Reading: Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien by Brian Winter

For some time now the idea has been swirling around in my brain that Argentina is a country poorly served by the travel literature. There are of course the usual plethora of Lonely Planet guides influencing the movements of gringo visitors through the country. That's not what I'm referring to. Such books have become tired caricatures of themselves, and lately I have more than once caught myself using them for guidance on precisely where not to go, in hopes of avoiding the backpacker hordes. No, what I mean is that I've been searching in vain for a travelogue that lays bare the soul of the vast Argentine nation. After all, Chile, a much smaller and narrower strip of land to the west of the Andes, has one in Sarah Wheeler's excellent Travels in a Thin Country. Tales of Argentina do fill most of In Patagonia, indubitably one of the towering skyscrapers of the genre, but Bruce Chatwin's account rarely ranges farther afield than the boggy wastelands of the remote deep south. It is no more a book about Argentina than an account of frontier life in Alaska could encapsulate life in the United States. What's more, as I've already pointed out, there are scarcely any Argentines to be found between its covers.

I'm still looking, even if Brian Winter makes a gaucho's stab in the right direction with his Long After Midnight at the El Niño Bien. This account of learning to dance the tango in the wee hours of the morning is resolutely focused on Buenos Aires, a city that resembles New York in the sense that, as Winter says, it ought really to be a completely separate country from the rest of Argentina. Nonetheless, both the tango and gaucho culture are right up there with Malbec on the list of things most foreigners would identify as essentially Argentine, and Long After Midnight does a decent job with each. The book is less convincing at forging a link between the two. When he asks where the dance comes from, Winter stirs up an ancient, troublesome debate amongst the group of cronies he frequents in the milongas, as tango halls are known. He apparently sides with "El Dandy," who attributes the origins of the tango to the gauchos, but I say apparently only because the opposing theories are never outlined with comparable clarity. (Winter's posse, always happy to be stood a round by the young Reuters Argentina financial correspondent, are referred to throughout by nicknames like El Tigre, El Chino and El Griego, and for me none of them really emerged from behind these masks of anonymity to become individual characters.)

Mi Buenos Aires, Querido

Winter makes a lot of jokes early in the book about learning to tango in order to meet women and relieve his lonely life in a distant city. He then falls in love with his tango teacher, something he cops to as a major cliché, but it is a savagely unrequited love affair that goes nowhere, and it ultimately feels a bit contrived, a convenient bit of plot paste to glue his milonga adventures together. There are lovely moments of self-deprecation here, however, as when Brian believes his foxy instructress has given him a unique whispered invitation to meet up after class for some serious partnering. Arriving at the dance he discovers only a table full of clumsy dweebs from every corner of the planet, a sort of kaffeeklatsch made up from the lovely Mariela's client list. It's my belief that making fun of oneself is the most effective route to humor in travel writing, and Winter comes up with some zingers. I particularly liked the opening to his epilogue: After I left Buenos Aires, I spent a year living in Mexico City, where I was the most grotesque creature imaginable--a Texan with an Argentine accent. I wore too many sweaters, I couldn't hold my tequila, I insisted on saying ciao instead of adios, and I had a strong urge to kiss everyone I met on the cheek, including men.

Winter dips into Argentine history, giving us Perón and populism, but he glances over the dictadura's more recent decades of horror, which he argues were less fertile ground for the tango. This is unfortunately akin to ignoring the holocaust in a consideration of the two Germanies, circa 1960. He argues that "the parallels between the fortunes of the tango and Argentine politics throughout history are truly striking," and goes on to say that the dark and melancholic tango "rose to prominence amid a time of prosperity almost unprecedented in the world; and then it nearly disappeared during the country's darkest hour." It is an elegant thought, but one which Winter promptly contradicts on the very next page, when he notes that between 2000 and 2004, "the worst years of the Argentine crisis...the number of milongas in Buenos Aires doubled."

A poster in front of the Casa Rosada demands justice

It is cruel but irresistible to point out that Winter, the Reuters financial correspondent covering one of the largest economic meltdowns of all time (at least prior to the United States of the last two years), demonstrates his perfect qualifications for a subsequent job as deputy foreign editor at USA Today when he opts to abandon the "astonishing sight" of thousands of demonstrators banging on pots and pans at 4 o'clock in the morning in the grand plaza in front of Argentina's Casa Rosada, the pink white house. Caught up in history, he succumbs to peer pressure and rushes off with his milongüero cohorts to visit a whorehouse.

Demonstration? There's a football game on...

Reading: Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe

About a decade ago my father predicted, in an entirely non-judgmental way, that by the year 2025 the USA would become a bilingual country, and that soon those unable to speak both English and Spanish will find themselves at a severe disadvantage. This demographic transformation began decades ago and shows no signs of slowing. In cities like Los Angeles and Miami bilingualism has been a functional reality for a long while already; the most enormous shift of the last decade has been the spread of the Hispanic immigrant presence from big city enclaves and the labor-intensive segments of the agricultural sector into every corner of the United States, from villages in Oregon to cities in Maine and horse farms in Kentucky. I view this vast hidden and spreading underclass of Mayan and Incan and Olmec descendants as just the latest of the many waves of immigrants to arrive, struggle, be exploited and dismissed, then ultimately integrate and finally be recognized for helping "to make this nation great." However, the reactionary forces today aligned against them suggest that the Ellis Island paradigm has been definitively abandoned. The country is too full, argue our governors and congressional leaders, some only one or two generations removed from Napolitan gardeners, Polish masons and Irish canal-diggers. The Mexicans, Salvadorans and Ecuadorians are not like our parents were, they say, they don't want to learn English, they don't want to integrate.


