Climbing Huang Shan

Megan and I have just spent 4 days in Huang Shan, which is a small city in central China near a famous mountain of the same name--one of the seven mountain pilgrimage sites that Chinese, if they’re lucky, visit in their lifetime.

We arrived late and caught a cab directly to our hotel. Apparently here in Huang Shan--like in the capital--the taxi fleet has recently been overhauled; our cab is one of the new omnipresent brown and yellow Korean models that is reliably metered and air-conditioned. I guess we have the upcoming Olympics and the wonders of a centrally directed government to thank for this. (Last year we were told that the government was cracking down on honking and spitting, this year we are told that they seeded rain in Beijing for over 20 days in July to help clear up the pollution in preparation for an Olympic committee visit. Indeed, when we arrive in Beijing in mid-August we are treated--a first--to several days of clearish-blue sky. Of course, the rain merely pushes the pollution into the ground and after three weeks in Beijing, balanced by 4 days around Huang Shan mountain and 4 days in Tianjin, the 5th most polluted city in the world, I will be dried out, puffed-up and congested. Nothing like a 13-hour plane ride to push you over the edge, right?) For now, though, we have arrived at our hotel pre-reserved for us by a travel agent in New Zealand. As you do in the global village...

The next morning we awake to another great “Continental” breakfast. Of course you have to remember which continent we are on. In China, breakfast can look a lot like other meals: wontons, meat or vegetable filled buns and black vinegar, fried noodles, greens etc. There are a few additional items that make breakfast unique. They are: warm soy milk, congee (rice is to congee as oats are to oatmeal) and hard boiled eggs--which are browner in color and taste a lot gamier (not chickens? or not a product of industrial processing and bleaching?).

After breakfast, we catch a cab to the bus station. When we get in, our young and hip-hop listening cabbie honks through the usual pedestrians, cyclists and--this is relatively new--electric moped commuters. With a show of Western amity, he cranks up the hip-hop music (it’s 7:30 in the morning!) and turns to smile at us and give us the thumbs-up in the back. He also takes the opportunity to check Megan out--whose big, blue eyes and bust attract a lot of frank, as opposed to leery, stares here in China.

En route, our cabbie convinces us to let him take us all the way to the mountain instead of just the bus depot. This is done through several mimed gestures and a series of price negotiations carried out on a pad of hotel notepaper that we pass back and forth. There appears to be some question about whether we want mountain/destination number one or two which never gets resolved, as hand-gesturing and grunting is rather limited at coaxing out this type of subtlety in communication. We’ve found that a pad of paper or a calculator--even a cell phone keypad--is ideal for negotiations as the Chinese have their own hand and finger gestures for numbers which are as hard for us to figure out as our system of holding up fingers for each place holder (first the tens, then ones) is to them. For some reason our cabbie won’t write on the notepaper, no matter how I try to indicate that there are many pages of the stuff and you can just rip one off and start on another, preferring instead to write everything on the cardboard backing of the notepad.

Our cabbie, in true foreign-cab-driver-style, drives like a madman, passing two and three cars at a time regardless of visibility, the existence of guard rails and/or oncoming traffic, and soon enough we arrive at the gates of the mountain. There is literally a big, red wooden Chinese arch-gate at the main entrance.

After paying the entrance fee, which is 200 yuan or RMB for me (about $25) and 100 for Megan (she is still using her International Student Identification Card which says she is 26), we consult--for the umpteenth time--the three pages which we have torn out of our guidebook to save on weight, and which are our only, however meager, source of information about Huang Shan--the mountain and town. We decide to take the shorter 7km steps Eastern route up the mountain, reserving the harder 15km Western route for the way down and the cable cars whisking bus loads of Chinese and Korean tour groups up and down both sides of the mountain for the weak. And without so much as a deep knee bend (or a decent supply of food and water), we are off and climbing an endless line of stone stairs, surrounded by a forest of bamboo, then trees and then, finally, steep mountain peaks.

