An Unlikely Ornithological Hot Spot

There are many tragic legacies of Africa's colonial past, but none quite so absurd as the eighteen-hole golf courses that are still to be found at the center of many African cities. These country clubs, where they have survived, were nurtured, financed and protected from squatting post-colonial natives by lingering moneyed white elites clinging to their conception of civility as tightly as they held their gin tonics. In a later phase local potentates assumed control, playing golf on weekends the way Americans do, to seal business deals and cement their status; in a nation that cultivates every square inch of its rolling red earth what could better demonstrate power and wealth than to swing one's clubs the length of eighteen expansive frivolous fairways? In Zimbabwe, my friend L.... tells me, Harare has at least five golf courses virtually in the center of the city.

Seen from the ladies tee, the ochre Umubano Hotel looms in the distance above the eighth fairway. Labor is cheap, and so greenskeeping is done entirely by hand; the greens are picked over by women, while the fairways are cut by men with machetes, known here as pangas.

The Kigali Golf Club, Rwanda's only course, has survived both independence and genocide. Manicured and sprinkled, it occupies the greater part of the valley below the Umubano Hotel, which, perched atop what was once one of the city's outlying hills, is now almost centrally located in this rapidly expanding city. Strolling the fairways below, one sees in every direction on the surrounding hillsides the white stucco walls and red clay rooftops of fresh housing developments and condominium schemes. Perhaps it has survived as an island in a frenzy of real estate development because the wet bottoms between the hillsides where it is laid out are the least desirable; like Hollywoodians, Kigalians like living on the hilltops the best.


Kigali homes jostle for space above a man-made lake just beside the golf course. Developers hope to turn it into a "water-park," and on my recent visit the far shore was littered with recently unpacked Disneyesque foot-peddled boats in bright plastic colors; smiling blue dolphins, grinning rubber ducks and so on. This will doubtless have a negative impact on the birds to be found, but last week I found White Faced Whistling ducks, Spur Winged Geese, countless Pied Kingfishers and a Pink-Backed Pelican enjoying the waters. Here, if you look very closely along the shoreline, a Marabou Stork patrols the shallows.

Walking down to the links one begins on the same busy boulevard that houses the presidential palace, beside a new multi-story apartment complex where, at the corner of the hotel grounds, a dirt road descends through a cross-section of the Kigali economy. At the top are large houses hidden behind walls festooned with tropical flowers. Their tall sliding metal garage doors are attended by private security guards. The residents, many of them working for international NGOs, come and go in luxury SUVs blowing their horns impatiently outside their own homes to inspire the guardian to pull open the gate. Lower down the steep track the houses become more modest and the walls are not so high; security is left to the alert eyes of the neighborhood. Approaching the green fields one soon finds oneself in a warren of adobe houses, each blending into the next, roofs repaired with lengths of blue plastic sheeting. The steep, narrow passageways between the houses double as sewers when it rains. In this part of the neighborhood there is no plumbing, and many of the residents poach their H2O from the pipeline feeding the water hazards of the golf course. It is a surreal sight to see groups of women trudging down onto the course with their yellow twenty-liter plastic canteens as a foursome of golfers strides by in crisp pressed polo shirts, drivers extended over one shoulder.

The eighteenth tee is tucked back amongst the reeds in a particularly swampy bit of the course. Errant drives here are bound to result in lost balls buried deep in the heavy marsh growth. To the right of the tee is an impressive stand of bamboo, home to a colony of weaver-birds, a family of yellow, orange, cinnamon and black-plumaged birds like large brightly colored sparrows that reaches its highest diversity in central Africa. Most, but not all species are highly colonial, and weave nests near one another, like bird condominiums. The form of the weaving and the positioning of the entrance hole is unique to each species, so that the well-versed weaver-watcher can identify the species just by seeing the nest. Unfortunately I am not a well enough versed weaver-watcher to be able to tell you specifically who lived here.

That the golf course lives on is a happy circumstance for Kigali birdwatchers. Or at least for me, since I have never met another binocular-toting geek wandering around down there while I was dodging golf balls. The ersatz marshy areas, which anywhere else in Rwanda would be subjected to amateur draining efforts and opportunistic cultivation of corn, rice or maize, have stands of reeds and bullrushes full of weaver-birds, and there are several almost intact clumps of second-growth forest, with dense underbrush, where warblers lurk and sparrowhawks pounce. Over my five or six trips here at various times of year I have seen 118 different species of birds in the hedgerows and forest patches of the golf club or on the artificial lake next door. Most, of course, are the common garden birds of central Africa, but there are always surprises to be found; the water, the height of the trees, and the expansive green all act to attract, much as New York's Central Park, tucked amongst skyscrapers, is a renowned migrant trap.