Current policy amounts to little more than a war on immigration, particularly the illegal kind. What we have now is an expensive disincentive program based on the notion that if we make it sufficiently difficult to cross the border, live, and work here, by building real as well as administrative fences, people will stop coming. At its most extreme this means that as a nation we now seem to be comfortable provoking aspirant immigrants to more and more dangerous crossings, in the asphyxiating bowels of automobiles, locked in shipping containers, or on foot across the most parched and forbidding corners of the desert, where many routinely die of thirst and exposure. But, like the war on drugs, this war on immigration is doomed to fail, and for some of the same reasons. Like cocaine users, we create the demand. Our comfortable cost of living is subsidized at every level by illegal immigrant labor, kept conveniently inexpensive by its very illegality. The undocumented underpaid have little recourse to collective bargaining and impose less of the costs of taxation and compliance with labor law on employers. Any urge to agitate for better pay or an improved situation is overshadowed by the threat of discovery and deportation. In order for our tomatoes and our remodeling projects and our lawn-mowing to cost us so little (so much less than they do in Europe, for instance) requires both the presence of the illegal immigrant and his lack of status. Furthermore, it is in our interest that wages stay low in the home countries, so that the tee-shirts, bananas, and auto-parts we import from down south will remain almost risibly affordable. It may be a Marxist platitude, but NAFTA removed barriers to the free flow of capital at the same time we were clamping down harder and harder on the free flow of labor. Given institutionalized inequalities like those that see garment manufacturers in Central American free trade zones paying their assembly workers as little as twenty cents an hour, labor will continue to take matters into its own hands, or feet.


We need them desperately. Without this army of Tyson chicken parts packers, Le Cirque pot-scrubbers, country club fairway manicurists and warehouse pallet-loaders, many of America's last remnant industries would grind to a halt. But many of us seem to feel we don't want any more of them, and we don't want to legalize the ones who are already here, and our culture is being eroded, and the other day I went into a grocery store and, goddammit, the whole place, from customers to clerks, was full of latinos gabbling away at one another in Spanish. Let's send them all back.

The raging national debate over immigration, and the public policy to match it, is as self-contradictory and bi-polar as that last paragraph.


In Just Like Us, Helen Thorpe has written a deft and compelling investigation of the current, messy, state of affairs. Her account of the trajectories of four inseparable Latina high-school students, two legal and two illegal, quickly leads us into a zone completely alien to that of the typical complacent Anglo citizen. It is a world in which every time a person gets into a car they need to worry what might happen if they should be stopped; one where inter-state travel is forbidding and dangerous, and international travel out of the question; one in which talented students, the country's future engineers, doctors and inventors--the exact same people who are meant to be innovating us right out of our current crisis and into a sustainable green economy--are stopped dead in their educational tracks for want of a social security card. Imagine a life in which any of the countless situations in which we are asked to show identification, from entering large office buildings, to renting apartments and buying used cars, is freighted with anxiety. No wonder the Spanish-speaking immigrant community turns inward and looks to its own for goods, services, and culture. Since I've never met a Latino laborer, legal or illegal, who didn't intuitively grasp that learning to speak better English would immediately translate into higher wages and better opportunities, it seems clear that right-wing complaints about the failure to integrate ignore the perpetual fear and justifiable paranoia that go along with being undocumented in post 9/11 America. I was reminded more than once of my own harrowing bus journeys in third-world countries, of arbitrary roadblocks where a request for papers might easily degrade into unpleasantness. I had thought such things only happened in countries I visited, not the one where I live. Just Like Us exposes a parallel United States many of us willfully ignore.

The clash between the embracing support system of insular immigrant life and a yearning for access to the opportunities outside it is central to the identity crisis faced by Yadira and Marisela, the undocumented duo who are the heroines of the book. Illegal most of their young lives, they are desperate to assimilate and to integrate, if those ideas include having the same possibilities as the fellow college students from whom they must hide their status. Both of them are strivers who ultimately succeed in attending college in their hometown of Denver, albeit as "international students" (an irony indeed) able to pay out-of-state rates only thanks to scholarship support from various sympathizers. They are, in other words, the elite of their particular underclass, fluent in English and willing to explore every avenue and lead that might help them advance. We realize that these are not representative illegal migrants. The fate of those many others in the same situation who might find the obstacles overwhelming is left implicit. While Yadira and Marisela ultimately graduate, this does nothing to change their situation; they consider going on to law school, but Thorpe suggests that, particularly for Yadira, this is simply a way of putting off the unpleasantness of facing the job market without any documents.


