Tropical Camouflage

Like Kingston, Port au Prince is one of those Caribbean cities where the heat, stench and oppressive humidity of the downtown waterfront has historically inspired all those with means to flee up into the cool, forested highlands. In the distant past they went there on the weekends to relax, and then, soon after the introduction of the automobile, to live. Petionville, several miles up a steep hill from the sweltering business district, is still synonymous with the economic elite, with refined dining and shopping for such things as charcuterie and champagne. But the one-time suburb has been all-but consumed by the Haitian capital's tremendous population growth; those seeking the tranquility of the forested highlands now need drive much farther uphill to find calm. 

The mass exodus from downtown in the wake of the earthquake of January 2010 has further clogged the enclave. In the twenty years that I have been going regularly to Haiti, Petionville has spawned its own shanty-towns, impromptu hillside communities that began as opportunistic squats and have burgeoned into dense and undeniable concentrations of humanity. Paint has never been a priority for the residents of these often slapdash cinderblock boxes, which have spread, gray and sunbaked, farther and farther out around the hillsides on both sides of town.

On a trip last fall I was stunned to look up at this perilous, ever-evolving hillside and see a riot of color. Every tropical hue from the (hypothetical) Benjamin Moore Caribe collection seemed to be represented there, as if all the third-world's painters of charming wooden fishing boats had descended at once, brushes in hand, in a mad frenzy of civic improvement. Suddenly, the slums above Petionville looked like Valparaiso! 

As much as I would have loved to learn that the citizens of this marginal, cliff-like community had banded together into a decorative council something like the competitive gardeners of Brooklyn front yards, I knew, or should I say I was quite certain, that some more grand imperial hand must be at work. How on earth did all these houses get painted in such a uniformly random cataclysm of colors? I asked our driver.

"Mateli te fel," he replied. President Martelly did it.

Not personally, I imagined.

Jobs had been created, I was assured, the people are really happy about it.

Now, were someone to come to my house and offer to paint it for free I might well accept. But it smelled to me like the worst sort of populist pandering, not to mention an absurdly cost-ineffective way to buy community goodwill. I probed a bit more. Why, I asked, did the painting stop so abruptly, leaving miles of dull-gray slum to trail off into the distance?

"They are intending to paint all of them," said my friend. "Eventually." One often finds in Haiti that things are wrapped in multiple layers of meaning. Often there is a surface explanation for events that, like a brilliant coat of tropically-themed paint, obscures other realities beneath. My friend decided that my pronounced interest merited the peeling off of some of the onion skin. "What I heard," he went on conspiratorially, "was that the owners of your hotel and some of the other new constructions around Petionville were complaining."

Our team was staying at the Oasis, a brand new, international style flying vee of a hotel, distressingly multi-storied in the still earthquake-ravaged country. I can attest that many of its rooms enjoy a panoramic view of the brightly painted cinderblock homes on the opposite hill.

"They spent all this money to build, but their guests were not seeing a pretty picture."

All that poverty was sullying the view, and nothing says "happy, contented natives" like lemon-yellow, guava-pink, passionate-purple, palm-frond-green and azure-blue.

Do I hate cynicism, revile and despise it? If so, then in this particular case I must confess I am filled with self-loathing.

For when you want that very special feeling

And they are kosher, too! Spotted by my wife at our local Fairway.

The empty billboards of Greece

Greece is the poster-child for economic collapse, so it should be no surprise that the country is full of empty billboards. On a recent trip we saw highways lined with them, post-apocalyptic and graying. Without a message, these are the most useless of structures, but they are ubiquitous in our built environment. These ghosts of capitalism force you to think about the fascinating relationship between advertising and consumerism, which is both symbiotic and parasitic. Advertising masks itself as a sharing of information. It asks the question: how helpful is it to society if an innovative product, perhaps even a life-saving one, remains unknown? Shouldn't we get the message out? Don't we have a duty to let the people know that ours is better than theirs?

But the billboard gives the lie to all of that. These enormous constructions are a blight on the landscape. Worse than an imposition, they are a criminal theft of visual real estate, jutting up into what would otherwise be a pristine azure sky, a beautiful Grecian view of blue. We are so numb to them and their messages that it takes rows and rows of completely empty ones to remind us how noxious they are.

Much more of my bloviating on the scourge of billboards and their usefulness as an indicator of economic decline is HERE.

Not really awesome.

 In the gloom of a January evening near Wall Street, dim golden arches are suspended above a brilliantly illuminated poster advertising McDonald's McRib sandwich.

Is it just me, or does this promotional campaign for the McRib sandwich imply that at other times, and in other sandwiches, the pork hasn't been real, (but rather unreal)? Is anyone else detecting an implicit: "Now, with real meat...!"? Perhaps it's the retro, 1950's font, suggesting that we have finally arrived back in some fictitious but glorious past when actual pork was used in confecting the mighty McRib. I'm certain I'm making too much of it, but my, oh my does that sandwich look revolting, oozing its glistening brown sauce out onto a Fulton streetcorner.