Although we are only a degree below the equator, Rwanda in July is much like the United States in that, ornithologically speaking, bird movements are in part dictated by "post-breeding dispersal." The chicks of the spring and early summer breeding season are now grown and hungry and ready to forge out on their own. Often, however, they do not have the discerning eye for prime habitat of their elders, and so, in their search for new berries to eat and better bugs to gobble, in July they often end up in places they might not normally call home, like the Kigali Golf Club. In July, rarities and oddities can turn up almost anywhere. This is a female, possibly immature, Black Cuckooshrike. I have also been seeing many of them in the patchy scrub of the rural hillsides where we film, although on other trips at other times of year I found them to be scarce.

The pesticides, chemical fertilizers and other unnatural treatments that make most golf courses in the United States comparatively barren of birds do not seem to be in use here. On a recent walk I heard, coming from the spiky acacia trees shading the borders of the long grassy fairway of the thirteenth hole, the coarse screechings of the Gray-backed fiscal, a noisy and gregarious shrike that hunts for locusts, lizards and other small prey. Beyond the green, in a dense scrub that captures errant long balls, I have often seen the spectacular, skulking Crimson-breasted Gonolek, another shrike that keeps low and to the center of the shrubs. Today he doesn't seem to be there, but an array of sunbirds patrol the flowering trees for nectar and, hunting from an evergreen branch just beside the green, I see a bird I have never seen before in Rwanda, the Gray-headed kingfisher.


I need your help. Although I got close enough to take this and several other excellent photographs of this raptor, I was unable to conclusively identify it. You'll have to take my word for it that in flight it showed a single, broad white tail band. Largely because of the tail I suspect this is an immature Western Banded Snake Eagle, but this one seems awfully gray about the back, where, Stevenson and Fanshawe's Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa tells us, we should expect all brown. I don't have an awful lot of experience with Snake Eagles, and it has been almost ten years since I last saw one, so I just don't have that confidence. This is a probably another example of post-breeding dispersal, a young bird looking for new horizons.


The right hand edge of this fairway marks the boundary of the course, bordered by a tall hedge of umuyenzi, a succulent with spongy, tubular leaves often used to grow garden walls. The plant offers a natural defense against intruders because its sap is toxic, and caustic, but it is easy to slip through a well-worn shortcut and emerge unscathed on a pedestrian highway that crosses the valley here, at the foot of a recently constructed berm. The lake above the berm holds a great variety of water birds, and, in the northern winter, often has some waders marching in the shallows. The lake is home to literally dozens of Pied kingfishers. Two Gray-crowned cranes keep an eye on me. The ducks swim away from the shore-edge and concentrate in the middle of the lake while swirls of the huge and hideous scavenging Marabou Stork float on the warm thermals far overhead.


The closest thing Kigali has to a forest are these tropical patches of woodland tucked away on the golf course. They offer shelter to a surprising array of species. The other day I saw here a somewhat scruffy and battered immature female Narina Trogon, also doubtless in post-breeding dispersal. This is a species generally associated only with dense and relatively undisturbed quality forest. Gray Capped Warbler is resident in the undergrowth, and Mackinnon's Fiscal, a shy, solitary and retiring shrike, is often to be found hunting here.

Sunbirds are the African analog to South America's hummingbirds, glistening, iridescent nectar-eaters that flit quickly and aggressively from one cluster of flowers to the next. The males are brilliantly colored with shining throats of green, purple, scarlet, copper or gold, while the females tend to the drab and the annoyingly similar and difficult to identify. Still, I feel confident in telling you that this is a female Bronze Sunbird.

Back on the course, a quick walk to the eighth tee, where crossing a dirt road brings one to the farthest reaches of the course and dark corners of damp woodland not far from the clubhouse. Hanging about near the eighteenth is always profitable. I find a Klaas' cuckoo, one of Africa's small, glistening emerald-backed cuckoos, and get some decent photographs of a pair of Green-headed sunbirds. A party of golfers finishing out the seventeenth look at me quizzically, but return my wave. They stop short of inviting me to the nineteenth hole, however, and I slip silently back into the woods, headed back across the course towards the Umubano and home.

Those bird gluttons who really want to know more will find my complete species list for the Kigali Golf Club in the comments.

Does anyone else find this unsettling?

I'm referring to the teutonic font complete with umlaut, the high impact red and black graphics, the marauding crusader flaunting the cross of St. George on his shield, his sword of wrath held high as he rears back on his horse, preparing to trample unwashed heathens and infidels under his white steed's hooves of justice and righteousness.

It might just be time for a rebranding campaign, as nobody seems to have thought about changing the label on Rwanda's favorite beer since the country was a German colony, way back before World War One. The beer is French in origin, from the town of Mützig in Alsace, that part of the Franco-German borderlands that seems to be continually confused as to whether it is in France, or part of Germany. Today, apparently, Heineken owns the brand.

How do you say "Wash me!" in Kinyarwanda?

