across space. This shows that there are mysterious links between some particles/waves that transcend space entirely.

6. It is possible under certain special circumstances to go back in time and change the past.

This one could also be titled “the universe is fucking with us”. But it only works for subatomic particles. The experiment goes like this: if you “tag” a particle (alter its spin) so that it is potentially possible that someone could distinguish it from another particle later, that particle’s probability wave collapses and it becomes an actual particle with a definite location and trajectory in space. If you later “untag” them so that they could never be distinguished from one another at some indefinite time in the future, it becomes a probability wave again. One the face of it, this appears to tell us that the particle goes back in time and now follows all possible routes through space where it once only traveled a single path.

This would even work if you “tagged” it in the Andromeda galaxy and then “untagged” it three million years later in our galaxy, which means that the past has been irrevocably altered and the particle, which previously only went through space via one definite path, has now gone back and traveled all of its possible paths as a probability wave. By untagging the particle we have altered 3 million years of history.

It also means that the particle/probability wave is on some level “aware” that it would be possible to measure and distinguish it at some point in the future, and alters its behavior accordingly. Terrifying, creepy and all-around awesome.

7. The universe was created out of nothing by a rare but occasionally occurring statistical blip in the void.

This does not of course rule out divine intervention, but the laws of physics as we know them today show that a universe such as ours will invariably emerge out of nothingness every so often as an extremely rare statistical anomaly. Blip!

It is probably a bit premature for me to post this one because it hasn't been proven per se -- but it's incredibly cool and looking more likely. The growing consensus around it stems from quantum math predictions surrounding the constant creation in our universe of "virtual particles" out of the void all across space that every so rarely turn into real particles, and an extension of this quantum behavior to reality before the creation of our universe.

8. The Big Bang was not a “bang”.

If you assumed it was a bang you would think that Planet Earth was Ground Zero, because everything is rushing away from us in opposite directions at speeds directly proportional to their distance from us. But the so-called Big Bang wasn’t a bang at all, and everything is actually rushing away from everything else at the same proportional speeds. The Big Bang and the ensuing expansion of the universe is more a stretching of space, like Silly Putty pulled further and further, and all matter in the universe gets stretched outward along with it.

In addition, it looks like our visual image of the universe starting in a single point and expanding outward also goes out the window. It looks more and more like the universe was infinitely large at its inception, even as it continually stretches and expands.

9. We already know how to teleport things.

And we’ve done it in labs. Unfortunately those “things” are sub-atomic particles like photons and electrons. But we’ve done it! Using the trans-spatial bizarreness mentioned in #5 we’ve managed to associate two particles with one another, send them off in opposite directions and then transport/transpose one particle onto the location of the other particle, destroying the other particle in the process.

Now the bad news. There is no way in hell we’ll be able to teleport human beings any time soon, and probably ever. For one thing, the teleportation requires this particle association (called quantum “entanglement”) for every particle being teleported. How do you do that for every particle in a human body? Then you have to have all of the constituent mirror matter at the location where you’re teleporting them. Then you have to have a computer so vast that it could capture all of the insane complexity of all of the particles jostling around in a human body in such a way that it can deterministically place them all back in the right order at the new location. The computer capacity required for that is truly inconceivable. Plus quantum weirdness may come into play; while the particles in your body are constantly jostling up against one another and their possibility waves have therefore collapsed, they might create a factor of uncertainty. In conclusion: forget about it. Not gonna happen.

10. Math is a motherfucker

Physicists have gotten so far in understanding how the universe works, despite how counter-intuitive so much of it is, by following the math wherever it leads. Whenever someone (such as Einstein) points out an apparent logical flaw in the math of quantum mechanics, for example, the math always turns out to be experimentally correct.

Which raises the question, why does math work? Nobody’s figured that one out yet. For now it operates infallibly and without explanation, as if the ineffable language of God.

ps. Because it is still very much undecided and up in the air I am not including any of the conclusions of M-Theory, because it hasn’t yet been proven or fully worked out. But suffice it to say that many more jaw-dropping surprises about the nature of reality are on their way. It’s worth tuning in to them from time to time!

Mississippi Goat Roast

Last month on the way back from a business trip I stopped off in Memphis, rented a car and drove just south of Senatobia, Mississippi to attend the Turner family’s annual Goat Roast, a weekend-long party in August on the old family farm that features two nights of performances by local blues musicians -- who happen to be some of the very best musicians in the world -- on a bandstand in the backyard.

Senatobia sits in the heart of North Mississippi Hill Country, a region that serves as keeper of the flame for traditional African American music spanning centuries. It’s in Hill Country that you can still find old traditions kept alive like the Fife & Drum bands that the Turner family is famous for fostering; back in the early twentieth century a regular dribble of Hill Country migrants bringing their traditional culture south to the Delta (where the jobs were) went a long way to creating The Blues. Even today, if you listen to Hill Country guitarists like the great Robert Belfour, you can hear a blues style that seems audibly connected to the West African Sahel, with guitar playing that sounds at times like Malian kora licks forced onto a fretted instrument, with sub-tonal bent notes unbuckling the seams of its normally well-tempered straightjacket. Others like the late Robert Kimbrough sound a dissonant drone in the bass strings torn straight out of a Sahara Desert camel caravan.

The Turner family occupies a special place in Hill Country’s musical universe. Recently deceased patriarch Otha Turner was the highly regarded fife-master of Rising Star Fife & Drum, with his grandchildren & cousins making up the drum corp. These picnics have been going on since at least the 1930s, when Alan Lomax filmed one of them, and attract hundreds of people all across Mississippi from Como to Clarksdale. The list of musicians that played here is a who’s who of blues history, including Belfour, Kimbrough, Napoleon Strickland, T Model Ford, the Burnside clan and many others.

Fife & drum bands were a major source of African American music & entertainment since the Revolutionary War. During slavery Africans weren’t allowed drums because they were known to be a means of communicating across large distances and therefore constituted a potential threat to European slave owners. But fife & drum bands started as adjuncts to the military and so were allowed, back when European armies were signaled and ordered via drums – something they were taught by North African invaders of Spain in the late Middle Ages. Fife & drum ensembles persevered through war and peace for over two centuries, serving as house band for parties in the agricultural off-season during the Jim Crow period. On these military snares and bass drums you can hear all the overlaid polyrhythmic complexity of Cuban or Congolese music in a completely new context, with a hand-made cane fife laying syncopated melodic patterns over the top of it.

Otha Turner died several years ago, but his large family is spread out along both sides of a wide stretch of rural Como, MS highway, and they continues the tradition with his nineteen year-old granddaughter Chardé Thomas as fife master. The goat roast is held on Otha’s old farm. Picnics like this were a near-daily feature of the agricultural off-season in the early twentieth century, with each family in the region hosting one a year. Back when Lomax visited, the fife & drum bands ruled the day, often with an African holdover opening that involved stylized, erotic drum saluting and male line dancing to entice the women. There were other instruments played then that are now extinct, including multi-flute pan pipes torn straight from Cameroon (soon to be replaced by the harmonica), home-made fiddles, hair combs covered in toilet paper, and diddley-bows – one long string often tied to a tree and anchored down to the ground until the tree was bent over, with enough pressure to turn it into a giant, multi-faceted instrument that can be played like a slide guitar & drummed at the same time (I did see one of these in the Dominican Republic a few years, where it’s called the gajumba, but it’s completely died out in Mississippi).

Those instruments are gone now as the blues’ unrecorded origins slide into the mud of oblivion along with the names of its inventors. But Rising Star and the goat roast carry on. I stopped off first at a grungy Super 8 motel by the side of the highway, torn from some picaresque David Lynch gothic noir, complete with creepy, obese motel clerk watching 1970s slasher movies & slugging down candy bars behind the counter, then made my way over to the stretch of country road where the goat roast was about to commence. Very pretty country, but remote and fairly poor. The neighbors had set up do-it-yourself parking operations in their front-yards for four dollars a pop and there were small kids playing on a trampoline in front of an adjoining house. Otha’s shack was still there, with a shed in the back where he made his fifes & kept his musical instruments, & the porch was a good place to kick back and check out the music.

This was an all-in-the-family operation and so there were teenagers directing traffic into the adjoining field, middle-aged ladies camped out in front of the house charging a modest $2 admission and a dozen family members behind the counter of a jury-rigged concession stand shelling out Wonder Bread goat sandwiches and beers for another $2. Out back there was a rented bandstand with power cords strung up overhead and leading to a generator by the house. It was vaguely disappointing to see no goats being slaughtered on-site, but one guy manned a gigantic woodsmoke grill out back where mass barbecuing was underway.

The first night of the party gets started with a drum call, and while most of the African ritual has been bled out of it by now, there’s still a big crowding and swaying around the drums when things get started. People are still really into it, and see it as a source of local pride. And a careful eye picks up the little fossil remnants of the old days, like one big & one small drumstick, male & female, a modest West African holdover. Then the first B-class acts start playing, but here a B-act is one guy playing reverbed-out guitar and drum-set at the same time, so awesome and raw that it made the White Stripes sound like Donnie & Marie. More people start filtering in and a Turner family matriarch who appears to have already had a few drinks ascends to the bandstand, demands a rhythm section and starts riffing a blues about how sexy her new wig is and how you can’t take it from her. The bass player dutifully demands the wig in a stanza of his own and he eventually winds up wearing it as she tumbles triumphantly into the dancers up front and makes a beeline for the beer concession.