Megan has her small black umbrella out to protect her fair skin from the sun and is calling out the names of plants as we walk. This is the same ubiquitous umbrella that she carries with her, rain or shine, which makes her--with her sun glasses and scarf--look like Marilyn Monroe on vacation in Ethiopia, the Sierra Nevadas and, now, Huang Shan. Apart from the umbrella, our three now tired guidebook pages, a couple of bottles of water, four snickers bars, a tin of wasabi-covered peas and a bun from the airplane, we are fairly unprepared for this hike. I’m wearing casual shoes and will learn later that besides the sweat soaked t-shirt on my back and my cargo pants all I had packed was a torn and hand-cut American flag tank-top and a pair of lacrosse shorts. Megan is wearing her MBTs and a black corduroy skirt. I guess we’ve been in France long enough to dull our west coast REI equipped-to-climb-Everest-even-if-we-are-taking-a-long-weekend-in-Milan reflexes.

Lucky for us the weather is 80 degrees and overcast rather than raining hard or blaring sun as it could have been. But it is humid, so although we make it to the top in only about three or four hours, we are definitely sweaty. Walking up--step, by stone step--is extremely fatiguing, but we decide that it is probably easier on the legs and ankles, if not knees, than a sloped dirt trail. At the top, the warm, misty and overcast weather, near perfect for hiking, obscures most of the incredible panoramas and makes even capturing the peaks we can see near impossible without a better lens and tripod. We are not terribly bothered, for now at any rate, as our main concern is finding someone to point us in the direction of our hotel. It turns out that the summit is more like several ridge trails and peaks, rather than one, so it is not clear which way we need to go. Though our guidebook pages and map do contain place names in Chinese as well as in transliteration, the map and place names do not seem to correspond to the Huang Shan and trail maps we are seeing in front of us. (In China, it’s best to have everything written down in Chinese characters if you want to get around. Since the language is highly tonal, even repeating a street or hotel name to a cab driver or passerby can produce haphazard results. I guess it’s lucky Megan and I went to that “mime” school in Paris.)

We eventually make our way, even more tired and sweaty, to our hotel and check-in. After a quick shower and change into my lacrosse shorts and muscle shirt pajamas-come-casual-attire, it’s about 4pm. We decide to head directly to the hotel restaurant for a late lunch. Besides the omnipresent snack stands along the trail offering cucumbers, Chinese sausage-on-a-stick, water, coke and the like, the only other alternative is the Friendship store at the hotel. We figure we’ll buy some stuff from there to improvise a ramen dinner or something. Cultural note: not too long ago foreigners to the “Middle Kingdom” were not aloud to go just anywhere or buy whatever they wanted, lest they poison the communist comrades in the street with their capitalist ways and seditious democratic ideas. Instead, they were given a special currency and invited to shop at designated “friendship stores” and lodge at “friendship hotels”. The term “friendship store” is typical in its Lost in Translation bubbly, happy Asian style. All over the place are signs for parks and such with names like, “Park for harmonious living with Nature park”.

The hotel restaurant--one of three--is more overrated, than overpriced. Megan and I are more than willing to pay $8 for the meat or vegetable stuffed buns with black vinegar that usually cost between $0.50-$1.00, however, for we had seen how most of the supplies get to the top. And it’s not in the cable car. It’s guys with a yoke on their back and another for balance and leverage carrying up loads on foot, one step at a time. We saw sacks of food and rice and even buckets with water and live fish going up, as well as laundry and garbage going down. And, apparently, this back and leg breaking work costs less (charges less?) than the cable car, which I can tell you was about $10 for a passenger ride up.

So, we are in the middle of placing our order when a cockroach (okay, not as big as the one that I took a picture of on the trail, but still pretty big) calmly begins making his way around the edge of the table. Just as calmly, and following my eyes follow its progress, our waitress takes a napkin from the Lazy Susan in the middle of the table and balls up our unwanted dinner guest in her hand.