Fiery Threads

Some twenty years ago, early in my career recording sound for documentary film, I traveled to Honduras and El Salvador as part of a team working to expose the slave-like conditions suffered by the workers who make the billions of garments that Americans consume every year. What we found was that the typical individual sitting behind a sewing machine was an uneducated woman in her late teens or early twenties, often forced to take birth control against her will (to preserve the factory’s “investment” in having trained her), routinely subject to the predatory sexual advances of the floor managers. Many were naïve country girls lured to the city’s favela outskirts by the hope of a job. They were chosen because they were the most compliant and powerless segment of the population. Shifts were absurdly long, overtime routinely withheld. The pay was derisory, some tiny fraction of a dollar an hour; many women we clandestinely spoke with reported spending more than a quarter of each day’s earnings on bus fare and a meager lunch. The huge factories required no more investment than a few hundred sewing machines, some fluorescent tubing, and just enough fans to prevent the workers from fainting on the line in the tropical heat. Invariably, these maquilas were located inside the gates of a tax-advantaged “free trade zone,” protected by a private security force beholden only to the managers. Any demands for better conditions or wages were met with beatings, and promises from the garment contractors to simply pull up stakes and relocate in some even more inexpensive and unregulated country: Haiti, perhaps, or Nicaragua, or Bangladesh.

The stories emerging from this last country in the wake of the deadly Tazreen Fashions factory fire last weekend suggest that little has improved in the globalized world of garment manufacture. Scattered in the wreckage of the factory, among the charred bodies of the 112 dead, were scorched labels for Wal-Mart’s house jeanswear brand, “Faded Glory.” (An apt description of the American garment industry, demolished by “race to the bottom” outsourcing). The spokesmouths of the global retailing titan quickly announced that although Tazreen had once produced clothing for Wal-Mart, they were “no longer authorized” to do so. They blamed, and immediately fired, a supplier who they suggested had illicitly subcontracted with the unauthorized Tazreen, as if the conditions there were uniquely bad, or particularly dangerous. If you believe them, in today’s global marketplace, the world’s biggest companies don’t have the vaguest control over who is manufacturing their products, and under what conditions. Public relations departments and other corporate spin doctors have apparently become so sophisticated that huge international brands can manage to “stand behind their products” while simultaneously denying any knowledge of the savage conditions under which they are produced. Clearly the programs of “voluntary” self-policing put in place by many gigantic international brands are essentially window-dressing. The many contractors and sub-contractors operating their independent freelance factories from Dhaka to the Dominican Republic serve an important role: they obfuscate the supply chain. When something goes wrong, Wal-Mart, or Hanes, or the Gap, or any of countless others claim to be just another disappointed customer, (albeit a bulk customer) sorry to hear that some “renegade” factory didn’t live up to the exacting standards on the mimeographed form they had once held a photo-op to insist should be posted prominently on the wall near the exit doors.

I’m not the first to note the grisly similarity between the Tazreen inferno and the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist fire of Greenwich Village, New York, which killed 146 mostly young, mostly female, mostly uneducated recently immigrated seamstresses, just over a century ago, in March of 1911. That disaster was instrumental in the creation of the International Ladies Garment Worker’s Union, and a catalyst for the discussion of worker’s rights in the United States. In an age when the clothes we wear are produced on the far side of the continent, in a distant country most people cannot locate on a map, it seems optimistic to hope that Tazreen might inspire the same kind of movement. Instead, companies must be held to account, by their customers. We need to change our ideas about what makes a brand worth wearing. 

On that trip to El Salvador twenty years ago, Charles Kernaghan, our guide from the National Labor Committee, estimated the cost of the labor spent on the production of a t-shirt at one half of one percent of its ultimate retail price. The cost of the fabric itself, and the shipping involved in offshore operations represented larger fractions, but most companies spend vastly more on advertising and marketing than on anything actually reflected in the quality of the shirt on your back. This means that doubling the pittance these exploited workers are paid would have a negligible effect on the in-store cost of most garments. Uh, I don't know about you, but I'd be okay with that. 

Photos from my own wardrobe.

¡Vete p'al Carajo!

A place to gas up, in more ways than one.

According to a Wikipedia article entitled "Spanish Profanity," the literal meaning of the word carajo is "crow's nest," as in the lookout at the top of the mast on an old schooner. This was news to me, and I rather suspect it would be for many speakers of the language. Much more frequently, throughout the great Iberian diaspora, carajo is an insult, a "swear." Its strength and implication varies across the vastness and diversity of latin america, with usages that include approximate equivalents of "oh, sh*t!!" and "go to hell!" Indeed, upon looking for, and then entering the Miami restaurant named "El Carajo," one is apt to exclaim "What the f*ck!?"

Although the owners of the El Carajo combination tapas bar, wine cave and British Petroleum gasoline filling station franchise pay homage to the nautical in their signage--their logo is a flag flying above a masthead roost tilted aslant by a Caribbean breeze--one imagines that they fully embrace the word's many meanings. It takes not a little sense of humor to open a full-on faux-Spanish cava in the back of a generic convenience store. Here the bewildered, walking in to prepay their gasoline, are likely to find, just beyond the cash register and the standard gas-station amenities, a group of men seated on stools around a table, pouring and sampling a selection of Iberian wines, each with half-a-dozen semi-used crystal glasses spread out before him.