By now everybody’s camped out on the backyard lawn. There are a bunch of plastic chairs but mostly people are sitting on grass or leaning against derelict pieces of farm equipment as the A-listers start filing up to the bandstand and jamming out. There’s living legend R.L. Burnside moseying up with a cane, clearly a little drunk and getting lost from time to time as he knocks out a hypnotic drone riff and commences to blowing everyone’s mind. At one point he throws a beer can at some harmonica player who wanders up and starts stepping on his buzz. The Turner family matron is back to move the show along and tries to bring in the next group, but R.L. just keeps sitting there and playing like he can’t hear her.

“Don’t be nasty, R.L.!”

He just smiles vacantly and rocks out for another half-hour. No one else complains.

Musicians meander up and down the bandstand in an ever-shifting ensemble. The old folks here are shocking, and when you start to talk to them you realize you own a dozen different recordings that they’re on. One man in a Fedora and a t-shirt that says “I’m 80% Redneck and the Rest is Beer” was Robert Kimbrough’s rhythm guitarist; he mistakes me for somebody and engages in an extended reminiscence that I’m supposedly a party to that is only half-understandable because he’s buckled over in hysterics the entire time. The North Mississippi All-Stars show up at one point, which consist of six different blues legend each a star unto themselves, and R.L.’s amazing son Dwayne turns up late and high as a kite to reverb out on some especially nasty Hendrixified blues -- some of which he forgets half the words to.

Up in front of the bandstand everybody’s making it clear that the blues was intended as a dance form. Couples are slow dragging one another head-to-toe or going solo with their arms up in the air and making herky-jerky leg moves that are as oddly graceful as they are abrupt. At one point an alarmingly large woman grabs me and drags me onto the dance floor with a vice grip on my wrists, turning her attention away from me only long enough to swivel her head and cackle at her friends: “Watch out! I got this one!”

Then of course there’s Charde and Rising Star. They start a set on the bandstand but something goes wrong with the monitor and Charde in a fit of pique storms off. From then on they simply wander through the festivities from time to time, all other music comes to a halt and everybody crowds around the six of them as they slam out local classics like Shimmy She-Wobble and generally jam out. It’s a miracle you can hear Charde’s fife at all given how loud they’re drumming, but somehow she makes herself heard, sometimes breaking into song with a surprisingly smooth & beautiful R&B voice, sometimes chanting out a latter-day addition like The Roof...The Roof...The Roof is on Fire...

Everybody’s really into the fife & drumming and you can tell it’s a point of local pride and a link to best part the past. So much of the old local musical tradition has been lost but thanks to these six kids the fife & drum is still going strong and doesn’t look to be going anywhere for a long time. Given how self-assured she is during performance it’s a surprise to talk to Charde in person and realize how young she is, a super-smart, slightly unsure of herself sweet kid. I had been corresponding with her previously about the possibility of performing at the Festival au Desert outside Timbuktu, but apparently she took one look at the photographs of fully decked-out Touaregs on camels and the tents she would have to sleep in and got a little freaked out. But we’ll get Rising Star out there eventually, along with some of the great local blues musicians, and it will be worth it to get them on the same stage with the kora virtuosi and bala players from whence so much of their musical foundation comes, even after all these centuries.

Outside the confines of the family farm, it’s clear that the Turner picnic is a magnet for every African-American kid with a car in a hundred square mile radius. You can walk a half-hour in each direction and see a solid line of teenagers and twenty-somethings partying by the side of the road and checking each other out, with strong-smelling mushroom clouds of pot wafting into the star-filled sky here and there and a long line of cars & trucks cruising the backroad and blasting R&B in a never-ending circuit. Some are barely aware that there’s music going on back at the farm. I tell them I'm from New York City and they look at me like I said The Moon.

But off in the distance as you chit-chat with local kids you can still hear the blues in the background. At one point an amplified guitar emits a long, inconsolable howl that crawls up your spine, like a woman mourning the death of a child.

So much bad is buried with our ancestors. But also just about everything that is good about us, about our culture, and all of it burns to ash in the same furnace. I’m standing with my fellow children of the twenty-first century, trying to make sense of one another as we listen to the last echo of a musical tradition that emerged out of these hills and quite literally transformed popular music across the planet. Our American descendants hundreds of years from now will cherish every bit of early African music that was captured before it disappeared as if they were fragments of Sappho, because it will still be what they are made of. The creation of the American soul took place while history was looking elsewhere. Tonight we are lucky to be here & hear it for ourselves.

Curtis Gwinn Exposes Himself

A serendipitous business trip to Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago allowed me to pop by Upright Citizens Brigade LA, where it turned out former New Yorker Curtis Gwinn was giving a one-man show. New York improv junkies know Curtis as a local star, perhaps the biggest in New York before he left last year, most famously working as founding member and deranged ringmaster of Death by Roo Roo.

In person, Curtis can be acerbic, elliptical and generally a pain in the ass. He’s also a lot of fun, in person and onstage, a brilliant post-punk showman torn from the set of Repo Man and allowed to mature twenty years like scotch. But as much fun as he’s having you can always feel the unrelenting, exacting judgment that he lords over himself and everyone around him like a Damoclean sword, emanating off him like an electric field, mowing down anyone too slow in its wake & generating much of the reckless, over-caffeinated dog-pack energy that Roo Roo is still famous for.

Curtis may be a lot of things but he’s not the first candidate you would come up with for one of these one-person shows, which are typically a sort of stand-up comedy equivalent of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, touchy-feely dinner theater for the grunge set, with seminal moments and life lessons learned and at bottom a naïve, wide-eyed faith in the defining power over our lives of simple, linear narratives that can be boiled down to three beats and twenty-five minutes.

Curtis opened the show addressing this head-on in his usual cantankerous manner, more for himself than the audience – though it was certainly entertaining – as he dragged himself kicking and screaming to the confessional booth.

I hate one-man shows he says, and I resent you for coming tonight. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for supporting this stuff. He then goes on to outline the specific issues he has with the form, especially his disdain for their shared notion of fundamental human change as a result of two or three pivotal events that pluck your heartstrings even while you learn something & laugh.

Curtis is right on here. Number one, people don’t really change, except maybe incrementally and over a very long stretch of time. And if some event in your life is actually so calamitous as to actually make you change in any meaningful way, it’s unlikely to change you for the better and isn’t going to be all that funny no matter how you spin it onstage. The loopy genius of modern improvisational form, which Curtis is especially adept at, is in a way the exact opposite of fundamental change, a ritual re-enactment of repeated behavior driven to further and further extremes in order to reach a surreal & necessary apex, and a celebration of the variations that can be spun from the set-in-stone nature of people, especially when you bump them together like pool balls on the stage to find out what happens.

This same logic marks Curtis’ world view here, and allows his show to tiptoe toward greatness. Having sufficiently chastised both himself and the audience for the unseemly intimacy of the performance to come, he manages to weave together the literal dissolution of his home & his father’s descent into homelessness, a porn mag found in the woods, an aborted attempt at a college education and a botched first romantic encounter into a grumpily touching tone poem of dislocation that holds him up to a microscope for comic inspection without offering any real hope of resolution or redemption.

Only once does the thought that “something might happen” impinge, when a former roommate informs him that his botched sweetheart is a pole dancer at a strip joint in a neighboring town. And that something is slapped down precipitously. Will seeing her so degraded provide irony, insight, closure, catharsis, revenge? No such luck; it’s not even her, it just sort of looks like her.

The sheer pointlessness of the hero’s journey is followed up by the rub-your-nose-in-it degradation of the trip back home. I would call it an anti-climax but he actually does auto-climax in the driver’s seat of his Volkswagen at one point, and is caught & run out of town by the local sheriff only to have his VW break down by the side of the highway, forcing him to abandon it and walk “home” to the apartment where his drifter dad is currently hanging out and climb into bed with him.

This is all a lot funnier than it sounds on the page, which points to the truth that anyone who wants to be adept at improv better be willing to lay themselves out for the audience as naked and squalid and sad as we all happen to be. Curtis’ show was brave by any standard, and very funny. It points to the way in which the underlying philosophy of improv leads to a smarter and stronger comic aesthetic when applied to written forms. And that Curtis is still very much in the process of conquering the world out in LA. He remains one of our best, smartest artists.

Metropolis Emboweled

I’ve just finished the complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (minus one short scene which is still lost) and was in the first American audience to ever view the complete film, which was cool. It’s more easily watchable than what we’d previously inherited as a lot of gaps in the narrative are restored, along with many short interspersed shots that bring coherence to the multiple big action scenes that take place simultaneously and converge on one another in the film’s second half. The whole flow of underground worker-drones smashing big machines and then line-dancing around their carcasses, earnest Dudley Do-Rights saving hundreds of abandoned children from a biblical flood, nefarious Thin Men and menacing mad scientists plotting mass destruction, and trashed flappers partying on the concrete skyways during a citywide blackout with empty cars littered all around them flow together more seamlessly and make a lot more sense now.

The cuts that were ordered by the studios to make it more commercially accessible are weird. There’s nothing especially esoteric about the recovered footage, and hacking away at key turns in the narrative can’t have been helpful in terms of the public reception. Disemboweled Metropolis was a movie only an art critic or film geek could love, as strange and surreally nonsensical as Last Year at Marienbad. And the corny action sequences interspersed throughout could only be taken as ironic and deconstructive in the mode of Jean-Luc Godard in the previous version. The full feature film is more the kind of swashbuckling, ass-kicking action-romance that you associate with big-budget Hollywood crap even in the silent era. You can’t help wondering if the studio editor was even more avant-garde (or stoned?) than the people who put the film together in the first place. As far as action-packed silent-film spectaculars go, though, I’d have to say that the original Ben-Hur still wins.