Up in the hills, we returned from filming an interview to discover this written on our car. There is nothing racist about it; if you are insulted by hordes of scruffy little children rushing out of their houses and screaming the equivalent of "HEY, White People!" at you, all day long, every day, then you are probably too sensitive to visit rural East Africa. We've been filming in the same district for four years, and there the chorus has evolved and become more personalized. Often, little children we don't recognize at all come hurling out of their compounds yelling "ANNA, ANNA," the name of Anne Aghion, our fearless leader. If you look closely at this picture you will see that someone (else?) has written "Ana" just under the letter "M." This, of course, is how new words are added to the lexicon, and perhaps a couple of decades from now all white female visitors to Rwanda's countryside will be mysteriously greeted by chants of "Anna, Anna."

The June-Bug Conundrum (great unused names for bands dept.)

Wednesday was a day off, so I strolled down the hill below the Umubano Hotel to my favorite birding spot in Kigali, the Kigali Golf Club, about whose birds I will soon tell you ever so much more than you are likely to want to know, in an upcoming post. Today it is all about bugs, namely these flying Junebugesque yellow and black monsters. About twice the size of the iridescent critters I know as Japanese beetles, these were clustered in a localized swarm, gorging themselves on the nectar of a flowering tree by burrowing neck deep into the octopus-like tendrils of its orange blossoms. Some have pairs of small yellow spots dotted on their black rorschach backs, some don't. I'm wondering if its a gender thing. One thousand pixels wide for your viewing pleasure; click on image to load.

The Romance of the Road

Our daily commute from Kigali up into the hills, to where we are filming in a remote village, is the most grueling aspect of my current job. We spend two hours traveling each way, of which only a quarter is on paved roads. Even this comparatively civilized stretch has its perils.



Landlocked and without oil, Rwanda, Burundi and the vast eastern Congo all depend for their fuel upon the constant arrival of vast, plodding tanker trucks. This rust-bucket brigade of petroleum begins in Mombasa, more than a thousand miles overland at the Indian Ocean coast, traverses the great inland expanses of Kenya and loops over the north shore of Lake Victoria and into Uganda, before finally turning south towards the Virunga mountains. Rwanda is known as the "land of a thousand hills," and the rafts of tankers seemingly need to go up and over ever single one of them en route west to Burundi and Congo.

Traversing a variety of countries, with a variety of driving regulations based on distinct colonial pasts, the long-haul trucks advertise where their driver is sitting: LHD, with an arrow, painted on the back grill, means "left-hand drive."

Already on their last legs when sold on the end-of-the-line used Chinese trucks market, these rickety, dieseling monsters positively creep up and down the Rwandan hillsides, bottoming out at between five and ten kilometers an hour on the worse ascents while collecting a wake of impatient vehicles behind. In a haze of black exhaust we jockey with the pristine Toyota Land Cruisers of the countless NGOs that ply their trade here, and with kamikaze minivan drivers, their HIACE buses stuffed to overflowing with Rwandan travelers. The winding switchbacks make it perilous to pass these behemoths, and it is almost with relief that we reach the turnoff onto the rutted, kidney jarring dirt track that will bring us the rest of the way to work.



The license plates send my imagination swirling. SK, for South Kivu, one of the most strife-torn regions of the vast Congo, implies lawless, bribe-smoothed border crossings and the cresting of the mountainous Nyungwe Forest, a mist-shrouded jungle where monkeys forage on the verges beside the highway, on the way there. BA plates are headed for Burundi, where I have never been; Bujumbura is said to be a hot and pleasant city on a spectacular lake shore. Perhaps I might hitch a ride there to see it.

Local traffic: a truck brings bagloads of charcoal to market in Kigali while advertising an even more carbon-intensive mode of delivery.

How much time, how many days, might it take to reach here from Mombasa, or Dar es Salaam? What dusty spot is the favorite roadside café of the long-haul driver creaking his way across the savannas of Kenya? Where does he sleep, this man, blamed for spreading AIDS along the corridors of Africa? What looted minerals travel back in the emptied trailers, and where do they go?

All Photos from: Vehicles of the Rwandan Road

Shave and a haircut, two bits

Whenever I learn that I am headed back to Rwanda all plans for getting a haircut are put on hold. I've been coming here regularly for the last four years with my friend Anne, who in addition to her Antarctic shenanigans is making the third film of a trilogy about Rwandan village justice and the aftermath of the genocide. A few weeks ago she called from Paris to see if I was free to join her on another jaunt. I said naturally, and started letting my hair grow, and two days ago we had a joyful reunion in the Nairobi airport before making our connection to Kigali.

All photographs: Linette Frewin

Before I discovered the barber shops of Kigali, I was already a big fan of third-world barbering. Compared to the United States, barbers across Latin America, Africa and Asia are guaranteed to give more of their attention, care and time for less of your money. More importantly, barbershops are inevitably hubs of local street culture, one of the few social spaces where, sliding in for a quick trim, one is assured of immediate and unguarded access to the daily lives of the locals.


