Originally the diary of 4 months spent in Antarctica working as a documentary film sound recordist, this blog has evolved into an online repository for the thoughts, travels and trivia of the writer Richard Fleming. For McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and polar exploration, see August through December of '06. Currently you are likely to find in these pages chronicles of my actual and literary meanderings, as well as notes on my many other passions. Also, did I mention I wrote a book?
The entryway to my bathroom, where renovations are ungoing, needs, among other finishing renovatory touches, a door. To ensure the privacy in that most private of rooms, I've been making the rounds of the Brooklyn salvage yards and upcyclers, looking for just the perfect portal.
Underneath the Smith and 9th Street "F" train station, itself eternally closed for renovations, lurks a vendor of previously owned clawfoot tubs, iron railings, doors, mouldings, and commemorative framed photographs of President Obama.
What a difference four years makes. Here I found poor Barack, available for a very negotiable, unfixed price, nestled right up against the antique mirror frames and unwanted fireplace mantles of brownstone Brooklyn. How long did it take the owner of this jubilant print to become disillusioned? Will Obama ever rise again, to be hung on the wall of some other proud American? I certainly hope so, the alternative being too dire to contemplate, but I also understand the feelings of dispossession and disappointment that brought this poor commemorative artwork to this low place. I'm afraid I was not buying it.
On inauguration day in the deep south the excitement in the capital arrived over the car stereo as a crackly, intermittent report of distant goings-on. Thankfully, antarcticiana's DC correspondent Mr. Johnny Stuart was on the mall to capture the scene. Obama may not yet have saved the American people from themselves, but nobody will ever diminish that first day of hope and celebration.
"Yes, we can" morphed into "Yes, we did," right before our eyes.
This guy was out of a job almost as fast as Gee-Dubya. Ending the tortures and indefinite detentions of Gitmo was to be one of Obama's first proclamations.
Does this shuka make me look fat? The Kenyan posse, like everyone else, refused to let the sub-freezing temperatures throw a chill over the proceedings.
Yesterday, in the water, underway just off the tip of a Wall Street engulfed in the flames of greed, I spied this Hunter 41, sporting a custom-made Kevlar McCain/Palin promotional sail that must have cost upwards of $40,000, and was presumably a rush order, once McCain's thoughtful and inspiring choice of a vice-president had been announced. What obliviousness to the world's realities must it take to commission, pay for, and then proudly raise this repugnant, ostentatious frivolity of a mainsail? The only good thing we can say about this is that the extraordinary arrogance of it is guaranteed to repulse, driving yet more voters into the Obama camp. I'm sensing an Obama landslide, after which this sail will be nothing more than an embarrassing, amusing historical curio, available on eBay.
I much prefer this Red Hook waterfront expression of political support, which cost nothing more than some sweat equity and a couple of cans of paint, and is visible to all the traffic in New York harbor.
NSFW and not for the easily offended. Those wallowing in the pitiful self-righteousness of political correctitude need not click through. Courtesy ATLAS.
Flew out to Oregon to help Laura drive her trusty pickup back east; I've never driven all the way across the country in one go before. The trip started auspiciously, as we headed out of Portland late in the afternoon on the day of Obama's record-breaking political rally. Yesterday's newspapers showed a sea of bodies crushed together, eagerly listening to what he has to say. He is looking more and more like a lock for the nomination; it seems like only a matter of days, or even perhaps hours, before Hil throws in the towel. Already she must be alienating more voters, former supporters and superdelegates than she could possibly be attracting, and so we hope that for her own sake she moves quickly, in the painful process of decisively losing, from denial to acceptance.
Camp One, At Beacon Rock, in the Cascades, in the spectacular Columbia River valley, a spot Lewis and Clark passed as they were nearing the end of their journey. Although they could not yet see the Pacific Ocean, the sight of the seagulls patrolling the upstream reaches of the mighty river must have warmed their hearts.
Wild Bleeding Heart, a typical understory wildflower of the Cascadian Douglas Fir forest.
Round Lake rorschach, Idaho Panhandle, dawn. The eerie calls of breeding Red-necked grebes gabbling in the marshy verges of the lake accompanied our dinner of couscous and grilled asparagus. The site of Camp Two.