 

 Not unexpected in your average gasoline station convenience store.

Rather less expected, in an adjacent aisle: this extensive selection of fermented grapes.

 Unexpected to the point of unique? The Spanish taverna dining room, complete with fake brick arches.

 Where some gas stations might have a hot nacho cheese dispensing machine or a slurpy gun, El Carajo presents this selection of fine Iberian cakes and pastries, behind curved glass.

Flan with your fill-up?

 From tortilla Española to black Angus sirloin, to go!

 The most unprepossessing façade.

 Never fear, El Carajo also carries the usual "convenience" selection of emergency cosmetics, candy bars, and sodas, like these emery boards. KD's fetching pink and green ensemble is by Mossimo for Tarjay.

 (17th and South Dixie Highway, and if you don't know, now you know....)

That's how we roll. ¡Vete p'al Carajo!

I'm holding out for Jonathan Franzen in Double Extra Large

 

"Shoes and Clothe" boutique, of Phnom Penh

 

Engrish is an endless source of amusement. For decades already we have found ourselves cackling at the excruciating, the misplaced, the misspelled, the off-center, or the just plain random words and letters that hapless Asians see fit to emblazon on their t-shirts. (Although to blame Engrish entirely on Asia may be unfair. Just today, while filming at Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, I spied a Russian gentleman wearing a burgundy t-shirt boldly emblazoned SOUTH DAKOTA IT'S ALL YOURS DANCE MASTER SCHELUDES.)

The origins of this sort of typographic festival seem to me to be rooted in the fast-fading allure of the great United States, beacon to would-be emigrants and aspirant entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe. In China, Vietnam or Russia, clothing with the English alphabet sprayed all over it denotes a certain hipness. No matter how random, the letters alone indicate worldliness, mobility. This is ironic in that the moneyed classes the world over tend to speak actual English--the Engrish shirt only works for those too low in status and education to comprehend the meaninglessness of the slogans they are sporting. Absurdity is just a click away; Google translate makes it so easy to be so very, very wrong.

The allure of the east and the rise of China as an economic power has somewhat turned the tables, with more and more attention being paid to the parallel phenomenon of Chingrish, including an excellent blog that chronicles the tattoo catastrophes of hipster Westerners.

I can't recognize Chingrish when I see it, but I'm always on the lookout for spectacular examples of Engrish, so my eye was drawn by this window display on the streets of Phnom Penh:

 

Rising up the NYT bestseller list, it's Erheyi Sniamla

"Going Greenly into the Future," a screenplay

There was no response from the media relations office of "elegantly" Glenwood Properties in response to numerous emails inquiring why their recent marketing campaign prominently features what appears to be Merops pusillus, the little bee-eater, an insectiverous bird widespread across most of sub-Saharan Africa, but unknown from New York City or anywhere else in the Americas.

At the offices of Global Glut Realty Corp., Joe and Schmoe sit at a polished black granite conference table, wearing Brioni suits. Manhattan, viewed through the smoked glass floor-to-ceiling windows of a corporate high-rise, stretches out beneath them.

SCHMOE: They're nice apartments I have, Joe, all over the city. I don't understand why they're not renting.

JOE: You're out of date; you need to get with the whole ecological revolution. People want their place to be sustainable and stuff.

SCHMOE: What the hell is that supposed to mean?

JOE: You know, like, long lasting, and, uh...natural.

SCHMOE: WTF? You mean I have renovate? I just redid all these places. They're like minty fresh.

JOE: Nah, you don't have to do nothing. Just emphasize the environmental aspect in your New York Times adverts. Green, green, green. That's the word everyone is using. Make it green.

SCHMOE: C'mon, stop yankin' it. The apartments are painted white. Who the hell wants a green apartment?

JOE: Not green the color, you moron. Like, as in natural, you know whuttum saying? Like a spinach milkshake or some shit. Like, yoga. Put a tree in there, dickhead. I dunno, put a picture of a fountain, some bubbly water. Just make sure you call it green in big letters. Paint a picture of a tree, or a goddamn bird or something. You see how I'm helping you, here?

SCHMOE: A bird? What do I know from birds? You mean, like a parrot, or what?

JOE: No, you jerk. Like some wild natural creature, you know, that flies around in trees and stuff.

SCHMOE: How am I supposed to take a picture of a bird?

JOE: You really are thick today, Schmoe. Let me order us up a couple of frappuccinos, get that brain working. Look, it's not particle physics. Just go on the internet, and get a nice picture of a bird, and just kind of place it tastefully in your ad, there. You'll see; people will be signing leases in no time.

Trademark Fringement

I'm in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where a trip to the gas station put me in mind of a post from earlier this year in which I documented the hand painted branding efforts of Vietnamese marine diesel fuel dealers in Dong Hoi. A google search for "NP Petroleum" brings up the National Petroleum company of Trinidad and Tobago as well as a Canadian outfit called Northern Petroleum, neither of which share this BP-inspired logo. Could it stand for "Nigeria Petroleum," or was the B simply changed to an N on a whim? Perhaps these are the proprietor's initials.