My friend J.P. our sometime driver-translator, first took me to get my haircut in Kigali, on the second floor of what appeared to be a decrepit, crumbling cement apartment building that had decayed into a low-rent vertical mall, with tiny Chinatown-esque businesses scattered across the facade of its many floors. Here were dozens of barbers cutting dozens of African heads while chatting in Kinyarwanda, Swahili and Lingala, as pounding hip-hop tracks boomed through the concrete arcade and an oscillating bedroom fan sent tufts of afro skittering across the floor. Haircut: $2. Ambiance: priceless.


By my next visit, J.P. had upgraded, and he took me to what passes in Kigali for a midtown salon. Here, facing workstations with expansive mirrors, four barbers gave thoughtful and meticulous trims to a generally more middle-class clientele. The customers here were of the sort who visit at least once a week and insist on maintaining angular razor sharp lines about the temples; the enormous, unruly bush and beard-run-wild of the visiting muzungu were a source of much mirth and merriment.

My neighbor enjoys an ear squeegy

I have since been back several times, and the haircut is just fine. What makes the downtown Kigali experience worth flying halfway across the world for, however, is the post clip relaxation one experiences at the hands of demure Rwandese beauties. While most barbers are content to whisk a bit of talc onto the back of the neck, or perhaps give the jowls a brisk swipe of alcoholic after shave, a cut here at my local barbershop involves an entire second lap, a marathon of intense, frothy shampooing and primping which lasts almost as long as the cut itself. After the cut and beard trim are complete, one pulls back a curtain to find a row of reclining armchairs and porcelain sinks attended by lovely unmarried ladies who swaddle your neck in towels before inviting you to lean your head back, close your eyes, and relax. Should you leave the curtain open even a gap, your hostess will pull it firmly to, as if the cranial intimacies about to transpire are deserving of the fullest privacy.

"Yo girls, what up? How come I always have to do the white guy?"

What follows is a blissfully relaxing scalp massage, shampoo gently applied and rinsed in triplicate, a head rub so complete that one feels that each and every follicle has received personalized attention. This goes on for a deliciously long time, but if by now you have not melted into a pool of gelatinous mush, the final finishing touches are certain to send you slithering to the floor; your hostess deftly swipes a warm and soapy finger around and about the summer dirty gritty contours of your ear lobes, and then darts her fingertips into your outer canal for a final, gentle squeegeying that verges on the erotic.

A new man, relaxed and ready to face the African day....

In which a theme emerges...

As regular readers know, from time to time we like to post a list of those Google searches which have steered the neophyte to the pages of antarcticiana. Most, one imagines, flee in dismay, leaving with their quest for some bit of arcane knowledge unsatisfied. To those poor, uncreative unfortunates who continue to wash up here daily after searching for "unused band names," or "good unused names," we can only apologize for perpetuating that vicious cycle of intellectual poverty right here in this very sentence. These periodic lists, you see, feed upon themselves; someone recently arrived here after googling "google search strings."

But other searches, as well, are becoming more and more regular. There is in the world, I am beginning to be even more certain, a tremendous hunger, if not for psychoactive plants themselves, at least for an understanding of them. It is a rare day that passes without someone stopping here after searching for opium, in China, Thailand, or just, generically speaking, in a den. Less frequent, but quite common, is a search for Soma, the divine mushroom of immortality, Amanita muscaria. These drugs have not been a dominant theme in the history of this blog; each was touched on in exactly one entry, but the searchers are many and persistent. In honor of those seeking enlightenment in these pages, or questing to live in the spaces between thoughts, I have arranged today's list of searches, all of which returned antarcticiana among the top ten hits on google, into a sort of free-associative poem, which, if you spin quickly in a circle while repeatedly reading it aloud, should help you to stumble into an altered state of your own.

yurt hippy

he survived for sixty days with only a few chocolate bars h

premature nostalgia

how to not be homesick

"all jokes will be taken seriously"

when my fish eats bubbles come out of gill

senility symptom in man

"caucasian hair cut"

german asparagus cult

vegetable phallic

soma divine mushroom pdf

ARE THERE OPIUM DENS IN CHINA TODAY

blurry birds

imelda marcos red hook

a legendary creature which lurks around Australian swamps

...

Immigration Bill Update

I don't have to move to Argentina just yet. Yesterday the Senate trampled all over the immigration bill in yet another rebuke to the Bush Administration, refusing to pass it and its Trojan horse national identity card provision.... I suspect it failed thanks primarily to my rabble-rousing fax....

Letter to the Senators

We don't usually pulpit around here, but if my government tells me I can't go outside and walk down to the corner bodega without a national identity card in my pocket I'm buying a vineyard in Argentina and keeping my income tax payments in a cigar box.

Here's the issue, courtesy of boing-boing and here's where you have a last chance to do something about it.