Camp Two. But what's missing from this photo? You noticed? How lovely, you may be be thinking, it was such a wonderful, starlit night, and the temperature so mild, that they dispensed with the claustrophobia of the tent altogether, sacking out al fresco. How mistaken you are! While unpacking the truck beside mosquito-infested Round Lake I discovered that one of us had left the bundled-up tent on the picnic table at Camp One, four hundred miles back down the road. I'm far too gallant to tell you who was responsible for this calamity, but she later claimed to have been distracted from packing by some wildflowers that needed urgent collecting. Something similar happened to me once before, in Africa, but that time, there was no one else to blame.
Camp Two, detail. Harmonian mosquito avoidance strategy. Note the crisp, brand-new blue polytarp we purchased only fifty miles back down the road at the Coeur D'Alene Walmart, "to protect the bottom of the tent."
Skunk cabbage. One hoped that the upside of setting up camp next to a pungent, stinky patch of this gigantic swamp-tobacco would be diminished mosquito activity. Sadly not.
Thank goodness it didn't rain, although that might have kept the bugs down. Apparently Mrs. Clinton still hasn't capitulated.
One night, almost exactly seventeen years ago, if I calculate correctly, I was deejaying at a global freakout of a one-nighter Mark Kamins had going for a while, where he fused Turkish belly-dancing tunes with Amazonian riverboat songs and house beats and who knows what else. In came my late friend Fran Duffy, with this gangly British dude I hadn't met before, Jason Mayall. Duffy and Mayall were fresh off the plane from Cartagena, Colombia, and the Caribbean Music Festival, organized by my buddy Paco. For all I know, he was with them, but I'm fairly certain we hadn't even met yet. Duffy had been filming the festival, and Jason had been buying records, crate-digging in a warren of dusty roll-front shops in the chaos of Cartagena's sprawling outdoor market. Duffy was calling him "the cumbia kid." I was like, "WTF is cumbia?" And Duffy goes, "Nixon, dude, you gotta let him get on the set so you can hear these beats." (They used to call me Nixon, back in the day.)
So Mayall dives into his paper bag of crusty treasures and starts pulling out singles and weird one-off pressings on unheard-of Colombian record labels, slapping them on the turntables and wiping them free of the last gritty sand of the Caribbean's southernmost shores, with my Discwasher. He starts playing shiznit I never heard before: gaitas, named for the bizarre, almost Persian-snake-charmer-sounding cactus-wood flute they feature, and porros, almost maniacally uptempo tunes awash in the sound of a massive metal grater, like the güira of Dominican merengue. The basic rhythm, the cumbia, I recognized from a catchy Nescafé commercial that ran for months in movie theaters when I lived in Paris in the mid-Eighties, but Mayall had countless backwoods versions of this beat, crunchy, raw tunes that, when you heard them, conjured up an image of a bunch of musicians ill-at-ease in the studio, gathered together from working out in the fields somewhere to come stand in front of a microphone, probably barefoot. Thus began my love affair with the cumbia.
The author, filling in for Steve Blush at the legendary Lite Lounge at Carmelita's, circa 1988. Forensic analysis reveals that I'm rocking an original 12" of "Good Times," by Chic. (Not a cumbia). If you look very closely (click image to enlarge) you'll note that I am wearing a 'dookie rope chain,' albeit a teensy one. Photographer unknown, possibly Alison Mayer, aka Ali177, or AK718.
In the intervening generation, (yes, I'm old enough now that I can actually speak in all seriousness of an 'intervening generation') the cumbia, always a music of the lower classes, the impoverished and the marginalized, has spread far afield from its Colombian roots. The infectious rhythm first seems to have taken Mexico by storm, where it became fundamental to the booming Mexi-sound-system music known as Sonidero, easily heard by anyone taking a stroll down Fifth Avenue (in Sunset Park, Brooklyn), where it booms out of cars and shops alike. Peru developed its own tradition.
