This Is Yr Day: February 2009

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

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.

Monday, February 23, 2009

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.