In the end though it’s easy to see why the movie’s commercial disfigurement did little to detract from its reputation. What’s so singularly hip about Metropolis is still the film’s look & feel, its massive deco statues and sets, its ritualized roaring twenties costumes that turn coke-girl flapper outfits into a modernist take on Native American headgear, above all its great big Moloch machines and its robot woman tied down to a gurney in Rotwang’s proto-Dr Frankenstein lab full of boiling beakers and functionally puzzling, electricity-conducting contraptions. The narrative makes all this more digestible, but has little of value to offer us aside from making it easier for our grandmothers to follow along as we watch it together.

Viewed again after so many years, it’s surprising to see how such a visually forward-looking film embraces traditional family values circa 1927. In that day and age this apparently entailed exhorting the proletariat to hark back to the wholesome, old-timey values of their agrarian peasant past, with the church as final arbiter of the struggle between industrial worker and latter-day aristocrat (i.e. Communist and Fascist). A valuable clue in the interpretation of behavior and meaning in the conservative religious movement today. Not Church with a capital “C”, but rather the constantly reincarnating multiple strains of grassroots populist religion that kept cropping up like mushrooms after rain and sweeping across Europe in the Middle Ages, sometimes doing significant damage. For it is a freelance incarnation of the Virgin Mary hiding out in the sewers of dystopia that brings sanity to the masses of Metropolis.

This highlights the great irony of Christianity in Western culture; promoted to official religion largely because its central authority and single deity are so useful in the forging of Empire, its clearly documented roots are so firmly on the side of anti-urban, anti-central authority rural Bronze Age class values that the Bible acts as a sort of permanent Trojan horse for the disenfranchised – not merely an opiate but also empowering, an insurance policy of sorts. And potentially dangerous as well – most medieval Jewish pogroms were enacted spontaneously by the masses in moments of aristocratic weakness: all is not sunshine and light in the old-timey agrarian values of our forebears, which the Nazi Party married to corporate fascism with ugly results. It’s hard not to interpret the workers’ suicidal frenzy at the end of the film as a disturbingly prescient take on Kristallnacht, still ten years in the future. The church was not especially helpful in restoring sanity in that particular use-case.

Speaking of religion, how about that hotty whorenun Brigitte Helm?! This is why every woman-loving human on Earth prefers Roman Catholics. Their religious upbringing has twisted them irrevocably in all the right ways. The only downside is that classic silent film acting methods – which seem closer to kabuki or koodiyattam than what we think of as movie acting today – dictate that her slutty evil doppelganger persona be performed with a facial asymmetry that makes it look like she's suffered a stroke.

Man-lovers have much less to pine for in Metropolis; Freder the corn-fed protagonist fights like a little girl, makes love with all the worldliness of a pimply teenage waiter at Friendly’s, and wears at least twelve geological strata of cake make-up that collectively make him resemble the embalmed corpse of a Swedish farmhand. Freder is less a Jesus figure than a modernist manifestation of the Buddha, cosseted away on a groovy Jazz Age roof deck banging bobbed-haired courtesans when Virginal Brigitte Helm busts in with a clatch of Dickensian waifs and explains that poverty exists. At this point everything changes. Does he want to end the social injustices wrought by his father the industrial tycoon, or is he merely burning to bag Brigitte? The two seem inextricably linked through the course of the film, and the rest of us can only let out a long sigh of relief that we’ve never fallen in love with a woman who made us end world poverty before she would sleep with us.

I’m getting too snarky and should probably stop. But to be honest it’s the occasional imperfect goofiness of Metropolis that breathes life into it & makes it more than a jaw-dropping exercise in social realist statue gardening. It allows us to roam the film and examine at will the operatic scope & perfection of its visual poetry and still puncture the self-importance a bit so we can laugh here and there at both it and ourselves.

PS you can still see Metropolis for the next two weeks at Film Forum: http://www.filmforum.org/films/metropolis.html

Agra to Aurangabad

They tend to stick all the tourists together on Indian trains, which makes them a good place to meet people. I end up on the ride from Varanasi to Agra with a klatch of Australians, one couple who are hippying it out for a few months plus a mom and her two adult daughters who just got back from a week’s trek in Kashmir. Plus a six-year old girl from the berth next door who keeps coming over and putting on a charm show. We put up a silk scarf in front of the overhead light, and between the six of us manage to come up with a fifth of Whiskey, some RC Colas, a blunt and a few energy bars, so the night goes well, though we get little sleep. Vendors pass through the car at regular intervals hawking cups of chai, bottled water and soda & various deep-fried foodstuffs. The one thorn in our side is the train attendant, who keeps finding excuses to come around and stare at the chicas. I start off trying to stare him down and shame him away, but turns out you can’t stare an Indian down; they don’t give a shit, they just keep staring back for however many hours it takes for you to look away. Throwing a shoe at them works quite well, though! I’m going to try staring at Neal Mohan when I get back and see what he does; the shoe I’ll save for Rajas Moonka.

I’m so ready to be palpably underwhelmed by the Taj Mahal that I’ve psyched myself out before arriving and have to adjust my whole world view when I find myself unexpectedly staring up at the most beautiful piece of architecture on Earth. It’s like a desert mirage, and hangs there like a cloud. Photographs don’t capture the full measure of it’s sublimity, and later that day I delete the ones I took in frustration. In part it’s so exquisite because it doesn’t try to do too much; there are no bombastic broad shoulders fanning out on either side, nothing that bespeaks a mote of insecurity on the part of its architect, just a pristine little elevated square of white marble topped by a central dome that borders on bulging out too much but then stops at just that place, like an alabaster balloon, with a retainer of eight little minarets and a monumental garden pathway. Off in the distance on either side are red sandstone gates that would qualify as world monuments in their own right, but they stay far enough apart not to mar the star attraction, like bridesmaids’ done up in prom dresses, to blur their beauty a bit as they stand off to the side. As the day progresses, shadows play with its surface and the sun subtly alters its color, an intentional effect meant to mimic the presence of the creator since Muslim law forbids direct representation of God. And it does feel like some all-pervasive presence is at work as the dome browns and pales over the course of the day, an ethereal, conscious motion running its fingers through us. Up close you see treasure chests of emeralds, rubies and sapphires that have been chipped into the shapes of delicate flower & vine patterns and embedded along the doorways and the inside of the building.

Being stuck in Agra after viewing the Taj Mahal is like waking up a week after you’ve married a shockingly beautiful woman and finding her entire extended family has moved out of their trailer park and into your apartment. All you can say is ouch. It’s a big thumping city that wears you out quick, and everyone you meet has a cousin with a rug store or a jewelry shop. The one bit of beauty that rises up out of the noise pollution are the pigeon keepers in the Muslim section who send their flocks into the air above the rooftops in late afternoon and direct them with a series of whistles that send them gyrating this way and that on command like magic kites. The food is good, too, high Mughal cooking like you see in the States except it tastes better, but you have to watch where you eat. The local newspaper has a front page story about a scam where one restaurant poisoned tourists, then put them on a rickshaw that took them to a backdoor clinic that gave them a prescription of more poison to keep them sick for a week or so while they charged their health insurance policies tens of thousands of dollars.

My mom wanted to come down and visit for a few days and since I sponged off of her when she was working in Ethiopia and Tanzania I ask her to meet here in Agra. She shows up on the second day and we’re supposed to take a train down to Aurangabad, but a major train accident on the way forces us to shift gears and get a flight from Delhi. So we drive up to the capital and crash at some fleabag hotel beside the airport when suddenly a memory flashes before my eyes like a vivid dream; I am in Dublin the night before Euro Partner Day and we are drunk in a cab going back to our hotel and I’m talking with Tim Evans and Jacoby Thwaites about how great Zaytoon’s kebab is when the Indian cabbie stops the car, turns around with a crazy look and howls: “Kariiiiiimm!” When asked for more context he says that Karim’s in New Delhi has by far the best kebab on the planet and makes Zaytoon look like McDonalds. How dare I praise plebian Zaytoon while regal Karim’s still stands? The owner, he claims, is a direct descendant of the chef of the Mughal emperors and the recipe’s been a family secret for centuries.

I wasn’t planning on going to Delhi so I quickly forgot the incident, but suddenly there it stands before me, the White Whale of kebabs. So I drag my poor mother back onto the street and find a couple of nice kids with a van who say they’ll take us there and back for 400 rupees. We end up getting an impromptu tour of the city’s highlights by night, including the Congress Building, Connaught Place, India Gate and so forth, before descending into the maze of dim-lit Old Delhi with its endless bazaar labyrinths and impossible masses of people camped out by the big mosque around cookstoves and donkey carts, from where we stagger through the traffic in a small alleyway to a bombed-out little storefront that is the promised land of kebabs – woo hoo, Karim’s! And yes it turns out to be the most deliciously spiced, melt-in-your-mouth kebab experience ever. Ladies and gents, we have a new world champion. And end up talking all night to a family from Lucknow that’s crammed in beside us on the benches. Which was more sublime, the Taj Mahal or the kebab? Tough call.

At five in the morning we rustle out of our beds and fly to Aurangabad. There’s a Starbucks in the terminal – I almost weep for joy. And pass through airport security with a look in my eye that says “you can pry this quad venti non-fat latte out of my cold, dead hand”. Aurangabad it turns out is a run-down little city in the rural district of Maharashtra that’s chief claim to fame is proximity to the ancient cave art of Ajanta and Ellora, which escaped the rampages of Muslim conquerors by being lost and forgotten for centuries.