Only recently, however, has cumbia crossed over from the Sunset Park world of its humble but faithful immigrant clientele into the realm of hipsterdom. I'm going out a limb here, since I scarcely go out to nightclubs any more, but at least to judge by the corner of the world-wide-web sandbox I've found myself playing in lately, cumbia has suddenly become the hottest thing on the international club scene. Deejays from San Franciso are bringing back Argentine dub-plates to rock dancefloors in the Bay Area, and the hottest one-nighter in the world right now is a weekly electro-cumbia jam in Buenos Aires, Zizek, named after the uber-hip Slovenian cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, who happens to be married to an Argentine supermodel-turned-philosopher. (It doesn't seem to be there today, but a recent google search for Zizek yielded a sponsored link to Cabinet Magazine.) At Zizek, the one-nighter, cumbias are slowed down, remixed, mashed up with hit rap records, tortured with dub effects, fused with reggaeton, and otherwise integrated into the deejay repertory.
This being the internet, however, you don't have to imagine what this music sounds like from my tortured descriptions. A brilliant example of the mash-up genre is "El Bombon en el Club," featuring Mr. Fiddy Cent himself being given the maximum cumbia treatment. Listen online, or download. If that doesn't give you enough to go on, download one-time Mark Kamins girlfriend and Danceteria coatcheck girl Madonna singing about music bringing together the rebels and the bourgeoisie over accordion rhythms laid down by the supreme maestro, godfather of the cumbia, the late Andres Landero, from San Jacinto pueblo in Colombia's coastal littoral, here. (Links Dead.) I've met them both, but you'd be more likely to find Landero sitting next to you at my fantasy dinner party. The bottom line in this post-post-modern, post-global music is that any sort of source material is fair game for remixation into a nova-Cumbia. Even footage of Barack Obama:
First spotted at Negrophonic, to whom I say "big up!," this is one of the most spectacular pieces of political propaganda to have yet emerged from the presidential race. Put on your dancing shoes and get out your Spanish-English dictionary.
UPDATE: If you are reading this before 10PM on March 17th, 2008, get on over to SOB's on Varick St. in New York City, where Zizek, the globetrotting party, not the Slovenian philosopher, is putting on their mobile show for one night only.
Barack Obama visits Somali refugees in northern Kenya in 2006 and is dressed as a village elder as a sign of respect.
The author visits Brooklyn refugees in southern Germany in 2007 and wishes he hadn't left the apartment without a hat.
In the death throes of the Clinton bid for the Democratic nomination, campaign tactics are spiraling downward like the whirlpool in a flushing toilet. According to the Drudge report, Clinton staffers were emailing the above Obama image around this weekend under a header suggesting their campaign ought to be trying to exploit it to smear Barack. An intra-Clinton email "obtained by the Drudge report" allegedly asked: "Wouldn't we be seeing this on the cover of every magazine if it were HRC?" Now the Clinton camp is trying to suggest that, of course there is nothing wrong with the picture, and visiting dignitaries including Hillary play dress-up all the time, but if the Obama campaign thinks they are being smeared then there must be something suspect about the way they view people wearing towels on their heads. What we really need to do is choose a candidate, put all this absurd sort of acrimony to bed, and start looking for pictures of John McCain in a bikini.
Went down to the polls after bagels and lox. Just around the corner on Van Brunt and Lorraine. I was glad to see they are still using the old-school voting machines in the old school gymnasium. These require you to pull down mechanical metal switches next to the name of the candidate of your choice and then yank across a massive lever sticking out of the floor, as if you were a lineman diverting a train. They are solid, antique devices from the pre-computer era that make satisfying clicking and clanking noises, the sound of democracy expressed, in response to one's performing one's functions as a voter. Manufactured in an era when this country actually manufactured things. None of this absurd nonsense of flawed and hackable software and the notion, already introduced in far too many states, that we are somehow better off e-voting.
The long-awaited Linden Elstran show opened last night in the back room at the legendary Sunny's Bar and Grill, the local Red Hook watering hole now frequently frequented on weekends by Manhattanite hipsters so desperate for a dose of real life that they will risk a long taxi ride to this dark corner of the ancient waterfront just to escape the theme-park ambiance of the lower east side.
The hordes assaulting the cheese platter ("I don't think this cheese is from Fairway," said Nadia, after taking a nibble. And she meant that in a good way) and the cantaloupe cubes were not disappointed. Elstran's "Alcoholic Alphabet" is a tour de force, a series of 26 copper plate etchings, each representing a letter, and all featuring the trademark character beloved by her fans. This often grumpy and dismayed, but always expressive line-drawn female figure, a sort of Dora the Explorer on meth, wanders through the alphabetic landscape in various postures of festive disarray, celebrating, as is appropriate in a bar, drinking culture.