Thorpe spent countless hours hanging out with the girls, their associates and their families over five years, a dedicated, long-term journalistic commitment all the more remarkable because she had to sneak out of the side door of the Mayor of Denver's residence every time she wanted to visit the barrio. That may be an exaggeration, but even after writing this book Thorpe remains married to John Hickenlooper, Denver's popular liberal mayor. Despite his popularity he is far from immune to the political mudslinging that spatters the topic of immigration. He may even be particularly vulnerable to it, given that before going into politics he was a restauranteur. His restaurant company, now in a blind trust, apparently owns most of the eateries and venues in which illegal Denverites (once) wash(ed) dishes and legal ones pass their free time. Thorpe struggles to keep her home life of charity galas and formal receptions separate from her inner-city journalistic endeavors, until mid-way through the project. When an off-duty police officer moonlighting as a bouncer at a Latino disco is murdered by an illegal alien once employed in one of the mayor's restaurants, her worlds collide. I cringed to imagine the pillow talk that must have ensued in the mayoral mansion, although Thorpe swears in her acknowledgments that her husband never wavered in his support for her work, striking out only one word in the finished manuscript. If true it would have been as unsporting of her not to comply as it is rude of me to wonder what the word was.

In the context of blogging, the notion of offering "full disclosure" has a ring of pretension to it, but even though we haven't spent much time in the same social circles in the last fifteen years I will nonetheless mention that Ms. Thorpe is a very old friend of mine. When I knew her well there was no doubt as to her liberal political persuasion; nothing in this book suggests that she has altered course. But Helen is the farthest thing imaginable from a knee-jerker, and in search of journalistic balance she spends far more time than I would have hanging out with the sorts of people who want to build a razor-wire fence between Brownsville and San Diego. There are moments when she almost seems to warm to Congressman Tom Tancredo as he drives her around his old neighborhood, cracking mafioso jokes and telling fuzzy stories about North Denver's version of the San Gennaro festival. Meanwhile, he was plotting the closest thing our most recent elections saw to a single-issue presidential campaign. If it did nothing else, Tancredo's short-lived bid for the Republican nomination forced most of the rest of the candidates further to the right on the immigration issue. And even while the Democrats wrinkled up their noses in disgust they were sticking them in the air to gauge which way the wind was blowing.


With official national joblessness hovering somewhere around the ten percent mark you don't have to be an unemployed rocket scientist to figure out that anti-immigrant populism has a bright future. This is one of the grim lessons of Just Like Us, a book that ought to have a happy ending but instead concludes with its protagonists in much the same place they were at its beginning; after five years of senatorial hand-wringing and congressional pussy-footing, Yadira and Marisela haven't come any closer to being welcomed as productive, legal members of our society, despite their hard-won college degrees. The only really good news I have is to tell you what a pleasure it was to read their stories. Like a well-crafted Hollywood blockbuster, this book anticipates, nay, demands a part dos, and I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel, which I hope will be written in Spanish. Or at least available in a bilingual edition.

Haitian Flavor

I'm back in Haiti teaching sound recording to a fresh incoming class of eager film students at the Sine Lekol de Jakmel. Here are a few snaps, most taken out the window on the clogged drive out through the capital.

The "touch me sweetly" breakfast spaghetti cart

Copyright infringement

Rooftops of old Jacmel

The rebar delivery boy

Remember that you are only dust

The other White House

New York is not actually on my route

¿Como se dice "Goth" en Español?

This picture of the Obamas with the first family of Spain has been all over the interwebs. In the darkest corners of the web it is even fueling the assertion that our president is the antichrist, devil-spawn who consorts with demons and devils. (Not to start a new rumor, but I heard the state department suppressed some of the pictures from later on this roll, when this happy group was captured actually stirring a cauldron).

But after my bashing of goth culture about a month ago all such photographs have become vaguely relevant, which of course is all we really need to get us going over here at antarcticiana. Looking at this image, I now regret my cruel dismissal of the black-clothed army of teenagers who favor maroon eyeliner and combat boots. Simultaneously hunchbacked, bashful, excruciatingly awkward, and 100% goth, the Zapatero daughters make adorable poster-children for teen angst. One just wants to give them a big hug and tell them that it is all going to be okay, that it would only take a couple of yoga classes, a popsickle, and a pair of comfortable sneakers to make everything right with the world.

Click the image to enlarge

Via Nina Katchadourian, on her facebook page.

Westward, Ho: The long slide home from Newport

The final, belated third installment of a description of a sail from Newport to Mamaroneck

9/11/09
Somehow a day has gotten lost in the shuffle. It must be that our brief sail on Narraganset Bay was yesterday, the tenth, because the 11th was a drizzly gray day filled only by sitting around doing nothing. I was unmotivated to go ashore in order to walk once again Newport's strip of t-shirt shops and salt-water taffy purveyors, this time in the rain. I've determined that if we don't make a move tomorrow I will abandon Anthony, who is perfectly capable of single-handing Salomé back to Westchester County on his own. This will make for a grim and unfulfilled bus trip back to New York, but I can't devote any more days to hanging about in Newport Harbor. I don't tell Anthony that I am considering bailing out, however, since I don't want to influence his decision about whether the weather is or isn't going to be appropriate tomorrow. We think the winds will have eased off a bit and large swells will continue, but the forecast still calls for possible thunderstorms and a small craft advisory. We pass the day eating most of the rest of the food to be found on board, so if we do sail tomorrow there won't be much to snack on except feta crumbs and cilantro stalks.