Ellora is a series of 30 caves along a wilderness escarpment, chock full of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist statuary and chapels starting from around 200 AD. At the time it was used for cave monasteries, and the sculpture is downright staggering. First the caves have been grooved out to provide proper ceilings and floors with little stone steps leading up to them, then palace pillars with ornate carvings along them are cut out of the interior. Then there are all these magnificent, vibrant sculptures like what you might see in some lost wing of the British Museum, in quantities it’s hard to fathom. The highlight is a huge temple complex they carved completely out of the rock, Lalibela-style but a thousand years earlier, with all manner of elephant, monkey and lion sculptures adorning its surface and interior chapels, and three stories of hallways carved into the adjoining rockface on either side of the building. In some places you can still see the delicate paintwork that originally covered it. Jaw-dropping.

Ajanta is even more ridiculous. An entirely Buddhist complex with caves that were created as early as 300 BC, it lies two-thirds of the way up a huge, horseshoe-shaped cliff in the jungle and was lost until the early nineteenth century. The statuary is all here as well, and some of the caves have acoustics more perfect than most modern concert halls, but what’s so devastating are the largely intact murals from over 2000 years ago inside every cave, each one qualifying as a major work of art on the scale of the world’s greatest paintings, with long story cycles depicting various ancient events lost in the mist of time, people of all races and all walks of life, as sophisticated and subtle in style as Picasso or Rembrandt, an incomprehensively vast Cave Louvre still sitting here like a prehistoric time capsule, telling us of a civilization and a take on humanity more rich and visceral than you could have imagined. Enough said; some things you just have to see for yourself.

Well I would hate to go on at The Creek after THAT, even with LJ. And so the environs of Aurangabad seem a bit dingy afterwards, though not unpleasant like Agra. There’s a “baby Taj” from four centuries ago that mimics the original but is made of plaster and is crumbling quickly and a little water tank where people come to hang out in the afternoon and the ruins of a fortress complex dangling here and there along the side of a nearby mountain. We also make it out to drive through several hours of rolling farmland to a large crater lake populated with tons of birdlife, large troupes of tree monkeys and several abandoned old temples gone back to the jungle like props out of a Tarzan movie.

The people who live in Maharashtra are so much nicer and more relaxed than most in UP that I’m not prepared for it at first and get quite snappy when anyone approaches, as I automatically assume they’re out to scam me. But these are some of the mellowest people out there, and it’s a pleasure to hang out with them. The one idiosyncrasy is that they all want their picture taken with us. They don’t want to talk, want nothing especially to do with us afterward, just the photograph, ma’am. For example, one guy comes up to us on a bus and asks for a photo, it gets taken and then he goes back to his seat and acts like we no longer exist for the duration of the ride. It’s OK for awhile but they keep coming one after the other for the entire time we’re down there, and the ones with extended families deploy themselves in a long, impromptu rope line that stretches off in the distance so that each one can take their turn being individually photographed beside us.

I start getting impatient but my mother, who is at the end of the day a nicer person than I am, dives into the work as if she were Hillary Clinton and the future of US diplomacy counted on her handling of the whole situation, greeting everybody with a warm smile, a handshake and a moment of total attention, no matter whether the whole operation takes up the entire day or not. I think maybe something got lost in translation between our two generations. Born in the rural mountains of South Carolina, she somehow managed to retain a rural warmth that’s gotten stamped out of me for the most part, even after she moved to Chicago and worked her way slowly up the ladder of social work, from case worker to the head of all foster care, emeritus professor and international aid manager for East Africa. I would love to capture that patience and simple, genuine warmth for myself – but I suspect you’ll all have to make do with me as I am. I’m no Agra, but I may be Aurangabad.

A Benares of the Mind

The chicken bus border at Bhairawa is the most chaotic and disorganized place I think I’ve ever been. It consists of little more than a concrete gate that says “Welcome to India” with a low-caste drum-and-chanting Kali procession moving past it, villagers trucking grains back and forth on buffalo-powered carts, and two Nepalese traffic cops consumed solely with the mass truck traffic. I’m the only gringo in evidence, and navigating through the street even with a backpack is a big challenge; I’m nearly mowed over more than once. When I ask the Nepalese cops about immigration they roll their eyes and impatiently point me toward India, then go on directing traffic. The Indian side is even more lassez-faire; they keep pointing me further and further down the road until eventually I’m well clear of the border and can do nothing more than get some guy to drive me toward Varanasi sans passport stamp. Has not been a problem thus far, we’ll see what happens when I try to leave the country.

So I’m driving along the border between UP and Bihar in a rickety old South Korean jeep with two kids who don’t speak a lick of English between them, skirting the Buddha trail from Lumbini to Bodhgaya, which is ironically today the most lawless and dangerous part of India, rife with Maoist guerillas, random acts of banditry and out-and-out caste warfare in parts. One local saying is that Gautama’s enlightenment in 600 BC was the last good news to ever come out of Bihar. But I encounter no overt lawlessness (aside from all the psycho driving) as we barrel through what seems like an unyielding urban center all the way from the border to Benares, punctuated with the occasional patch of rice paddies and one sad little government-run monkey forest where the monkeys all sit by the side of the road and watch the traffic go by, just like the people. Anyone who’s been to India will be familiar with the driving “rules”, but it was my first time so I was a bit daunted, seasoned traveler though I am. Driving here involves non-stop passing of donkey carts, buffalo carts, ice cream trucks, wandering sadhus, bicycles loaded down with rice sacks, slow-moving cargo trucks and packed public buses, here and there a cantankerous steer or a sudden flurry of goats crossing the road, honking your horn the whole time to let people know you’re coming and veering in and out of the wrong lane ad nauseum, often escaping an oncoming collision in a matter of centimeters. You spend the first hour in wide-eyed terror, then surrender yourself to the universe, kick back and watch the carnival of life go by.

It’s a long ten hours from the time I leave Lumbini to our arrival in the traffic-choked streets of Varanasi, and night has fallen hard. Everybody here is gearing up for Diwali, every house is lit up with Christmas lights, every storefront sells psychedelic neon Hindu idols and every little kid is packing ten or twenty M-80’s and is busy unleashing them into street traffic. It’s at that point that my driver offers up my very first northern India scam, dropping me at some fleabag hotel that wants 2500 rupees a night and refusing to take me further – in the hopes that he’ll get a big commission on top of what I already paid him. So I trundle into the broke-leg streets of Varanasi with my bags, not having the slightest idea where I am, and eventually get some scrawny bicycle rickshaw dude who looks like he’s about eighty to drive me to a ghat that’s near my hotel. During the ride power in the city goes out – probably can’t handle the load of all those Diwali lights – and my driver suffers what appears to be an asthma attack so that I get out and help walk the bicycle through the noisy, darkened streets until we arrive in the general area of my hotel, at which point I wander around in the dark asking for directions until I stumble across it at a little after midnight. Welcome to India! Life is good.

I’m up with the sun at 6am and go trundling through the ghats all morning. Mark Twain said this city was “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together” and it must have been the riverfront he was referring to (admittedly there were no motorcycles in Mark Twain’s time, so the rest of the city may have seemed quite a bit older), especially in early mornings when thousands of people fan out across the various stone temples and religious-site-cum-bathouses that line the western bank of the Ganges in Benares, with steps leading directly to the water, each with a different cosmic sponsor (in one case it’s a deified local tree). Between each ghat there are little boatyards packed with weatherbeaten wooden sailboats, and circles of sari-wearing women singing and chanting. As the sun rises hundreds of people disrobe into their loin cloths and dive in. Some ghats have fallen out of favor and lie disused and decrepit, others are packed to the gills and have holy men chanting through loudspeaker systems as the celebrants drop in the water and let the river carry their sins downstream. At spots there are barbers shaving men’s hair off in preparation, and at one there are shorn high-caste acolytes in yellow robes chanting for hours on prayer mats. All along the waterfront the boats are just offshore, moving in to disgorge more worshippers. Tourists are few and far between, and the few that are here are of the blonde-dreadlocked, tabla-playing neo-hippie variety that have become such an international stereotype.

It’s a boring old truism that the Ganges is dirty as hell and that no one in their right mind would bathe here. But I wish I had the ability to convey the real beauty of the place. A singular life experience. Admittedly I was not tempted to take a dip in it myself, especially after seeing a heartbreaking funeral for a very small boy, maybe two years old, his father tending the duties by himself, attaching the child’s limp body to a small piece of driftwood and pushing it out to be upturned and sunk into the river along with all of the ashes being swept out from one of two segregated cremation zones. Equally upsetting was the attitude of the bottom-caste crematory staff, who were more interested in trying to stop me and scam me out of money than they were in attending to the man’s needs as he said goodbye to his small child. There are some very tough people in UP.

Around noon it gets hot hot hot here; all you can do is lie down and be poached beneath a ceiling fan as you wait for the furnace of mid-day to break. Then it’s off the wander the streets of Varanasi and see the big Diwali preparations, which include lots and lots of lights, firetrap storerooms crammed to the gills with combustible pyrotechnic devices, and religious processions in the streets with chanting and drums. The festival is based in part on a myth in which Rama’s wife was kidnapped by an evil baron in Sri Lanka, and Rama recaptured her with the help of Hanuman the monkey god, who created a bridge of monkeys that allowed Rama to walk over and get her back. As the sun starts to fade you’re invited into stranger’s homes and offered sweets, and one family even insists on feeding me.

At night the Diwali bomb hits. All down the river Hindu priests are performing fire ceremonies, the ghat steps are lit up with candles and long streams of tiny paper candle rafts are unfurled onto the river until it’s lit up like a kilometer-long birthday cake. The fireworks are not organized in the manner of an American celebration; instead it’s a mass chaos of every man for himself as M-80s blow off all around you, tens of thousands of bottle rockets scream overhead and the big 4th of July-style fireworks get shot from the rooftops for nine hours non-stop.