Here's what I wrote to Hil and Shoe:

My Dear Senators
The waves of noxious legislation encroaching on the personal freedoms of the American people and the grand traditions of their great nation, which began immediately after the horrors of September 11th, need to stop now. While there can be no doubt that there are those out in the world who wish to harm us, the instituting of a national-identity card requirement flies in the face of everything that this country has traditionally stood for. The forces of international terrorism will have won a great victory on the day that Americans are required to carry identity papers on their person, at all times. Should you believe that this proposed program "is not about that," you must consider its insidious potential rather than its proposed use. History tell us plainly that identity cards will inevitably be used as a tool to punish, to segregate, to intimidate and to arrest those who are already marginalized in our society.

I can imagine little that is more un-American than a national identity card. In my lifetime I have been a great traveler, and have visited more than 60 countries. In any country I have been where there was a national identity card this "required" document was used as a tool of oppression and control and considered a great nuisance and expense. Are we so arrogant as to believe that we would do it any differently?

Please support the Baucus-Tester and Grassley-Baucus amendments to the immigration bill and suppress this vile proposal.

Many Thanks

A Monsoon comes to Brooklyn (sell your waterfront property now dept.)

The Pacific navigators of yore leaned out of their proas and observed the angle of the chop of the waves before glancing at the distant horizon to read there a comprehensive meteorological report. Millennia ago, our species could smell as well as many others; alert heads turned at the distant wafted whiff of a predator; our ears pricked up at the scent of potential prey. Today, although in many ways alleged to be more advanced, we have lost those skills. Therefore, I may be wrong when I say that this summer, the sky over Brooklyn has a new and troubling aspect, an ominous look never before seen in these latitudes. There is an inexorable, rolling, bruised eggplant character to clouds that bring waves of rain, falling in sheets before passing quickly on, leaving a churning purple mass to reconstitute itself in the sky. Evening after evening a narrow slit of sulphurous yellow lies to the west, behind the Statue of Liberty, crushed under thick, gray, swirling cotton fit to burst, the sorts of clouds that in all my many travels have always served to announce and reinforce an arrival in the tropics. Here in Brooklyn we have, suddenly, heavy, wet, oppressive skies straight out of the Guatemalan rainy season, weather that one might expect to seeing gathering on the Amazonian horizon or lurking behind an Indonesian island in a Joseph Conrad novel. It is something alien, a Philippine typhoon gathering above New York harbor.

In other news, it is 105 degrees plus in southern Romania, as if it were August in the Sahara.

These things are not normal.

An American Master

Regular readers have had ample opportunity to read my bitter, middle-aged gripings about the ruination of the lower east side by an overabundance of faux-european watering holes and the wandering weenies who clutch their hipster guidebooks while stumbling through the neighborhood from one poncey boutique to another, leaving a trail of gentrification and American Express Gold card credit slips in their wake. For curmudgeons like myself, of course, the glory days were long ago, no matter how old you are; if you are too young to have been there, well, too bad, it was better then. Before I moved away. More real. More authentic. More dangerous. More fun. More like Bushwick. At that time Clinton St., now a three-block-long restaurant row of overpriced finesse, was an open-air narcotics Wal-mart, an endless parade of slow, trolling cars, surreptitious palmslides and the flashing of green paper and yellow butane in gloomy bulb-smashed alcoves. In 1989, with the exception of one or two grimy Mah-Jong parlors and the Parkside Lounge, a blighted inner-city whiskey-shooter ballasted by a resident handful of crumpled puerto-rican geriatrics, there was scarcely a bar to be found in the entire district east of the Bowery and south of Houston street. Now, of course, there appear to be hundreds, and the once urine-streaked tenements have been done up with aluminum and glass storefronts. On Ludlow St. one of the pioneers of this pernicious process was Max Fish, where, gentrifiers all, my cronies and I spent far too much of our leisure time through much of the early 1990s, acting artistic.

In fact Max Fish was (and is) the center of a thriving arts scene; it's just that the staff on the side of the bar where they keep all the bottles was more prolific, more dedicated and in every way more serious about actually making art than most of those who were warming the stools on the other side. Over the years a number of wonderful artists paid their dues schlepping the ice-tub there; some of them are still at it. At Max Fish, if you wonder after the whereabouts of your favorite bartender, you are more likely to learn that they are off on a sculpture retreat in the Berkshires, in Oregon teaching a seminar on print-making or at an artists' colony in Canada, rather than vacationing on a tropical beach somewhere. The bar also serves as an art gallery, with monthly shows, some curated by bartenders. I hadn't been by in a few years, but the prospect in late April of an imminent Swipple group show offered the promise of a reunion of sorts, so a handful of us Brooklynites put principle aside and headed into Manhattan on a purely voluntary basis to go to the opening.

Swipple is a sort of loose association of artists with a strong online presence. Founded by Jason Wright, himself a former Max Fish pourer, Swipple has curated and put on group shows of Swipple artists on both coasts and even in some of the flyover states. Although having made drinks at Max Fish is not a prerequisite for Swipple membership, those who have put in time on Ludlow St. are well represented in its ranks. Many associates from the golden age of the lower east side have dispersed across the continent, and new artists unknown to us have been added to the Swipple fold, but the extravaganza at the Fish did not disappoint. The crowd was filled with familiar faces. Peering at those who some years ago had existed on the edge of acquaintance was slightly disconcerting in that one wasn't quite sure who in the crowd had come back and who might quite possibly never have left.