"Insert totally fake posed action photograph of the Captain here"

9/12/09
We decide to go for it and are up at 7, removing the sail cover and listening to the weather. The harbor is enveloped in fog. Our radar is not working, but the visibility seems to be about a mile and we conclude that we will probably be able to see any gigantic ships bearing down on us before it is too late. Moments later in Narraganset Bay a monumental Norwegian cruise liner powers its way in from the ocean, emerging out of the fog like a towering white skyscraper, but the image resolves in plenty of time for us to stay clear. Once at sea we are glad to observe a small flotilla of other sailboats heading west for Point Judith, suggesting that we are not the only boat to have decided that today is the day to make a move.

"That's just swell"

Bobbing in the mists, we find a nice breeze and are lifted gently over the rolling swells. These are a good six feet or more from trough to crest, but in no way intimidating. A friend has offered Anthony a free mooring and an evening of grilled vegetables far out on the north fork of Long Island, so we decide to head that way and get the train back into the city in the morning. The breezes are light, but at last we are sailing. After a few hours of slow progress we turn the radio back on and listen to the canned voice of NOAA, which promises steady north winds of ten knots in Long Island sound, blowing right the way through the night. On a sailboat slowly moving through the water there is little to do but endlessly plan and replan the immediate future, and speculate wildly about the more distant future ("My NEXT boat will be..."). If we can make it to "the race," the passage where the tide rips in and out of the sound, in time to catch some assistance from the current, we might just make it back to Mamaroneck, Salomé's home port, by around noon the next day. We determine to sail through the night, taking three hour shifts.

"Checking the trim"

Anthony calls and cancels the barbecue and breaks the grim news that if we are to have any chance of favorable tides we must now motor for a couple of hours. I go below to nap and sulk, refusing to come back above decks until Anthony announces that we are through the race and the engines are going off. The wind immediately picks up, as if to welcome our green initiative. Then it really picks up, just as the sun is going down, and we wonder what we have gotten ourselves in for. The wind is off the rear starboard quarter and we can't seem to find a sail trim that will help Salomé hold her course--sailing her demands constant attention and course correction, and suddenly we are moving quite fast. Soon it is dark. The fog has cleared, but the cloud cover is so low that the towns and villages of Long Island and Connecticut are capped with blurry orange smears. Already visible at the far end of the sound is the biggest orange glow of all, New York City, projecting itself into the sky. Sailing, alone, gripping the wheel in the stiff night breeze while Anthony sleeps down below, I daydream about a reversal of the discovery of the Americas, and imagine Indians arriving in the America of today for the first time. Sailing down the sound as we are, without the experience of electricity, and certainly without a motor, they could only conclude that both shores of the sound are on fire. We are honking, doing between six and a half and seven knots. If the winds hold like we will arrive in Mamaroneck at dawn. I go below at about nine, and when I come back on deck to relieve Anthony we have already reached Middle Shoal. The hours between one and four in the morning are magical. One tugboat passes to the north of us, pushing a barge east, but it is the only other traffic to be found. I do my best to keep the boat in the dead middle of the channel. The temperature is perfect. There is no sound but the wind and the boat carving through the black water. Soon I am able to take my course from the distant beaded pearls of the Throgs Neck Bridge. When Anthony comes on deck shortly after four we are less than two hours from home, already sailing waters he knows well, easily visited on a day trip out of the city. At 5:45 we are high-fiving and, the engine back on, motoring up on Salomé's home mooring.


View Newport to Mamaroneck Sail in a larger map

After squandering vast amounts of time on Google searches and html manipulations, I have finally figured out how to implant a google map from the awesome GPSvisualizer into this blog. Look forward to viewing countless interactive maps of journeys you may never wish to take, plotted in extravagant detail. Note that you may zoom in and out and look at the trip at whatever scale you like. You may also click on any of the points marking the journey to read more of my snarky comments.

9/13/09
"Mamaroneck Dawn"

Most photographs: Anthony Chase

Southbound: Stuck in Newport

A Second installment in the exciting sail south from Cape Cod; see the previous post, first.

09/10/09

Another morning in Newport. We're considering going for a sail in Narragansett Bay, just to relieve the boredom. Conditions on the outside are, to judge by the tyrannical monotone of the National Weather Service's automated voice, still on the edge; a small craft advisory, a gale warning, and seas "4 to 7 feet." The weather is glorious and breezy here on the mooring inside the harbor; the danger in these situations is to let tedium overtake good judgement. The wind here is an ideal ten to fifteen knots, straight out of the east, and if we were to find the same conditions outside it would make for a perfect day of sail, a brisk tailwind skimming us effortlessly towards Long Island Sound and home. Instead we are sitting in the cabin, listening to gentle creakings in the rigging, both of us in desperate need of a shower. Every few hours we listen to a pessimistic weather forecast that in no way seems to reflect our reality.

Captain Chase curled up with a good book
Photo: Evan Eames

I have exhausted my reading material and made it some way through the onboard selections. Now I'm waiting for Anthony to finish reading Richard Price's Lush Life. Sitting around waiting for someone else to finish reading a book, that's what it has come to. This morning, in desperation, I picked up The Decorative Arts of the Mariner. It is not what is known as a page-turner. This large, dull volume compiles the prose of a gaggle of retired British Lieutenants-Commander and nautical museum curators, all experts in their arcane fields of hobby-study. In his enthralling chapter on decorative rope and canvaswork, P.W. Blandford notes that this form's development "was probably due as much to the need for an answer to boredom as to any intention of creating a work of art." Because "periods of intense activity alternated with days when there was little or nothing to do... the worker was looking for something to pass the time and maintain his interest for the longest possible period."