I can take it for a couple hours but eventually retreat to my hotel balcony, where the mild, elderly, lily white high-caste proprietors sit in their bamboo chairs and look out onto the chaos below like benevolent demigods. Hung along the walls are lush paintings of a Ganges of the mind, hung with flowers and tame jungle vines, where green-hued Krishna descends into the turquoise stillness of the full moon into this imaginary river, as an elephant gazes placidly at its own reflection from the shore. And I realize that this is what my proprietors see when they look out at the dirty, urban Ganges, this ancient but overbuilt matrix of the spirit and material worlds. During my time in India I see so many of these holy sites, irretrievably engulfed by the pollution of modernity but somehow still imbued by them with an eternal, placid peacefulness that entails blocking out the reality around them the way we block out bad smells that we pass on the streets of New York. It is this magic of the imagination that still makes Varanasi such an amazing place, as the primevality that they perceive is passed on to travelers by their actions. It is a collective act of will in a way. My proprietors wish me a Happy Diwali, offer me a lentil square and stare out with a look of profound peace as mass explosions rock every inch of the city, sometimes just a few feet away.

Brown Sugar

I’m tired and intent on spoiling myself in Kathmandu, so the first order of business is to upgrade hotels and find out what passes for pizza in these parts. My buddy Tom Przydrozny beamed out instructions to stay at the Dwarika a few days earlier so I’m booking two nights there. Tom doesn’t let me down – Dwarika is magnificent, luxurious and calm, more a museum than a hotel as its buildings and furnishings are composed entirely of centuries-old woodwork chock full of traditional Nepalese carvings. They were saved from destruction by the hotel’s namesake owner, out of various and sundry demolitions of traditional homes that have occurred in recent decades as the city’s urban blight expands outward across the valley. Otherwise all this magnificent art would have been firewood – often he had to compensate construction crews with an equal weight of plywood in order to save them. I could have spent my entire time in Kathmandu just perusing the inlaid Hindu carvings in these window frames, stupas, headboards and chairs and made excellent use of my time; the furnishings in my room alone could make up a wing in the Met.

The pizza, on the other hand, is pedestrian but acceptable.

Nepal is a deeply Hindu country, though a small minority of Buddhists still live here, and a giant plaster statue of Shiva stands sentinel over the whole of the vast Kathmandu valley as you approach it from the east. Appropriate as Shiva is god of the universe’s endless cycles of destruction and regeneration, and he stands guard, trident in hand, over the most profound destruction of the rural valley and original city, and its re-creation as an impossibly populous third world urban center, a thick cloud of smog-belch hovering over roads choked with construction sites, motorcycles and minivans. Vishnu, the other major extant deity, is the Preserver, he who when possible keeps what’s good from going into the trash compactor of Shiva’s interminable churning. So if Kathmandu is in the throes of Shiva as never before, then Dwarika is a little island of Vishnu amid all the indiscriminate bulldozing.

There are still lovely old neighborhoods in Kathmandu with big square courtyards and wooden window work still attached to their original buildings, but they’re few and far between enough that focusing solely on them is like flying to Paris and talking about Disneyland France. Mostly Kathmandu is a modern third-world Asian city so densely packed with people, rickshaws, pack animals and cars that every moment is a sensory assault, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Stop for a moment in the crushing foot traffic and you’re likely to get mowed down. The locals are so inured to it all that they blithely scamper out into heavy traffic in their business suits and saris and elbow their way through the clogged streets, often with small children in tow and with insufficient regard for life and limb, some carrying huge canvas sacks stuffed with cargo slung across their backs as they bolt out onto the highway. Diwali is coming up so everyone is starting to light candles in their windows and set off fireworks on top of the usual chaos.

Punctuating every part of the city are the ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples that everyone visits while stuck in town setting up their Annapurna treks. They defy umbrella description apart from their antiquity. In some monkeys are considered holy and thus allowed to run rampant, in others it is the rat that is revered and you’re unlikely to escape without having at least one scamper across your leg. There is the vast white dome from the fifth century that attracts hundreds of Tibetan exiles and their shaman prayer flags (I first saw them in Russia and still they follow me), the giant medieval pagoda down by Freak Street and the 2000+ year-old statue of Shiva in his brutish, red-faced Bhairawa the Destroyer incarnation, stepping on the head of a man (looks like Buddha?) with a string of skulls slung around his neck and a pair of nasty looking fangs.

I ask one man what the point is of all these innumerable manifestations of a single deity and he says it’s basically all “illusion” but that the god wears a different face in human society based on the different roles it plays. For example, Shiva brought you into being so in a way he’s like your mother, but when the time comes for Shiva to take your life you don’t want to see your mother coming to lop off your head. “It is as if you have committed a murder and your father is the judge” is the best way he can put it.

The most haunting temple is a little one to Kali where a “living manifestation” of the goddess is installed and made available for viewing and worship from a small balcony. This is a little girl that is plucked from some rural village every few years at the age of four, gussied up like Kali and worshipped until she turns eleven, at which point she’s sent back to her village to resume a normal life. The belief is that she actually is the goddess Kali during that time. She looks cute and a bit sad, stuck up there from 9-5, seven days a week like some primeval Barbie doll. Kali is a strange one to be manifested as a small child. Closely associated with Shiva the Destroyer, she’s bloodthirsty and dangerous, considered a personification of Time itself by those with a philosophical bent. In the early nineteenth century they still sacrificed young boys to her in Calcutta and Kerala, and even now they’ll be sacrificing a goat to her in a nearby temple in two days.

The final stop on the holy site circuit are the cremation grounds along a bend in one of the Ganges’ many northern tributaries. The baths are lined with grimy marble steps where sit a smattering of middle-aged man looking out over the multiple smoke pyres with a wistful look in their eyes, and a klatch of dreadlocked, loin-clothed sadhus, itinerant holy men with their faces painted in chalk, like tribal relics. Sadhus are colorful and give good photo, but as far as I can tell this group is merely a bunch of surly deadbeats who got tired of working and raising their families and now hang out in holy places smoking dope and hitting up tourists for small change. There’s apparently no requirement they become enlightened, they do it “for their own pleasure” as one man puts it, and if they happen to stumble across enlightenment along the way so be it, they share the wealth with the occasional faith healing.

Along the opposite side of the river is a grim-looking concrete hospice where the terminally ill come to die by the side of the river. Every once in awhile an ambulance rolls up and disgorges another body in a burlap sack. The male relatives follow it out and the local funeral director (i.e. an “untouchable”) dresses it up with flower garlands and colorful dusts, then it’s raised to the platform, firewood is stacked on top and it starts to burn, with a big cloud of smoke rolling upwind of it for three hours or more. Further off someone is pouring the ashes from a completed cremation into the river, and a bit further up from that three little children swim. Shiva’s work never stops. And sadly there’s no Dwarika Hotel for the collection of spent human souls. The ashes whorl downstream and dissolve into the mud-color of the river like brown sugar into dark coffee.

Descending from the Moon

Emerging from the environs of Everest is like clambering off of the moon and slowly swooping back in a long curve toward the atmosphere over the course of several days, like Chuang Tzu’s big philosophical bird. Our first night is spent in Tingri, a godforsaken little concrete outpost that is as middle of nowhere as it gets. Even in the desert a day outside Timbuktu I felt I hadn’t quite made it all the way because I still could have gone fifteen days further with the Tuareg by camel to see the salt mines hidden in the Sahara’s bowels, but everything beyond the bumfuck little town of Tingri is closer to, not further from, the familiar. The mountains around it are craggy and barren, the hotel is a broken-down dump torn from the set of a 1970s slasher movie, and the one-storey concrete block housing scattered about bespeaks the breakdown of liveability. The one thing to do is wander about and watch the villagers tend goats. At one point a woman goads a cow away from a precipice and leads it back into the yard. The stars are again magnificent at night, but we are warned not to wander the street (singular) because there are packs of wild dogs.

So we’re left to Google Sky Map it from the hotel stoop, and for the first time I see & identify all twelve astrology constellations, including my own Capricorn, which is disappointingly modest. Also seven or eight shooting stars, until I run out of wishes. The food at the hotel is good Chinese home cooking, but something makes me very ill and I spend the next day getting sick all over some of the most beautiful places on Earth. First there is the final mountain pass: 5500 meters high, clotted with rope lines of prayer flags at the top and with an unbeatable vista of a dozen different ice mountains. I spend 20 minutes searching for somewhere to go to the bathroom, but every bit of cover is a holy place of some sort and I’m not that much of a jerk; I’m captured in one bit of tourist video shambling off in the distance like some trailer park denizen’s amateur footage of Bigfoot.

Then we start the border descent – if you were to bike this route you would spend at least two days going downhill. Interspersed at regular intervals are stone medieval ruins of forts overrun in distant centuries by the Nepalese or English. After a couple of hours there are bushes that can spare enough energy to bother changing colors in autumn. Then there are trees, real trees! I’d forgotten them so thoroughly I didn’t know how much I missed them. And more and more trees, the mountains are still big but are covered with them now, great operatic cliffs draped with vines and wildflowers, and with waterfalls spilling over them at regular intervals, like the lush mountains of Sichuan. We’ve arrived at Paradise.