Grumpy girl with latte waits for B61 bus: it doesn't get any more Red Hook than this!
Hold your breath. Wait for it. Now run, do not walk, all the way to Sunny's at the southern tip of Conover St.! For a measly fifty bucks you can own the letter of your choice.
But wait; there's a catch. As big-hearted as she is talented, Elstran isn't even going to keep your money. The picture of Ulysses S. Grant you exchange for an etching goes not into the Elstran coffers, but to the presidential campaign fund of Barack Obama. A bitter, cruel dilemma indeed for those short-sighted enough to be supporting any other candidate. Luckily, I don't have that problem.
Antarcticiana's firm commitment to journalistic integrity and our unswerving dedication to presenting only the facts are, of course, known from one end of the world wide web to the other. You may read here about the "beauty" of a particular species of bird, or even the "superiority" of one sort of flooring to another, but we generally try to withhold judgement, always preferring that you, the informed reader, draw your own conclusions. We are all about empowering you; we leave polemics and politics to the blowhards, those puffers of hot, garlicky air who pollute the byways of the internet in such tedious abundance.
But lately the barrage of attention being paid to our humble blog has made us aware of the great power we have; power which must be used to do good, lest it go to waste, falling like ripe fruits from the trees to rot uneaten on the ground of the orchard. In short, we feel much like Bono; with so very many ears cocked in our direction, to remain silent seems to us an abdication of the grave responsibility you, the dear reader, have invested in us.
It is therefore, with pride, and a sense of urgency, that we end our long moratorium on the endorsement of political candidates with the announcement that we firmly and fully support Barack Obama in the upcoming Iowa caucuses.
Why Obama? And, having gone out on a limb and chosen a young, gangly, light-skinned black man whose name sounds scarily like "Osama," why hedge and endorse only for Iowa?
As to the latter question: the presidential elections are scheduled for November 4th, 2008. The Iowa caucuses for January 3rd of the same year, but only just. (Next year, by the way). Eleven months are a very long time. Significantly longer than a pregnancy, and we all know how long and trying those can be. Give or take a few weeks, in fact, this period represents a full one-quarter of a complete presidential term. This absurd state of affairs, which results in our electing a president who serves for all of two years before launching his re-election campaign, requires our discouragement. With such a vast span of time dividing the primaries from the actual election, Obama, despite being by far the youngest serious candidate, could well die of old age before the elections even take place. Or do something so stupid that we would be forced to withdraw our support. For the moment, Iowa. Then we'll see how things go.
So, why Barack? In six words: he is earnest, brilliant, and inexperienced. We live in a time when the so-called world's greatest democracy has been reduced to a two-party tyranny of rule by corporate interest. Fat old white men, some in blue diapers, some in red, all paid for by lobbyists, sit on either side of a great sandbox slinging handfuls of grit at one another. Why on earth would we want to elect as president someone who has demonstrated that they are adept at playing this game? Obama honestly seems to agree with us that things cannot go on this way. From here, his inexperience looks like a major benefit; he hasn't been at it long enough to have been corrupted and destroyed by the endless series of incremental, criminal, soul-destroying compromises reached daily between our elected leaders and their golf partners. Should we really prefer, for instance, a woman whose every decision appears to have been taken in the calculation (or miscalculation) of its political consequences, rather than any actual belief in the rightness of it?
Plus, Barack is a brother. He doesn't talk about it much, and he did go to Harvard, which doesn't play so great in the 'hood, but what I'm hearing is that he is actually a bro'. Almost fifty years after legislating racism out of existence, the contemporary attitude towards race in our country is one of denial. Today's solution to chronic black unemployment and resultant potential unrest, now known euphemistically as the divisions within our society, is an offer of two choices to the disenfranchised: incarceration or military service. Those who complain are reminded that they have just as many options open to them as anybody else, because back in the 1960s they became equal. It is about time we proved it.
Video link courtesy of ATLAS + the Balakrishnan dynasty.
He starts playing shiznit I never heard before: 