There must be some old twine or cord hidden away somewhere on this boat....

09/11/09

After a brief but exhilarating sail on Narragansett Bay, with strong enough gusts to remind us why we fear the ocean, we head back to our Newport mooring for another dozy afternoon. New topics of conversation are elusive, so we compile a list of the ten worst boat names we have come across. It astonishes me that people will spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a yacht just to paint a painfully bad pun on her stern. Don't get me started on tattoos.

Here they are, in no particular order. Should you happen to own a boat with one of these trite, hackneyed or otherwise painful names, apologies in advance for the disrespect.

Risky Business
Carpe Diem
Moonshadow
Sweet Action
Liquid Asset
My Mistress
Wind Dancer
Bad Boys
Time Off
Decisive Moment


The author on the starboard bunk, showing some gut, maintaining some perspective, and trying to remain patient by reading Adlard Coles' Heavy Weather Sailing, several hundred pages of small craft horror stories.
Photo: Anthony Chase

Southbound

The first of a couple, or a few, installments of the chronicle of an ongoing sail from Cape Cod to New York...

09/07/09

The ferry east from Boston to Provincetown today crosses a calm and silvery sea. On the PA system the ship's concierge announces ideal conditions for the crossing, "not like the past couple of days." He means that it is calm and windless. The hapless sailboats we pass in the harbor have given up their hopes for an exciting labor day sail, and they motor, with bare poles. This is as might be expected, since I am en route to meet Captain Anthony Chase and sail his boat, Salomé, back to New York City with him. My visits to that vessel have with extraordinary frequency been plagued by calm. Anthony and I have spent many afternoons together in Long Island Sound staring at a slack sail in dismay and watching bits of seaweed drift beside us, keeping pace as we bob, wakeless, praying for wind. I'm surprised still to be invited along, so consistently have I brought this sailor's curse along with me. Anthony and I both hate to start the engines, but we are usually forced to when the longed for late afternoon breeze invariably fails to materialize. The sheet of glass that is this morning's Bay of Massachusetts, and the immobile cottony balls of cloud pasted against the sky suggest that this trip will be no different.

Salomé on a windy day, on the outbound journey. I was not on board.

Evan and Ant pick me up in Provincetown for the drive down the Cape to Wellfleet, where Salomé sits on a mooring. They made the trip north last week, during which Anthony left me not one but two breathless messages of the "you don't know what you are missing" variety, describing deliciously favorable and constant winds, resulting in entire days spent scooting along on a "broad reach" without even the dimmest memory of even having an engine to turn to ever intruding into their delighted minds.

On board we optimistically remove the sail covers and then fire up the motor. Ostensibly this is to help us navigate the counter-intuitive zig-zag channel out of Wellfleet Harbor, but one glance at the pancake sea and I have no doubt that we will be burning fuel all afternoon. Anthony calls his wife, Nini, who does the majority of the landlubbing in the marriage. "Well," he says, "to be honest, we're motoring." He graciously avoids blaming this unhappy state of affairs on me. "Loooooosers...," replies Nini, and I picture her sitting in the country kitchen of her Catskills farmhouse, gleefully making the "L" sign with thumb and forefinger, and holding it up to her forehead. The afternoon is calm as we diesel across the placid pond of the Bay of Massachusetts. The water is flat. How flat? The stunningly round tomato I will soon chop into the the codfish ceviche rests solidly on the cockpit table, tremorless.

09/08/09

Yesterday ended with a long, slow slog through the Cape Cod canal, which connects the Bay of Massachusetts with Buzzard's Bay and points south, saving mariners the danger and distance of going all the way around the outside of Cape Cod over treacherous and shifting banks. Arriving at the canal's northern mouth just at slack tide, we opted to press through and find a harbor for the night. It is an impressive feat of labor intensive engineering, but the canal also serves as a pressure valve of sorts for the tides flooding in and out of Buzzard's Bay. Soon we were motoring against the flood, four knots of current charging straight at us down the narrow channel. We slowed to a crawl.

The sun went down, and it was dusk. The pedestrians out for an evening constitutional on the canal towpaths at first kept pace with us, and then began to overtake us. Not a few glanced over at us in puzzlement, perhaps wondering why we were sitting still in an active shipping channel. Then it got dark, and they could no longer see us.