There isn’t much to do at the peak, the main attraction being the great views still shrouded in a misty grayness and the electric sunrises still over 12 hours away, so Megan and I settle in to some deck chairs to watch bus-loads of Chinese tourists following tour guides with headset microphones and flags. There is also a basketball hoop which is presumably the employees only recreation. I tell myself that if my legs weren’t so tired, I’d show them what it really means to push the pumpkin (not in my central Chinese mountain shrine, boo-yah!).

More than other groups of tourists or people, the Chinese make a lot of noise. Between the talking and hacking (remember that spitting, although now fined in many places, was traditionally considered a way of getting rid of bad throat spirits) and picture-taking hubbub, it’s a real tintamarre. This probably explains while all the tour guides need amplification. I like to correlate this cultural trait to the population size. Like they say about growing up in a large family, you learn to speak up if you want to be heard. And hey, the Inuits aren’t known as a loud people, are they?

One of the traditions of Huang Shan is for lovers to engrave a padlock with their names and then attach the locks to anything that is, well, chained down. And indeed, there are hundreds of padlocks hanging from the guard rails of every viewing site. So many, that the chains and bars are completely covered with them and they continue hanging the locks from each other. It looks like dangly mats of metallic wooly mammoth hair.

When we go to bed--it's only like 8pm--Megan and I disagree about what time to set the alarm clock for in order to catch the sunrise. Megan says 7am should be about right. I’m not sure whether this is wishful thinking or some sort of inference from what the light looks like when she usually wakes up at around 10 or 11 (am). I propose 5am. After a bit of negotiating, we settle on 6am. This, of course, is a great example of how compromising can be a zero-sum exercise, because not only will we miss the sunrise but we will also lose an hour of sleep.

In the end, it doesn’t make much of a difference, because the sun only comes out for the briefest of moments the next morning. Indeed, between 7:07-7:09 the sun rises from one set of clouds, illuminating the mountain top to the tune of a digital picture snapping applause, then promptly climbs back behind the clouds and humid mist from whence it came. (As I read this aloud to Megan, she points out that this means she was technically right about when to wake up.)

We walk around to a couple of the lookout points and add our canon clicks to this matinal mountain-tourist concert, before stocking up on supplies, checking out and heading off down the mountain. Today, with only Korean peanut crackers (yuck) and Chinese mooncakes (double-yuck) for sustenance we are going to descend the 15km Western trail.

Our legs are still a little soar and weak from yesterday’s exertions, as we follow a ridge trail for about 6km. Along the way, we get to see most of the famous vistas, rock formations and ancient double-trunked lovers trees that Huang Shan is surely known for. When you only have two pages in a guidebook that covers all of China, details like this are often omitted. The map, however, does indicate that we should continue to follow this ridge to get to the head of the Western steps.

After about 45 minutes of ridge line, the trail heads downhill, step by step. We quickly decide that going down the stone stairs is at least as tiring as going up. We go downhill for about 3km, and our thighs and knees begin shaking and trembling after the about .5km. It’s about 10:30 in the morning when we arrive at the crossroads. Now, in addition to being weak in the knees, we are sweaty and hungry.

We rest and snack for a few minutes, then begin looking around for the Western steps. I am figuring that we have already knocked off 3 or 4 of the touted 15km. The English location names and directions on our guidebook map--once again--do not correspond to the names and directions we are seeing on the trail maps, so we ask for directions from one of the ubiquitous park employees who go around with what look like really large chopsticks picking up litter and emptying the even more ubiquitous stone garbage boxes. One might hope that with a garbage bin every 15 or 20 yards along the trail, people wouldn’t litter. But that would be wrong, at least not here in central China. Of course, maybe there is a correlation to the number of people that you see picking up trash and your incentive to carry that snickers wrapper another 5 or 10 yards to the nearest garbage bin.

But I digress, and that’s probably because the answer we are given is so distasteful that even now I am trying to avoid relating it. When we show the park employee the Chinese characters for “Western Trail” in our guidebook, he points back up the path we just came down. My first reaction--one of base and survival instinct--is that this Chinese guy must not have understood. Or maybe he doesn’t know how to read. Or maybe he is trying to play a trick on the foreigners. Anything, basically, but the fact that it might be true. However, soon enough it becomes apparent that, indeed, errare humanum est. And that in this case, the humans in error--and now despair--are us.