Jim Damron, however, I knew had decamped some years ago to an unknown and isolated frontier somewhere in central California. It was immediately obvious from one glance at the wall that the bucolic isolation of his self-imposed exile has refreshed and invigorated his painting and that while toiling away in the wilds of the tomato fields or whatever, he has made great strides as an artist. His portrait of Fidel Castro positively leapt off of the wall at me, and the few minutes it took between spotting it and determining from Jason Wright that it had not yet sold were fraught with anxiety. Fellow Brooklynite and chief boon crony Joseph, himself yet another former cocktail stirrer at the Fish, now turned real estate mogul and furniture designer and the (currently and only temporarily) faster half of the Atlas Cycling Team, was much taken with Damron's masterly portraits of Galileo and Newton, and suffered similarly stressful moments. (A slideshow of the entire show and even a photograph of the festive opening can be seen here.) Luckily we had arrived early. It took us no time at all, like emigrants made good returning to a little mexican village in fresh Nike sneakers, to demonstrate that we have thrived, at least financially, in the outer boroughs. Whipping out mountains of cash and slapping them on the bar in dueling piles, we then rubbed our palms with glee as Jim Damron himself affixed little neon-orange "SOLD" stickers to the sheetrock walls beside our new purchases.


Fidel in situ, back in Red Hook, Brooklyn

Meanwhile, twinkling on the café tabletops were examples of another Damron masterwork, the "Fertility Light." Small, glowing, battery operated lamps made out of recycled Beech-nut baby food jars, they are the sculptural equivalent of a doodle. At only $25 dollars a pop I felt these were such a steal that in my infectious enthusiasm I quickly convinced a number of attractive young ladies propping up the bar that their lives would be incomplete without owning one. It was only then that I realized to my horror that I had single-handedly sold out the entire world supply of Damron votive lamps without managing first to secure one for myself!



Now that Jim, safely back in California, has managed to supply me, I feel feel much better in urging you to get one too.



Three of the many moods of the world's coolest lamp, my Jim Damron "Fertility Light," Red Hook installation view. The Swipple Website warns: "May cause birth control failure."

Pull up your damn pants

Fabulous. Dallas is now contemplating litigation against the more-than-a-decade-old fashion trend of wearing saggy pants. Discounting the influence of my father, who pioneered "extreme plumber's crack" all the way back in the middle 1960s, this admittedly lame and objectionable mode of jeans-wearing originates from the penitentiary and regulations preventing incarcerated Americans from wearing belts, both to minimize suicides and because belts are, duh, a potential weapon. So the city of Dallas, in considering criminalizing low-pants-wearing, is bringing things full circle. Those poor inner-city unfortunates amongst us who have such dim prospects ahead of them that the most optimistic they can be is to idealize and mimic the thug lifestyle of their imprisoned contemporaries now face incarceration merely for aping the sartorial style of their role-models "upstate." No need to commit a crime--we'll gladly send you away just on the basis of your self-identifying as a thug! Expect the Dallas police force to shortly hold a press conference opposing this legislation on the grounds that malefactors with their pants belted around their knees can't run very fast.

Reading: Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

Some years back, while on the walk across Cuba mentioned a couple of posts ago, I finally delved deep enough into One Hundred Years of Solitude to become completely hooked, at last emerging out the back of the novel in shock and awe at the supreme talents of the master. In mid-read I met, in the city of Ciego de Avila, another American traveller-writer, and when I explained to my embarrassment that I was reading it for the first time we discovered that both of us had suffered repeated failed attempts to get through it, separated by many years, before gobbling it whole and joining the ranks of those who consider it among the very greatest novels. Since then I have met other readers who likewise dipped a toe in that murky pond many times before at last being caught up in the swirling whirlpool of Macondo. I'm not sure how to account for this, other than to imagine Garcia-Marquez refusing to write a single word with the intent to entrap and entice the reader into turning the page rather than to recount the history of his imagined clan.

It is difficult to imagine the toil and struggle required to produce the perhaps aptly named One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not so the journalistic Clandestine in Chile: the Adventures of Manuel Litin, a slim volume of 114 pages, which Garcia-Marquez distilled from eighteen hours of interviews with Litin. One imagines the writer banging it out on a newspaperman's schedule, but it is a measure of the author's enormity that the relaxed, documentary first-person story of the exiled filmmaker's secret return to Pinochet's Chile keeps you on the edge of your seat, despite portraying its narrator as a relaxed, carefree and foolhardy hippy who sometimes seems unaware of the potential consequences of his dangerous dance through the terribly altered country. And while Clandestine in Chile is far from the top of Garcia-Marquez' long resume of literary accomplishments I found myself, reading it, just as embarrassed not to have picked it up before as I was to have only gotten to One Hundred Years of Solitude at the creaky old age of thirty-five.