Finally through, we found a mooring at Onset harbor. We enjoyed ceviche, and miso-marinated grilled cod, enjoying the culinary aspect of the sailing lifestyle, even if we had yet to do any actual sailing. In the morning a dead calm, much like the day before. Rather than subject you to more of the same, here is a short poem I've written to sum up the continuation of our journey:

DIESEL

Oh, glassy tedium

Oh, unwrinkled sheet

Of gently undulating mercury,

Stretched out beneath the leaden skies

The flaccid canvas hanging

Limply from the poles

Implies a long dull day

Of gentle chugging

A sailor's ambivalence

Drowned out by the steady throb

09/09/09

Our excitement at finally watching the sails fill with wind yesterday afternoon--a lazy five to ten knot breeze that gave us just enough of a torpid push to justify turning off the engine--was tempered with anxiety at the weather forecast. Since we were barely moving along through the gentle ripples on the surface, the prospect that today would see fifteen to twenty knot winds, gusting up to thirty, five foot seas, and a "small craft advisory," seemed unlikely, almost absurd, but the sailor who ignores the weather forecast is a fool, and we headed into Newport to sit it out. It is sunny and breezy. No boats are moving in and out of the harbor, and the advertised gusts have us rolling and swinging in the mooring field. There is little to do but organize the tool boxes, eat granola and imagine that outside the harbor it would be just about sailable, but risky, the kind of conditions in which a minor mishap or problem might easily spiral out of control. The wind whistles through the rigging, and the sound of slapping halyards on boats moored upwind carries far over the water. I fantasize about being out at sea, and wonder when it will be time for the next snack.

A breezy day on board Salomé, when I wasn't there.

Photos: Evan Eames

Reading: Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura Fuentes

It's 2005, and Havana's greatest detective, Lieutenant Mario Conde, has long ago left the police force, having resigned in protest when his incorruptible mentor, Major Antonio Rangel, was made a target by the Department of Internal Affairs. In the Cuban context this means that the fictional Conde (the Count) has joined the great swirling, crowded whirlpool of the internal brain drain. The premature retirement of innumerable professors, teachers, doctors and professionals to become tour guides, translators, taxi drivers and waiters has been devastating to the Cuban state and the revolution. The abandonment of public service, and, often, the life of the mind, for the service industry and a chance to access the all-important tourist dollar has, fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and world Communism, sapped the revolutionary potential of an entire generation of Cubans. That Conde's creator, the Havana writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes, has seen fit to send his ace detective into "retirement" and out into the wilds of the dollar economy has weighty metaphorical significance.

Mario's disaffection for the police force and his perennially postponed aspirations to become a writer of "squalid and moving" tales leads him inexorably into a new career as a used book dealer. It is a brilliant choice of destiny on the part of Padura Fuentes, whose detective novels always transcend their genre. For the used book-seller in Cuba is not the enthusiastic recycler of ideas and the noble guardian of our literary heritage that we sometimes imagine him to be here. (Yes, we are also familiar with the drooling ambulance chaser, picking through the estate like a crow nibbling at fresh roadkill). In Cuba, to be a used book dealer means that one is an active participant in the exportation of the country's culture, history, and patrimony. A looter, a defiler. No Cuban wanders the bookstalls of the Plaza de Armas in Havana with the wads of dollars needed to take home a musty, leather-bound tome. The client, everyone knows, is an extranjero, a visitor who will put that priceless volume in a suitcase and spirit it away, out of the country, forever.

Padura Fuentes, whose work I've written about before, is only getting better at stacking multiple layers of meaning within the basic structure of the noir crime novel. Havana Fever, as the UK-based Bitter Lemon Press regrettably insists on calling their translation of La Neblina de Ayer (the mists of yesterday), presents, like all of its precedents, at least one robust mystery to be solved, but the novel manages all at the same time to be a look back at the evolution and devolution of the revolution; an ode to books both as objects imbued with aura and repositories of wisdom, history, and inspiration; a chronicle of a ruined family and its satellite members; and a revelation of contemporary Cuban life.


It is tempting, although perhaps excessive, to see in the vicissitudes of Mario Conde's progress a metaphor for the revolution itself. He is getting old, and is not as indestructible as he once was. The hangovers once cured with a shower and some thick, cheap home-brewed coffee now linger long into the grim day. He has grown skinny from scarcity and may be willing to do things he shouldn't, and once wouldn't have, to ensure his own survival. In Havana Fever even his trust in his own atheism has grown shaky:

Conde had come to suspect that the blend of aging and disillusion overwhelming his heart might finally cast him back, or just return him, to the fold of those who find consolation in faith. But the mere thought of that possibility irked him: the Count was a fundamentalist in his loyalties, and converts might be contemptible renegades and traitors, but re-conversion verged on the abominable.

In this novel he is battered, beaten to a pulp and left almost for dead, but he refuses to throw in the towel. Once, he was the most incorruptible of police officers, and then the most honest and plain-talking of book dealers, but the end of this thriller will find him stashing away a cache of Cuba's most prized publications on his modest personal shelf. And weeping.

I'm going to leave many of Padura Fuentes' plot threads unpicked, in the hopes that you will seize the moment and read Havana Fever for yourself. I'll reveal nothing of the elusive bolero-singing seductress who disappeared from the nightclub stage just as the revolution was dawning, nor of the wealthy, handsome Batista-hating Meyer Lansky crony who flew off to Miami, leaving behind a spectacular library but no forwarding address. Once one really starts to appreciate what Padura Fuentes is up to, the lurid details of the actual plot are merely a fine veneer on the surface of dense layers of allegory.