The Chinese government is busy improving the roads, which are perched perilously over the precipice of a massive canyon and were previously prone to deadly landslides. Unfortunately, this means they’ve closed off our little one-lane road at one point for the next six hours, until dusk. So we get out with our backpacks and hike through the remote, mountainous construction site (though I still feel like crap) with its blue tarp tents and its little canvas canteen, its waterfall-powered cement machine and its dozens of Nepalese laborers hacking the rocks apart above us, chopping up the road and carrying it off, and setting concrete blocks with steel supports to be laid later in the day, hardhat Chinese engineers talking through some technical quandary here in the middle of nowhere, and a couple of waterfalls thrumming above us and right onto the old road. Then further across the pristine canyon and down into the snaking, one-lane border town of Zhangmu, which follows the looping road for well over a kilometer and continues across the border on the Nepalese side with another name.

Zhangmu is a singular place, hugging the road along the side of a mountain like a ghetto Positano, with little more than storefront shops, ratty tourist hotels and the occasional brothel. It’s a bit Wild West, with Chinese, Tibetans and Nepalese rubbing shoulders along the many bends in the narrow road as it repeatedly doubles back & descends. The water here is from little rivers that flow down the side of the mountain, and it’s pretty unhygienic; water from one is used to power a small tsampa mill at one point, further down you see the same stream being peed in from a hut, someone’s washing clothes in it at the next bend and further below you see someone drinking from it. Our hotel is a notch better than Tingri, but that’s a low bar to set; one restaurant’s food is edible but the whole place reeks of yak grease and so do I afterward, even after showering. So why do I love Zhangmu so much? In a word, it is awesome.

Next morning the border opens and we’re off across the Friendship Bridge to Nepal. The Chinese border post is busy with Nepalese day-laborers going the opposite way, and though they do search our luggage they’re extremely polite. My temporary travel partner Rany Ng’s Tibet permit apparently expired the day before and so I prepare to call her parents and inform them she’s in prison, then call Google and tell them I’m happy to take her job and her equity, but thankfully the Chinese let her go and we’re free to continue. Our Tibetan guide, who so annoyed me throughout the journey, waves us a doleful goodbye as we cross into another country and I’m suddenly struck by how limiting his little forays from Lhasa to the border must be, and get some insight into why he seems so bored by it all. He blathered on in places of worship, incessantly hit on and at one point proposed marriage to Rany and I’m pretty sure spent every night of our journey in one brothel or another like a little Johnny Appleseed of VD, but he did take me out for a really good pub crawl in Shigatse, and for that I thank him, dumbass though he may be. And in Tibet you’re required to have a guide, so he did make this leg of the trip possible.

Paradise continues on the Nepal side but the vibe is different. The people look markedly different ethnically for one, and there are dozens of huge, colorful trucks parked along the road that you have to navigate around with your luggage. There is more chaos and yet somehow less stress, like you can breathe a bit more easily. Everybody’s chilled out and hanging by the side of the road all the way to Kathmandu. We acquire a Nepalese driver and start journeying south through an especially lush stretch of the Himalayas for an hour before all traffic stops. So we get out and wander past fifty or so trucks and see a bus that went off the road the night before, teetering on two wheels (one front and one back) with its ass up in the air blocking traffic and its front-end pointing perilously straight down into what can truly be called an abyss. You think of all those people you see riding on the top of every bus in Nepal and wonder if they all made it off alive or not. And look, there’s a suspension bridge that advertises bungee jumping just 100 meters further! We bless our luck – like a sign from God! – run over and get ready to bungee jump for the first time in our lives, but the operation has been closed because there are too many people milling about, and my faith in divine interventions that involve catastrophic bus accidents is shaken to its core.

As we wait for our car to carefully slide its way along one side of the cliff past the accident – which involves slowly driving UNDER part of the bus without hitting it and knocking it into the canyon – we meet an innocuous little Brahmin police officer who asks us for a ride home as he’s been at the site of the accident all night. A very sweet, mild guy, seems respected by his community, harmless really. You have a hard time imagining him swatting a mosquito much less forcibly taking down a perp. He’s a fine person but I start getting alarmed when he tells me he’s been selected for UN peacekeeping work to train the police force in Haiti and potentially the Sudan. He’s off to Haiti in a few weeks! Because, he says, they need training and Nepal wants to help.

Ladies and gentleman, from a UN system veteran, here we have a case study for why UN missions rarely work as well as they should. This little dude may be just fine in his home environment, but having experienced the Haitian police force in action I can authoritatively confirm that he’s dead meat the minute he hits Port-au-Prince. You can only laugh. He asks if they speak English there and I watch him grow bewildered and his eyes glass over in panic as I inform him they speak a sort of combo dialect of French and West African languages. The sad part is he’ll probably be over there talking softly and overly politely in his OK-but-not-exactly-stellar English to a translator who will “sort of” understand him and relay the general sense of his lecture to a bunch of quasi-reformed Haitian cops crammed into undersized school desks in a sweltering, windowless classroom, listening to him yammer all day about being more polite. He seems a bit worse for wear as a small glimmer of reality sets in, but he has a “gentle but stiff upper lip” vibe going and gives us a little goodbye wave without commenting further. I do hope he’s OK, he’s a remarkably sweet fellow, and may be in my beloved but troubled Haiti right now.

Across the Himalayas

Tibet’s been part of the People’s Republic of China for over fifty years, but it still feels like an armed occupation in Lhasa. There are military checkpoints at every intersection, patrols navigating the maze of alleys in between, and a phalanx of foot soldiers always marching the main square outside Lhasa’s monastery. Every few hours a patrol of three tanks trudges slowly through the streets with soldiers in black SWAT outfits keeping a wary eye out from the gun turrets. The sheer amount of firepower is hard to understand given the current peacefulness; apparently it’s a response to a series of large-scale protests and riots last year.

The soldiers look tense as they stand on patrol, you can smell how unappreciated their presence is, and they can smell it too. There’s a palpable and fierce unit loyalty that you can see in the terse nods they pass amongst each other; these guys have each other’s backs, someone to trust in this place, a family of sorts. And I can’t help thinking of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, how hated they must be there and how fiercely they must cling to each other in that distant place, the same tense look in their eyes. To me and other passing civilians these kids are polite when possible, but you don’t want to cross them. Accidentally take the wrong snapshot, for example, and you can have your passport revoked and your ass sent summarily back to wherever you came from.

Tibetans are a world away from the Han Chinese of the coast. They look more like Mongolians or Native Americans, with long, ornate hair braids, weather-beaten faces and peasant dress torn from some distant century. The culture is similar to Mongolia’s, reflecting longstanding cultural ties. It was the Tibetans and their llama form of Buddhism that was exported to Mongolia, and before that they shared a common shamanic religious system, which is called Bon here. There are the same prayer flags and prayer wheels for the auto-enlightenment of the illiterate (a lot of religious practice here is rote), Buddhist gift-wrapping to an animist system of thought. The similarities are so striking you get the sense of a people who once roamed over all of Central and Northeast Asia in prehistory and were pushed back to the most mountainous and least accessible parts of Asia over several millennia.

Overriding first impressions of Lhasa – aside from the military presence – are the flood of devout pilgrims from all rural points of Tibet making their way every day to the downtown monastery in their traditional woollen garments and their handheld little prayer wheels, and the warren of crook-backed little streets that pass all manner of little storefronts – the ones I remember most are the open-air dental shops with examples of metal fillings displayed on signboards out front – and markets selling great big chunks of yak butter and meat, and fresh vegetables. In front of every house is a fold-out, low-tech solar panel that heats the tea kettle in the morning. The streets are packed with cavernous sweet-tea shops where patrons sit together on long wooden benches and loudly throw down cards, play music on ancient string instruments or simply gossip. Also noodle shops with yak soup, snooker tables, taverns with house guitars that anyone can play, corner restaurants with spiced chicken wings and yak “sizzlers”, and one good espresso shop that I track down by smell on my first day.

You can see why popular culture has glommed onto Tibet as a center of otherworldly mystical experience, and why so many visitors come here expecting to encounter some manner of larger-than-life “enlightenment”. There are few things more intoxicating than watching hundreds of primeval peasants prostrating themselves on prayer mats before an ancient building, amid chanting and candles burning yak butter, with mushroom clouds of incense wafting everywhere and the intermittent tolling of the temple bells. The monastery temple has just re-opened after an eight-day closure during the 60th anniversary to prevent any outbreak of protest, and a long line snakes through the main square thronging with petitioners seeking favors from various manifestations of the Buddha: the demonic Protector who holds the entire wheel of life in his arms, the multi-headed, multi-armed Future Buddha who can shift the course of events through the distance of time, and dozens more, each with their own little shrine. It’s a cosmogony that’s complex enough to make it not worth learning in detail, and each manifestation is showered with large amounts of small-denomination Chinese currency by poverty-stricken local petitioners as they pass through.

Late afternoon you see the shorn, red-robed monks tallying the day’s take from their changing area in the center of the temple, which given the extreme poverty makes the whole thing seem more like an ancient, low-tech televangelist operation. Those little amounts of money showered over every section of the temple add up; all you have to do is wander several blocks to witness the Potala Palace at night to see that – the Dalai Llama’s winter home, a truly massive structure set high on a precipice in the center of town, probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen, excepting maybe Lalibela in northern Ethiopia. How do you describe something like that? Or fathom the wealth it took to build at a time when Tibet was composed entirely of illiterate herders and peasants scraping barley out of the moonscape? The llamas were living well before Communist China took over; each of their tombs in the palace are crammed with tons of solid gold and thousands of jewels. And though the current Dalai Llama seems like an excellent person, the old order looks ugly in its way as the current one.

The architecture and art at these religious sites is amazing. Our government-required guide, though, is a nightmare, blathering on loudly in places of worship, conveying little of interest but doing his best to destroy the ambience, trying to rush us from spot to spot without experiencing anything other than the nails-on-chalkboard grate of his monotonous cawing. This despite the fact that he spent several years studying to be a monk. I basically have to ditch him at every stop.