In 1985 Litin returned to Chile in disguise to make a film about the dictatorship and its ongoing impact on his country. In his introduction to his account, Garcia-Marquez leads with a documentary filmmaking truism: he imagines that the "making-of," the film about making the film, risks being as interesting as the film itself. "When Miguel Littín told me what he had done and how he had done it," he writes, "I realized that behind his film there was another film that would probably never be made."

The requirements and conditions of filmmaking are so absurd that in fifteen years of working as a soundman on documentaries I cannot remember a single shoot reaching its conclusion without some episode prompting the comment that "we should be filming ourselves." On some films one has this feeling all day, every day, prompted by episodes like the beseeching of a Philippine peasant to hoe the exact same furrow, "in the exact same way as before," over and over again, in fact six times. This repeated request is so inexplicable as to result in fifteen minutes of bemused discussion between the peasant and the translator. All the while copious amounts of smoke and fire are puffing out of the ears of the producer like steam from a kettle. The problem resolved, the crew demands lunch.

The tension between the subject, who invariably wishes to be as hospitable as possible and is generally interrupting his or her day in order to share themselves and their life, and the filmmakers, who desperately hope that their presence will not provoke any change whatsoever in the daily life they hope to capture with honesty and authenticity, has throughout my career been the stuff of endless hilarity. I have been on countless shoots where I have witnessed some variant on the following conversation:

Subject (having just been filmed collecting his pigeons in the pigeon-coop after being forced to re-release them three times in a row): So, what would you all like to do now?

Director: Well, what would you do now? Nothing you wouldn't do normally. What would you do if we weren't here?

Subject: I'd probably make myself a cup of tea. Or take a nap.

Director: A nap's no good. It doesn't make good TV. Tea? The thing about tea is, it isn't very active. We would really like to see you, you know, it would be nice if you were doing, if you were doing,... doing something.

Subject: Like what?

Director: Well, what might you be doing? Could you be hammering something? Maybe hammering a board onto the pigeon coop?

Subject: I could do that if you want , but I think that would terrify the birds.

Director: Well, not that, then. What could we do? What other sorts of things do you get up to?

Subject: Tea sounds nice.

Director: Don't you worry, we'll get you some tea. For now we need to just concentrate on getting this next shot.

Director (to cinematographer): Phil, Phil, we really need some B-roll here. Can we do tea? Can we make making tea look exciting?

Phil the Cinematographer: Of course.

Director: But is it active enough?

Phil: Don't worry, we'll cheat it; I'll make it look good.

Director (to subject): Okay, here's an idea. What if you made some tea now? How would you go about it?

Subject walks over to stove, turns on a burner, picks up kettle and walks to sink and begins filling it.

Director: Wait! Wait! We're not ready. We need you to empty the kettle and start over...

Me (the soundperson, to the director): That faucet is really noisy. Would you mind asking him not to do any speaking at the actual moment that he is filling the kettle? That will make it much easier to edit.




After that prolonged digression into the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, let us return to the resolutely unfunny Chilean dictatorship. Garcia-Marquez, intrigued by the idea that Litin had made a documentary in Pinochet's Chile using three different foreign crews, none of which knew of the existence of the others, nor, for much of the filming, even of the presence of Litin himself, sets out to write the "making-of." Litin, disguised as a bourgeois Uruguayan businessman, spent much of his time in Santiago directing the cameramen via subtle hand signals, waved from dozens of yards away across plazas and parks to one trusted assistant, who "translated them." It was a brave and heroic, but also foolhardy and somewhat absurd undertaking. It seems almost implausible to me that any great amount of the footage could actually reflect his vision, but it is the filmmaker's personal journey through the once familiar territory of his beloved Chile that is truly fascinating.



In the midst of the drama of trying to get a film made under such harrowing circumstances, it is Garcia-Marquez's observations on identity and exile, as experienced by Litin, which make for the most poignant reading. Of wearing a suit and attempting to assume the persona of just the sort of latin-american oligarch he pities and despises, the narrator says "changing personality is a daily battle in which, wishing to continue being ourselves, we keep rebelling against our own determination to change." Sitting alone in a restaurant in Valparaiso, still frequented by an elderly couple who had known Litin and his wife when he was courting her there, Marquez-Litin watches the couple and observes that "occasionally they would look over at me without curiosity, without the slightest inkling that we had once enjoyed each other's company at the same table. It wasn't until that moment that I realized how long and devastating the years of exile had been. Not just for those of us who had left--as I had thought until then--but also for the ones who had stayed."