Let's concentrate on the library, and the books. The logical extension of Mario's career is that he quests after libraries; his livelihood depends on those same skills with which he once solved crimes, except that now he concentrates on locating fresh supplies of ancient texts. It is a difficult task. When I was in Cuba in 2001, walking through the island, I had the impression that already every last stick of antique furniture, every jeweled brooch, every Tiffany lamp and every mahogany mantelpiece had already been removed from the country. The woman at whose bed and breakfast I lodged in Havana had a regular client from Italy who specialized in buying diamonds passed down through the generations, stepping in whenever necessity overwhelmed nostalgia. He did not visit while I was there, but nonetheless a neighbor came around once, in the hopes that someone, anyone, might purchase her mother's wedding ring. It was a squalid and moving moment. Padura Fuentes conveys the dismal dynamics of this Havana used trade with pathos and economy: Conde, standing before a grand but tattered mansion he somehow has never noticed before, imagines that "someone must have already beaten him to it, because that style of edifice was usually profitable; past grandeurs might include a library of leather-bound volumes; present penury would include hunger and despair, and that formula tended to be a winner for a buyer of second hand goods."


The brother and sister who inhabit this house, in which Mario Conde discovers the ultimate library, have already sold off “the noble bone china dinner services, repoussé silver, chandeliers...,” and it is only because of a solemn, fifty-year old pledge that the books still exist. But there they are, untouched except for their ritual biannual dusting.

The reverence with which Padura Fuentes has Mario Conde enter that chapel of reading and savor the spines of those all-but mythical volumes rivals the bibliomaniacal inventions of Jorge Luis Borges. Not since the Argentine master has a library been this breathtaking, important, and charged. Naturally, it is in this place that the clues to two murders await revelation. But here also is inscribed the entirety of Cuba and, perhaps, much of the author’s personal cosmogeny. Mario immediately spots the Alphabetic Index of Demises in the Cuban Liberation Army “from its rare 1901 single printing in Havana,” and The Coffee Plantation, which “Conde’s fingers caressed even more lingeringly.” These are apparently real, rare, books, but their titles alone illuminate the march of Cuban literature and history, from sugar and coffee to slavery and rebellion. Here, too, is a first edition of “El Negrero,” (The Slave Trader), by Lino Novas Calvo, which I bought a couple of months ago in a painfully crumbly acidic paperback edition from an online bookseller in Venezuela, because Padura Fuentes recommended it in a 2004 "ten best" novels list. This is not the only cross-reference to the Cuban writer's other work: The previous Mario Conde novel, Havana Black, opens with two quotes. The first, from J. D. Salinger, reveals the forgotten (by me, at least) template for Conde's now five-novel predilection for all that is "esqualido y conmovedora." "I'm extremely interested in squalor," Esme tells Salinger's narrator. Now, in Havana Fever, the battered Conde, during a semi-conscious reverie as close as Padura Fuentes has yet veered towards the postmodern, encounters Salinger in an orange jumpsuit, and castigates him for no longer writing. The second quote is from José María Heredia and relates to that feeling of grim but almost sexual anticipation for the onslaught of an impending hurricane, a theme Padura Fuentes has repeatedly made his own, but which also constitutes a pivotal moment in Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, suggesting that the tense and frantic waiting for a deadly but purifying cyclone constitutes an essential aspect of the Cuban character. On the last page of Fever, it is a thin but priceless volume of Heredia's poetry that Conde gives to his beloved. As usual, it's all about the reading.

Arthur M. Schack for Mayor!

This guy is our kind of public servant.


...

It's been out for almost three weeks...

If you haven't read my father's new book yet, GET WITH IT!



I know, you thought he was a medievalist, but John V. Fleming steadfastly refuses to be pigeon-holed, and in about the time it takes me to put together a decent blog entry he wrote a fascinating analysis of four books very much of and about their time: those grisly years of intrigue between the wars and after, when our necessary alliance with the Soviet Union morphed into the cold war. You might call it a literary procedural; he follows the evolution of four writers who, although initially captivated by Communism, turned away from Stalin and survived to tell the tale. Ultimately each wrote a book condemning the Soviet incarnation of their once-beloved ideology, and these books are the heroes in my father's account; the authors range from the shady and frustrated one-hit wonder "Jan Valtin" to the tortured genius Arthur Koestler. That their motivations and aspirations are often unclear makes this an all the more fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

Goths by the Seashore

It may only be because I'm getting my 2008 income taxes in order today, and therefore find myself easily diverted, but I think Goths trying to take their vampiric selves to the beach makes for some hilarious bloggery.

I've always thought gothicism a particularly weird and self-conscious youth subculture, a fashion statement searching for a cause. The purple fingernail polish, the black Stevie Nicks dresses and the cruciform jewelry have always seemed nothing more than a pitiably transparent attempt to piss off the parents rather than actually transgress anything. All that darkness, mascara, those coffins, cobwebs and wistfully depressing music for me add up to little more than a Halloween costume adopted as lifestyle.

Perhaps I need enlightenment, but is there a goth political point of view? Or is it just gloominess for its own sake?

Whether you are in touch with your own dark side or not, this blog, which I discovered courtesy of Tim Broun's facebook feed, is HOWLINGLY FUNNY.

And in today's news

I'm sure there are other blogs that compile telling headlines found in the major media, but when the New York Times has three obvious candidates on one front page in one day, it is hard to let it pass.

U.S. Helps Spanish Company to Buy Texas Bank

Where’s the Rulebook for Sex Verification?

Maybe It’s Time to Change Credit Cards

Fort Defiance in full effect...

