Notes On Brutality And Cultural Relativism, Or: What's On The Drinks Menu?

Yubaker plays Nepali heavy metal music on his mobile phone as we bump along in a van through the dull, blue-grey dawn. It sounds like a low-fi Iron Maiden with the lead singer wailing in Nepali over whining guitars. Past the morning bustle of the Kalimati vegetable market, past an oddly anachronistic Playboy Whiskey sign. Up through the hills and trees – a soft and hazy approximation of the Santa Monica Mountains but with temples. Dammit, cold shower this morning cuz the generator wasn’t on yet when we got up at 430am and now winding and wending to a Hindu temple, we three vegetarians apprehensively expect that we just might witness the sacrifice of a goat. Go, Cultural Relativism, Go! That’s an abandoned cement factory, bombed-out and in a state of remorseless decay, and I can’t help but think again and again that this is not our past but our future. Blade Runner after the BOMB. (Note to self: Buddhist science fiction film). The buses and water trucks are decorated with righteous iconography and poems – poems writ large on a tanker truck! The impetus to write poetry on automobiles denotes a decidedly Un-Western perspective and in the villages women in saris shower in the open air and men in trousers and sweater vests brush their teeth at the side of the road. We drink sweet tea in a dirty parking lot. We breathe cold air that smells like campfire and sunbeams. We walk past the beggars and the vendors along the path to the hollowed ground. But Jesus Effing Christ the temple is wild and brutal! Barefoot on cold damp tiles and tika powder and – no joke – blood, yes BLOOD running across the ground and only the smell of burning incense, everywhere burning incense that bleats out the odor of so much death, and all the while Yubaker texting on his mobile. The music is nice when it whirls but… Where are the Buddhists? Or the Jains? Gimme my people cuz I can’t handle the liquid and the violence, I think I’m going to be sick, yet even in the face of redlined ritual, home is still a distant simulation. What’s the idea, here? I do feel sick. And then I feel sleepy. And we all wash our feet and maybe try not to think about it. Finally, today’s big lesson comes at dinner: NO POWER. NO BLENDER. NO COCKTAILS.

Travel Notes On Time Expansion

Keep moving, keep moving. Dramatically, intentionally. Unintentionally. Somewhere it’s tomorrow already. Might as well be here. Taipei to Bangkok. Hot hot weather. This is the Children Of Men for LA. Yes, Bangkok, the Los Angeles of the future. Reclining Buddha smiles sweetly for our cameras but security is none too pleased. The three Americans disappear. Quickly. No harm, no foul. Priceless boat ride on the river at sunset, who cares? with the wind in your hair and the low rent apartments on stilts and the kids swimming under a burning sky and amulets that can protect against everything and anything for just 50 baht. And then the night markets. What’s “pussy ping pong” anyway? If you don’t know, please don’t ask, just move on to Hong Kong and fog and hills and neon and 3am 7-11 missions complete with disposable underwear. What’s next? Kathmandu, which must be the noisiest Zen destination on the planet. Yes, Shangri-La is endless honking taxis. Dust. Exhaust. Passing bananas. A sparkle ahead is a Coca-Cola billboard. Eff it anyway, Disneyland hasn’t colonized just yet. Beautiful Hair Now – Life Can’t Wait says the next sign, though beautiful hair is the last thing on your mind. Scarves, face masks, loose clothes, and the Government Ministries building is ornate and white but stained like old dentures. The traffic circle must have been invented here, or at least reached its pinnacle in the haze of the Kathmandu Valley. This city feels like a chain of linked, chaotic, traffic circles. Did I mention there are no lanes, no stop lights? It’s the festival of Shiva, by the way, en route you pass the Terminal Café, which sounds like the name of a William Gibson novel, and maybe this place is more like a William Gibson novel than an antiquarian travelogue when DVDs occupy market stalls beside prayer flags and someone takes a digital picture of us from the back of a rickshaw. Chaos chaos chaos. Several hundred thousand people all festive, yeah, bearded, stoned, glassy-eyed, hollow-faced men smoking ganja, and pyres, yes burning bodies transcending this world, or whatever. Oh and time expansion, right? This is day four and I feel like we have been together for a month at least. How much raw, unmitigated, disparate, contradictory, visceral, vital and uncompromising life can you pack into a day? The more you experience the longer you live, innit? It’s not just the difference. Really really, it’s hardly the difference, babe, it’s the experience. And time slows, and time slows, and time slows, as we keep moving, keep moving, ever Westward. And if we feel everything then we are bound to something, eh? tied and true, or maybe tried and blue, and if we never stop we can outrun the pangs of the Modern World, I know it I just know it, walking awhile side by side by side at the far end of the map, just past the near future where time matters or doesn’t, yeah, just beyond the International Date Line.