Lhasa is 3,500 meters altitude, we’re headed 5,400 meters high and beyond, driving across multiple mountain passes and through the heart of the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp, over the Nepali border and thence Kathmandu. The land on the Chinese side of the border is bleakly beautiful. As the Indian subcontinent bores into Asia these peaks have been muscled up from the bottom of the earth into the farthest, thinnest tip of the planet’s atmosphere. You can see deep scars on the sides of these monstrous rocks from where they’ve been forced up into the light of day, and ridgebacks of rock where the wind has wiped off whatever small margin of topsoil originally covered them.

Some mountains don’t seem to belong next to one another. Some have thick deposits of mud, others are sandy and enigmatic as pyramids. At times there are long red ridges out of the American Southwest that lay out the earth’s timeline in red-and-orange strata, and then there are these alien, jet-black behemoths that have had all the history smashed and melted out of them in the earth’s furnace, covered with little crystallized burrs like mineralized porcupine quills. All of them spat out at random from deep inside somewhere, and rising four more inches every year. But even at the highest points there are locals selling deep sea fossils from before the time of the dinosaurs, from when these highest rocks on Earth were embedded at the bottom of an ocean.

The place is majestic but it really doesn’t look meant for human habitation. Yet there are people everywhere in the narrow valleys. The tree line is far behind us, and the only plants that scrape out an existence here are nasty, hard-scrabble little minimalist weeds that cling fiercely to the side of the rock and crabbily say “fuck you, I’m gonna live.” But appear to take little pleasure in it.

The people live in pretty little traditional Tibetan villages but scrape out a tough existence sowing barley with yaks and threshing it by hand with sickles. They drive by packed onto the backs of tractors, or on bicycles carrying massive bales of hay. At one point we stop at a little millinery where they use the river as power for a primitive mill that grinds the barley into a traditional wheat called tsampa. The locals offer us “barley beer”, which is strong as hell and probably not very hygienic, as the man of the house writhes in pain from some growth in his belly for which there is scant available modern medical attention. At other stops locals clamber over to us in search of a bit of food, and we accommodate them as best as we can; god knows how they make it through the winters. The temples are pretty much done away with and instead you have these piles of stone arranged in the shape of a stupa so that you can see the evolution from Bon to high Mahayana architecture.

There is a lot of larger-than-life beauty out here; there are a couple of shockingly beautiful blue lakes that wend between the mountains and follow the trail of our road for several kilometres, and mostly dried out river beds with trickles of half-frozen water trilling through them.

All of this is a prelude to the brutal transcendence of staring up at Everest from base camp. The barren moonscape of so much of the range was unexpected because I anticipated those endless snowy Himalayan peaks that really only get going along the border with Nepal, though you see a spectacular one here and there along the road south. Getting to Everest is a slap in the face. My god, what a beast. After ascending the steep curving road to the first tent encampment, taking a bus and then hiking up to the actual base camp you’re in some of the most barren territory on earth, gasping a bit for some of the scarce oxygen and staring at a glacier-crusted monster that is the closest thing to a god that you'll ever see in this life. It’s head is an impossibly large piece of abstract Egyptian statuary, placed too far on the left shoulder. From it’s right arm issues a series of jagged rock peaks that seem themselves impossible to climb, on the left is a long ice cliff in a semi-circle that looks sharp as a knife’s edge along the top, with an amphitheatre of snow beneath the semi-circle that would be an apt setting for judgement day. The terrible wind is shearing off a thundercloud of snow from the peak as we gawp up at it.

If there’s anything remotely like a spiritual experience to be had in Tibet, it’s here, though it’s in no way comforting standing in the face of this inhuman force and its train of lesser ice-capped mountains trailing off in the distance, visibly shrugging us off as if we were gnats.

"for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."

-- Rilke

Autumn Moon Festival

I’m sitting on the roof of a boat staring out at the surreal conical spires that fan out for miles along the Li River, a pleasantly bizarre Dr Seuss-scape where the earth has been carved into tall shapes that defy common sense, mountains topped with pointy dunce caps, drooping cliffs with tufts of grass, triple-humped camels covered in moss, squat bales of hay with a bite taken out of them, wobbly ziggurats ready to heave over, hills with little pillbox hats, layer on layer and really high, the furthest ones visible through mist. Really strange.

If you ever wondered where those surreal Chinese landscape paintings come from, this is it; underwater for hundreds of millions of years, the porous karst has been grooved into shapes that don’t seem to belong on this earth. Nothing can mar their strange beauty, not the armada of double-decker tourist boats that chugs downstream every day, not the city of Guilin, a big bustling concrete town marooned along a bend in the Li, full of narrow alleyways and rickshaws and with twelve different bridges leading out to the mainland on all sides.

The Chinese imagine various animals and people in the shape of the hills, some of them easily recognizable, some not. The most obvious is at the edge of town, a riverfront gap in the rock forming the shape of an elephant with its trunk draining water from the Li; legend says it carried a god through the sky until alighting in Guilin and being stunned by the beauty and wanting to stay. In punishment the god turned it to stone and left it here for the locals to scramble over.

There are tea plantations in the hills and rice fields in the plains. The town is urban but charming, with a long crooked pedestrian walkway in the center that holds old fashioned tea shops for tastings, little sweet shops and plenty of restaurants, from grimy little wok shops to snazzy indoor hot pots. I almost wander into one that serves dog, but am stopped by a local named Ho who steers me somewhere better for a very spicy beef dish. He’s a disarmingly pleasant guy who teaches calligraphy at a famous art school here, and is fairly well known in his own right, having won multiple gold medals for his work at national competitions in Beijing. A great guy: engaging, unpretentious, warm. He takes me through the town at night to see the bridges lit up and the fishermen and their cormorants in the waterfront parks, the kitschy local restaurant with snakes and rats in cages (we don’t eat there) and the best local art galleries.

At one point he asks about my “wife” and so I have to go into the whole widower routine, which is tiresome, but he shares with me as well – his wife was once pregnant but they found serious brain problems and were forced to abort the fetus. She hasn’t been pregnant since and is very sad about it. Then she calls his cell as if she knows he’s talking about her, and when she hears he’s met an American she offers us two tickets to some special acrobatics and magic show they’re putting on in honor of the festival of the autumn moon, which starts tonight. The festival involves passing out little cakes with red bean paste in the center and launching hundreds of paper lanterns into the night sky, powered by a mere candle but cascading one after another over our heads like a little spirit world spit out by the Li.

The crowd for the show is strictly local, lots of families and little kids. We get there halfway through, just in time for an appearance by the monkey king and something called “the pig fairy”, who pull audience members onstage and perform magic tricks with them as dupes. Then we detour back to the art gallery where some of his work is for sale, and though he’s not hawking anything I dig out a piece of his calligraphy that’s especially impressive and purchase it. It’s a famous ancient poem by the great Li Po about another Chinese river, the Yangtze; the selection of the text is a very personal decision by the calligrapher. It goes something like this:

Brother, there is no easy path through this life.
You navigate this life through the endless jagged rapids and rocks
of the Yangtze in a bamboo raft.
That’s the way it is.
The hero is the one who doesn’t just sit on some sandbar watching his cargo rot.
Jaw set, he maneuvers the malicious current,
cognizant of dangers, empty of fear,
though the water’s tentacles grab
from all directions to pull him under.
And when the snow of the highlands settles in his hair
and he sees that awesome river finally open
into the sea,
he knows that his journey is done,
finally done.

We part afterwards and I head to my hotel. I have a “corner office” room on a high floor and can see several of the bridges lit red for the festival, a tall pagoda squat in the middle of the water, and the steady stream of paper lanterns unfurling over the river and getting sucked up by the night sky. The Chinese government outlaws them because of the fire risk, and you can see why; every once in awhile one of them craps out and goes toppling into the river. The potential for forest fire in this dry terrain is obvious. But everyone ignores the law and lets them fly. Impossible little puffs of paper telling the laws of physics to fuck off for a minute, like fireflies signalling in the vacuum of night.

A Walk on the Wild Wall

In fifteenth century China during the Ming Dynasty, ordinary citizens were barred from viewing the procession of the emperor through the streets of Beijing from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, where he made animal sacrifices to the gods that were critical to the success of the following harvest. It was ordered they barricade their windows and remain home in silence lest they catch a glimpse of that most holy of rites, thereby upsetting the balance between heaven and earth.

It should probably then come as no surprise that the ordinary people of China are barred from attending or viewing the massive spectacle of the 60th anniversary parade that the Communist Party is throwing for itself today, for this ruling class is as exclusive in its way as the emperors of old. The entire downtown area is cordoned off by thousands of armed military, and tens of thousands of volunteers wearing red armbands, and those who live in the area aren’t allowed to leave their homes. Annoying.

The Chinese government says they’re responding to the threat of terrorism from Falun Gong and others, and there have indeed been two FG knife attacks in the capital over the last few days. The ordinary man on the street here expresses concern for “China’s 9/11” and doesn’t seem especially put out by the security measures. It’s all very Waiting for the Barbarians, and one wonders if FG didn’t exist whether they would have to create it, but this is probably unfair. Falun Gong is a bizarre and genuinely dangerous sect, run I am told by a friend in the State Dept by a blind man who lives in Queens of all places and claims God speaks to him through his television set. From all of us who live in Queens, my apologies to the Chinese people.