Those who left, like Litin, are the old guard. He discovers that within the country is a new generation of dissidents struggling against the savage Pinochet dictatorship, youngsters who scarcely know his name or the names of Allende's murdered colleagues. He shuttles around like James Bond, changing hotels and taxis dozens of times, wearing a blindfold on visits to the secret hideaways of the resistance while trying to come to terms with the ongoing dictatorship and his sense of loss and abandonment. He lingers and lingers, captivated by the prospect that a dissident general in the junta is on the point of offering himself up for a clandestine tell-all interview. Meanwhile he cannot shake the feeling that the junta is, if not on his tracks, at least aware that something is up. It is the moment for flight, and for editing the film, but we can tell that Litin wishes terribly that he could stay.

I met a Chilean on that trip through Cuba, one of the few exiles who decided to stay in Havana rather than return after the final, long-awaited demise of the General. It was too different for him, the new Chile, too full of shopping, infected by a general obsession with money, how to get it and keep it. "Nobody wants to remember what happened to us," he told me. "It might interrupt commerce." Litin, of course did go back, to work, making films, but after reading Garcia-Marquez' account the one I would most like to see was the one he made in 1986 when he was persona non grata.

My Cellphone Got Run Over by a Bus

I know, you're thinking I'm behaving like the yellow press, stooping to any eye-catching headline just to grab up some readers. But it isn't true. Or rather, the headline is true. Some sinister force is at work, trying to keep me disconnected from our over-connected world. After leaving the mobile telephone in Germany on my recent trip there and going phoneless for a good ten days while the antiquated snail-mail system struggled with international delivery, it finally arrived some time last week. But reunification was short-lived. Yesterday I drove up to Court St. to buy some mat-board and managed in my prematurely senile way to set the phone on the hood of the truck while wrestling the 32 X 40" sheet into the cab. Then I drove off. Because the large sheet of card risked damage from the stick-shift I drove cautiously down the hill. So cautiously that it was only some twelve blocks later, on the cobblestone stretch beyond the BQE, near the garbage transfer station, that I heard through the open window the thunk of an object falling from my truck onto the pavement. In a flash the thought entered my mind: PHONE! I rounded the corner onto Lorraine and pulled over onto the sidewalk, already looking back over my shoulder. Turning off the truck, I jumped out just in time to watch a school bus lumbering down the street. I could clearly see the phone, nestled in a little divot in the cobblestones. The front wheels of the bus missed the phone by inches. I hastened towards the corner, but the rear wheels of the mighty yellow behemoth scored a direct hit--the phone lifted up into the air after the wheel had passed, as if in the throes of a final, mortal vibration. To my astonishment, once recouperated, the phone powered up again. I can still receive calls, but can't make any, as the keypad no longer functions. Don't send any text messages; at the moment I can't read them. On a positive note, the new and improved display has a beauty all its own, like the sheen of motor oil on a fresh rain puddle.

The Rebar Chairs of Cuba

Between polishing my new wood floor and reinstalling my kitchen, I've been spending some time lately going through stacks of photographs taken a number of years ago on my epic journey across Cuba on foot. (If you are new to this blog and work for the State Department or the Department of the Treasury, now is the time for me to tell you that everything written here is a meticulous fiction, no matter how much it may appear to be essentially documentary in nature....) This journey may or may not have happened in what I would refer to as Cuba's "late Special Period," meaning well after the demise of the Supreme Soviet. The collapse of the USSR brought many hardships to Cuba; soap, for instance, was in 1994 and 1995 almost impossible to obtain anywhere on the island, and at that time Cubans washed as best they could with limes.





It seems unlikely that the Soviets were ever particularly adept at producing and exporting patio furniture; certainly what little industry there had been in this area had long since ceased by the dawning of the new millennium, when I might have set out to walk the length of the island. One hears much about the ingenuity of the Cubans in that time of hardship and scarcity, and as a result wherever I might have went I found no lack of outdoor seating.





To cope with the difficulties of having a seat on the front porch in a time when there was no seating, the Cubans elevated the lowly rebar, that humble pig-iron rod used in vast quantities for concrete reinforcement, to the status of a primary construction material. The result, with some deft bending and welding, was a plethora of indestructible outdoor furniture. Found the length and breadth of the country, in styles ranging from the bauhaus knockoff to the positively baroque, the rebar chair became for me a testimony to the resilience of the Cuban peoples, and a signifier of their desire to sit down and relax.



Since then I have become a big fan of rebar, which crops up again and again in the so-called third world, that mass of impoverished countries of which Fidel Castro has so often been pleased to consider himself the philosophical leader. My potrack is made of rebar, welded into a configuration copied from the window-guards of mud houses in Rwanda. The spindles supporting my banister, my friend Joseph informed me while graciously lending me the use of his shop to machine them, are "the only drilled and tapped lengths of rebar in the history of mankind." I have a chisel made of rebar, found in a coastal hardware store in Brazil. Some might say that I have seized on using the material as an ongoing design theme throughout my abode only because I am a cheap bastard, but I prefer to date my interest back to the ingenious, bespoke, chairs of Cuba.