I didn't manage to take any pictures of the dancing throng at proprietor St. John Frizell's birthday bash at Fort Defiance on Friday night, because I was too busy selecting 45s back by the pass-through next to the kitchen. The original improvised deejay booth, the best seat in the house at the street end of the bar, had to be abandoned due to technical difficulties, and I ended up in a little nook near the basement stairs, with my boxes of records perched on top of tubs of cutlery and piles of napkins. From time to time I peered out into the room between records to gauge the crowd's reaction. I had forgotten how short 45rpm records are. Like the ubiquitous babies of Red Hook, they need constant changing. (For those of you too young even to remember what 45s are, they are 7" in diameter vinyl--analog--"singles" containing no more than two or three minutes of music per side).

We rocked the house until 4:30 in the morning and left the place a sweaty mess. By Saturday morning, so I'm told, the Fort was already back in business, serving Red Hook's most delicious sandwiches, coffees, and, well, actually, let's not talk about the cocktails right now. I would have blogged this yesterday, but I didn't really get a jump on the day...

Happy Birthday! You don't look a day over forty!

Retirement is overrated...

On the basis of a couple of ipod playlists he heard while over at my place for dinner, St. John Frizell of the fabulous Red Hook eat and drinkery Fort Defiance has humbled me by accepting my offer to become the Fort's house deejay. It's been a few years, or more, but I'm coming out of retirement, dusting off the crates, and sharpening my needles. If you are in Brooklyn this Friday night, August 14th, stop on in for our debut jamdown. Friday also happens to be St. John's birthday, so you can buy him one of his own splendid cocktails. See you there!

A Dip in the Pools

A couple of weeks ago Cabinet Magazine hosted a pseudo-secret after-opening party around the corner and across the bridge from their digs on the sunny banks of the Gowanus Canal. At Cabinet we first experienced Nadia Wagner's scent-piece, essentially a white gallery of sheetrock invisibly permeated with the odor of primeval European forests. We were then treated to a presentation involving an array of perfumer's odors, from scatol, reminiscent of the most intestinal moments of John Water's smell-o-vision experience, to pleasant waftings of jasmine and rose, both synthetic and natural.

What is fascinating about scent as an art form seems to me the homogeneity of humanity's reaction to it, across all class, cultural, racial and geographic borders. A concentrated foul odor will cause an instinctive recoil in a Congolese pygmy and a Swiss bureaucrat alike. In contrast, a painting, or a color, a sculpture, or a texture, no matter how loathsome I might personally find it, will have its champions and defenders. There is certainly a spectrum of scents, and we may differ about some smells (for years I found the particular odor of eggs being cooked in butter unsupportably revolting), but generally we are in agreement; there is in smelling a kind of aesthetic universality. Only the self-consciously contrarian or the allergic will claim to dislike the odor of a flowering rose-bush after a spring rain.

After sniffing until the mucus membranes of my ethmoidal labyrinth were begging for relief, a posse of us trundled across the often wiffy Gowanus to the Macro-Sea dumpster pools. My ignorance of this Brooklyn summer experiment should be taken as evidence that I have been doing all manner of productive things other than swanning about the internet reading lots of other blogs, because the pools had already been blogged to death without my having noticed so much as a ripple. On the evening of the Cabinet event even the New York Times got into the act.

All that can be seen of the dumpsters are their ends, painted and stenciled macro-sea. A staircase leads up to decking built flush with the surface of the water. After pouring sand into the bottom for a soft footing, the giant bins were lined with gargantuan polytarps. Presto. Instant pool.

The Gowanus dumpster pools are exactly what their name suggests: swimming pools made out of dumpsters, situated near the banks of the Gowanus. Don't be confused into thinking they are full of water from the canal, however. They are clean and turquoise and inviting and have pumps and floating chlorinators and inflatable toys and decks and deck chairs. We are not talking here about those trapezoidal green oversized garbage cans on wheels, but rather the mammoth multi-cubic yard construction debris dumpsters which so often and so recently used to line Brooklyn's streets before the current global economic unpleasantness put an end to all that eager renovating. In other words, these are twenty or thirty foot long reinforced steel boxes, shallower but much stronger than shipping containers.


A couple of creative folks had the idea that for minimal money it would be possible to turn an underused vacant lot (of the sort rarer and rarer in Brooklyn these days, full of encroaching weeds, abandoned cars and parked construction vehicles of dubious utility) into a summertime destination, an unpretentious and relaxing neighborhood splash. One of them, it turns out, is an old friend, Dave Belt. I had not seen him since very early in this millenium when I visited him and his wife Antonia Wagner (no relation) in the hospital to meet their newborn baby. The woman I was splitting up with at the time won them all in the divorce, or at least that is how I stupidly imagined it at the time. In the long interim Dave has grown a beard, and it took me a moment to recognize him. His daughter is now a ravishing and vivacious eight-year-old with a younger sister. It was a wonderful and unexpected reunion. Dave reminded me that he and Antonia met at a party while I was deejaying, so I take credit for their whole splendid nuclear family situation. No need to thank me, just invite me over for another swim!

Grilling by the macro-sea-side: Dave says he is particularly fond of the matching squadron of red barbecues.

A couple of days ago we dropped by with some shrimp. Some fellow grillers had just finished cooking and they urged us to use their perfectly serviceable coals.

Post swim and post-shrimp: Harmon and Najafi face off on the bocce court.

Aaaah.