At least we have the benefit of watching the parade on TV, and it’s hard to miss the tight contingents of fighter jets swinging low through the city. On the tube you see phalanx after phalanx of high-tech military vehicles, tanks and radar trucks, anti-aircraft and nuclear missiles, bombers and helicopters, every piece of heavy equipment you can imagine trundling past Tiananmen Square and its iconic portrait of Mao, placidly smiling at the pomp. All this is followed by a series of floats celebrating the stunning recent advances in Chinese technology, medicine, agriculture, industry, space research, science and so forth – and let’s face it, China and the ruling party deserve to be proud of their accomplishments; it’s possible the rapid-fire advance of Chinese civilization over the past couple of decades – legacy of the great, visionary pragmatist Deng Xiaoping – will go down in history as the one important event of our time.

In the evening there is an interminable song and dance extravaganza on the imperial square with all of the dozens of ethnic groups that comprise China singing what are described as “folk songs” in their native tongues lauding things like “another five percent increase in the crop yield”, punctuated by massive firework displays. I get a few cheap laughs from this retro-social realist cheese, but it’s no more cheesy than your average televised Fourth of July celebration, just tuned to a different key and on a more spectacular scale. Witnessing even a bit of it from the periphery is still cool, and a highlight of my journey.

By far the most impressive thing is the weather. When I arrive in Beijing and make my way past the electronic fever detectors positioned to block the spread of swine flu (pretty intimidating), my first thought is “Oh My God. People Breathe This Stuff?!?!?” A thick layer of sickly dark yellow smog blots out anything more than a block or two away from you, and it seems laughable to read the pronouncements from the government that unspecified “eco-friendly chemical agents” will be released in the air above the capital that night to disperse all clouds and prevent rain during the festivities. Ha ha yeah whatever. An old fashioned rain dance. Good luck with that.

But sure enough the next morning the smog is GONE, as if it never existed, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky for the next four days.

Holy crap! The Chinese Communist Party controls the weather!

I’ve taken a break from the backpacking hostels to stay in a five-star hotel, the Shangri-la on the west side of town. It’s guests are a mix of well-fed, high-level apparatchiks from the provinces decked out in red sashes and drinking high-end cocktails, and professional tennis players competing in the China Open at the new Olympic Tennis Center. During my stay I see & share elevators with Novak Djokovic, Dinara Safina, James Blake, Caroline Wozniaki, “Dr Ivo” Karlovic, Elena Dementieva, Sveta Kuznetsova, Jelena Jankovic and a host of unranked qualifiers hoping to make it into the tournament. I love tennis, so this is awesome, and I end up seeing Serena Williams, Safina & Robby Ginepri play when the first round commences.

The next day of this 8-day celebration is for the ordinary people. We’re allowed into Tiananmen to view all the mega-floats up close, which is quite cool. The imperial pomp of the central square and the gargantu-scale Forbidden City is formidable and something I’m stunned and grateful to see, but the crowds for the holiday are massive and the scale of Beijing at this point starts leaving me cold, with its limitless skyscraper canyons and autocratic signs posted at regular intervals advising citizens to “work hard, be thrifty, avoid bad habits, respect the military and love civilians”. All commendable sentiments, but it seems downright odd. I’m hungry for a Whopper-size dose of democratic chaos, despite all the disabling nonsense it engenders, a little “grab a six-pack with a fake ID and hang out all night by the levee” kind of a feeling, and while the Chinese people are awesome – some of the nicest and smartest I’ve met in the world – I’m having a hard time penetrating the veneer of this great city and tasting much of anything.

That’s when I pay attention to the bicycles. I bike through the streets of New York every day, and it always helps me make sense of life at home. Why not the streets of Beijing? And so I scrabble through the side streets looking for a bike shop, find one not too far south of Tiananmen and leave a large deposit for a crappy rental one-speeder with faulty brakes, never to return (the deposit was worth more than the bike).

Like magic, big monolithic Beijing melts away and the city becomes lovable. First off Beijing is a great bike city, with dedicated lanes on every major street, even some of the highways – it’s far safer than New York. Second, you’re navigating around fellow bikers, mopeders, motorized wheelbarrowers, electronic wheelchairs, delivery bikes larded down with massive packages of goods or sky-high piles of recyclables, and a host of weird contraptions that locals have jury-rigged together; the one I remember most clearly is a lawnmower engine & handle attached to two truck wheels.

The best part of biking in Beijing is veering off into a hudong, the narrow, interconnected alleyways of Old Beijing – and discovering the honeycomb of old-school life that snakes through the city like an enormous termite infestation and give Beijing real character. You can twist through them for hours without getting bored, past open-air vegetable markets and little outdoor bars, single-floor dwellings that look about to flop over, all of them hosting a Chinese flag, one-table kitchens serving hot pot and barbecue, barber shops, cookware storefronts, concrete 1-yuan bathrooms, clothing shops with tatty western mannequins, laundry hanging everywhere and a thousand squalid wonders waiting to be uncovered. You can go down them for days without running out of cool things to see. So life still grows wild on the vine behind the solid wall of megaliths that front the major freeways. May the hudongs live forever.

On day three in Beijing I make the obligatory trek north to see the Great Wall, a spectacle if there ever was one. I go to one of the less visited sections that’s renovated for tourists, but again it’s all a bit manicured and Disneyland for my taste until I hike 2km, cross two consecutive “do not pass” dividers and discover an apparently endless stretch of “wild wall” that hasn’t been touched since the Ming Dynasty. The paving stones have cracked over centuries of winters, trees and grasses have sprung up all around, the guard towers are crumbling and sometimes look as if they’ve been blown up in an aerial bombardment.

I keep going kilometer after kilometer along the wild wall, can’t stop myself despite knowing I have to go back as far as I came. By far the best hike ever, just incredible. I’m posting pictures to Facebook soon so everyone can see for themselves. At some points it’s a bit dangerous as the only thing left clear of trees are the gate stones along the edge, and some are a bit loose & it’s a good 40-50 meters down if you fall. But hey I’m having a good time and you only live once. Then I think about it more and realize what a public laughingstock I would be back home:

“Hey what happened to Sean? I heard he died.”

“Yeah. He fell off the Great Wall of China.”

“Ba ha ha! How ridiculous.”

So I move off the edge and trundle over the trees in the center.

Another great example of wild Beijing: 798 Art District. This place is what Williamsburg wished it was back when it bothered to pretend being a serious avant garde art zone. It’s centered around a massive, Terry Gilliamesque factory from the 1950s bristling with comically huge insulated piping and tubes, steam-spitting spigots and smoke stacks tattooed with slogans from the Cultural Revolution (kept there on purpose by the artists who run the place). It’s now been refurbished and is used as a set of display spaces. The rest of the zone really looks nothing like Beijing, with spiffy little one-storey art supply shops, outdoor cafes and galleries hosting world-class exhibitions of big-name contemporary Chinese artists. It was a good chance to see what China is doing these days – a lot of figurative stuff, mostly painting, geared for the international art market. But there were plenty of sculptures outside, including a gigantic bird cage that passersby were invited to sit down in and become part of the art while they slurped a cherry ice. At night there are art book carts along the side streets and outdoor movies like you see on New York summer nights. The people wandering the streets here look cool but are not “beautiful people” per se; the vibe is more Fort Greene than Fashion Week.

There was a subversive note to some of the work, especially the outdoor graffiti, always masked in the vocabulary of the ruling party that it sought to subvert. One poster said “Life is Beautiful, Love More So, Freedom is Worth Losing Both”, followed by a quote from Mao preaching patience in the service of the cause. Another had a mischievous, smiling cartoon match and a bunch of iconic portraits of Che Guevara, quoting Che: “It only takes a spark to light the blaze!” Hard to take this too seriously as everyone looked pretty fat and content, it reminded me more of the empty acting-out of anti-Bush polemics that you’d see in artsy neighborhoods back home; the vibe I got was more of people whose temperament balks like mine at all the random autocratic nonsense, and wants to tweak someone’s nose. But the strategy of using ruling party sloganry against itself is interesting and dangerous in action; they could all be shut down at any moment, and they still skirt the edge. Another great example is a social realist poster of angry proletarians taking up arms above a giant Wal-Mart logo, and there were lots of ironic renditions of the big red buttons everyone was wearing for the anniversary.

Last night in Beijing I head out with a couple of open qualifiers who didn’t qualify to a big lake in the northwest of town by the Summer Palace, for some Peking duck and a few beers to drown their sorrows in. We circle the lake, stop at a few taverns and again see what a great, prosperous city this is. Boat rentals and lakefront bars with alternating guitar balladeers and karaoke machines, families and young couples out for a tree-lined evening stroll, little kids trying to skateboard and falling on their asses, old folks singing the old songs with the old instruments. Everyone looks happy; there’s a sense of opportunity that most never thought they would see, I think, and everyone I met without exception seems more than willing to put up their government’s sometimes overbearing presence to keep the good times rolling.

We did find an underground bar playing rock songs with lots of people from my generation, the Tiananmen Square massacre generation. They played some tunes in English (and there are English signs everywhere, and not just in Beijing, and 80% of the shirts here have English on them) and at least one ironically delivered rendition of a hymn of the Cultural Revolution that everyone smirked at and bobbed their heads to. The massacre seems largely forgotten in Beijing, at least on the surface. And I would expect zero near-term change in the low level of political freedom in China. Will the Chinese Communist Party ever have to choose between the open experimental pragmatism of Deng that has led to all this good fortune, and the blunt, dogmatic hubris of Mao, which mostly pisses people off? No matter how many health and safety secretaries you summarily execute for poisoning the baby formula, the lack of accountability will cause damage at some point. But twenty years later it seems like those kids really did die for nothing.