Khao San Blue Shoes

BANGKOK

1. Please declare your insects at customs.

2. Job's Tears

3. Apathy Delk

4. Three Americans (almost get arrested at the Wat Pho Temple)

5. Khao San Sandals

6. Riverboat at sunset.

7. Protective amulets

Living It For The Moment At The Taipei Intl Airport

1. Brutal accounting. Tragically bad movie.

2. Back rooms of Chinese restaurants. Anonymous hotels. Reagan-omics. Flash forwards to my past.

3. Sweet and sleepy hold-up.

4. Book tour roll-in. Murderous toys. The blue's too blue and the green's too green.

5. Hint at the past but never show it. Well, maybe show it a little.

6. Studying for CIA personality tests.

Fan Letter

     So here it is. Please don’t call this a fan letter. Although, I guess that’s probably the best description. Lawrence Durrell wrote to Henry Miller, so writing to you seemed…okay. First off, your book is vivid, brutal, economical, touched, wild, flailing, uncompromising, renegade, true, and – correct me if I’m wrong – very much alive. At the end of Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen merges literature and bubblegum pop, infinity and the comic strip. Who else? Dean Young. But you too.
    Leonard Cohen, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Koch, Joseph Brodsky, Dean Young, and now this. And that’s just the poetry. Not that I am trying to imply any lineage for your work. Just a lineage for my inspiration. Joseph Brodsky writes like water (and as David Berman tells us, “all water is classic water,”) – like water in a glass, in a stream, in the ocean, not to mention mist and rain and evaporating steam, and ice, Brodsky definitely writes ice. But if Brodsky’s words are water, yours are a whiskey and cola with a menthol cough drop dissolved in there – it may not cure everything, but it’s an effing elixir!
    I can fall in love with a girl with nothing more than a phone call. And a book can be the same. A page! Just one page can do it! And then, obsession. Or maybe not so much obsession as doting. I dote on books. Try to read them from different directions, get them to love me back. Sometimes I read them backwards, reading a page and then reading the previous page and so on. Is this insane? How many sit-ups must I do, how many books must I read to make her love me?
    What is that line about questions in a letter? Not that I expect you to have the answers anyway. Or maybe you do. Your work certainly implies a vast knowledge of these types of things. Page 136 for example – ah but that’s solitude, isn’t it? I’m trying. I’m really trying.
    I went to Uganda and I couldn’t write a word. This was almost a year ago. I wrote so many more words about having my tooth pulled – which was bloody and visceral – then I wrote about all my time in Uganda. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be there and write about it, as if these were two separate existences that cancelled each other out. And then, just last week, I could. I wrote about it in the past, but the past as if it was the future. Maybe it will be the future. I wrote simultaneously about what had happened and what might happen. Wrote about myself there with entirely different people and entirely different experiences. This means something, I am sure. About writing or about love, I know not. Maybe writing is about the dissolution of the perception of linear time. Or maybe that’s what love is. Or maybe love just makes us rewrite our experiences with our fantasies. Do you know? Can someone write a book so good and not know?
    I went to Berlin, I went to Amsterdam, I had a toothache. I wrote these words once: “you know how you can see the breeze in a photo? / It’s kinda like the feelings in a letter.” Do you understand what I mean? I wish I was writing to a girl.
    I used to think a poem was all you needed to make someone fall in love with you. Has it ever worked for you? I don’t think it’s ever worked for me. Although maybe a poem is not the best thing to found a relationship on anyway. What’s next? I had a horrible, horrible dream last night. But I woke up feeling so invigorated.
    I’m not going to sit here and analyze your poetry to you. What a waste of time. The combinations of words in my analysis could never begin to say a tiny bit of what the combinations of words in your poems say. But I’m trying to tell you, at the very least, that it means a lot to me, this book with your words. It was Andre Velter who reduced his biography to one single word: traveler. I like this. I read his poem Frontiers translated into English from the French by a publisher in New Delhi, India. This seems fitting. What I’m saying is that geographical expanses conflagrate my heart. But your writing does something altogether different – like positioning the epic at the meeting point of my foot and a dented soda pop can. This blows my mind.
    What else? I dunno. I guess my task is complete if I’ve communicated in any real way the meaning of your book to me, how grateful I am for you writing it. Put on some tea, turn on the teevee and call it a night. Good job.

a forgotten turn of phrase: one shot of circumstantial poetry

1. Back from Holiday hiatus.

2. "Walking along the Champs-Elysees I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say 'health' I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. 'I have only to talk about a meal,' he say, 'and you're radiant!' It's a fact. The mere thought of a meal - another meal - rejuvenates me. A meal!" -Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Grove Press: 1961. Pg. 49

3. Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 77

4. Jacques Prevert

5. Writer's conferences and gunfighters. Directors. Forgotten names. Industry. Robbery and sympathy. Literature for airports and technology.

6. Tell a lot of story, fast.