Now we are faced with a decision: either hike back up 3km, find where we missed the turn off for the Western Trail and then hike down 15km; or continue on in this direction for several kilometers and take the cable car down. I’m not really sure how the next bit happens, but after agreeing that we don’t think we can make it--not on day old legs and a dwindling reserve of Korean crackers--Megan and I shoulder our backpacks and head back up the hill.

One of the things that keeps us going over the next several sweaty and shaky-legged hours is the thought of how good it’s gonna feel to dip into the natural hot springs that our guidebook says are waiting for us at the bottom. In fact, it is probably this same sulfuric vision that charmed us into going back up the trail to find the Western steps in the first place.

Hours and rocky ridges and steep staircases and thousands of stone steps later, we reach the bottom. We even decide to walk the extra couple kilometers from the gate to the parking lot and bus stop, rather than wait or pay for the shuttle. After all that, we find that the hot springs are closed. They are being renovated, probably for the darn Olympics, into some sort of big hotel hot spring and spa complex. Although, I have to say that by the time we get there it doesn’t much matter. I am just ready to get out of there and get back to our hotel in Huang Shan where I can take a shower, eat a decent (Chinese) meal and lay down.

Although we don’t do the hot springs, that evening Megan and I get 45 minute foot massages when we got back to town. Chinese massages are excellent and very cheap, but I can tell you that they are not recommended after a two-day hike when you’re muscles are already tender and sore. I was slapping the side of the massage table and giggling uncontrollably (it was either giggle or scream like a little girl) the whole time. The two masseuses seemed to think I was pretty funny. I just thought it was painful.

The final note on this story is that we spent the next day discovering Huang Shan, which mostly involved huddling in a Chinese restaurant for hours, waiting for some people to come in and order something so that we could point to it while staying out of the rain, thanking the lord it hadn’t rained on the hike, and planning out the theater workshops that we would give when we got back to Beijing.

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Best Man Speech for Jesse and Rebekah's Wedding

On behalf of everyone here I’d like to thank Jesse and Rebekah for bringing us together to celebrate with them on this beautiful occasion.

Now I was told that I had to keep this to under 45 minutes, so I’m going to get right to the point.

Rebekah, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, but do you realize that you have just legally agreed and bound yourself to put up with Jesse and his shennanigans in a long term and committed way, till death do you part. No, really, Rebekah, I hope you know what you are doing. We don’t all necessarily understand why, but “Thank you!”

I’ve known Jesse just about all my life, almost as long as I can remember, and several times I would prefer to forget, so I know what I’m talking about when I say, Rebekah, I hope you know what you are doing.

Now unfortunately, the problem is that most of the embarrassing stories I’d like to tell you about Jesse, incriminate me just as much as him, so I can only hope that you know what you are doing.

What I can tell you about Jesse is that he rolls through life collecting friends and adventures like dirty laundry collects around his room--laundry that doesn't always belong to him (when we lived together in Fremont, he used to slip his dirty laundry into my basket hoping I’d wash it for him. Now that’s what I call a free-loader). And even though Jesse was known throughout high-school as the mooch, he is one of the most generous people I know. Jesse is a rogue and a lover with touches of genius.

He is one of the last great explorer spirits. He has a great sense of direction, adventure and luck. He is mythically optimistic, to the point of bending the truth. And he’s a good tipper.

Jesse's the kind of friend that you never leave, not even when you're a thousand miles away. You can not hear from him for six months. Then he'll show up on your door step out of the blue, give you some of the best advice of your life over a beer then suggest opening a store based on bulk peanut butter or smoked salmon flavored deodorant.

And it's like you never were apart.

When I asked Jesse how he felt about marrying Rebekah, Jesse said, “It's like going all-in pre-flop with a good hand. Who knows what could happen on the turn or the river, but you're happy now and you know it's going to be an exciting ride so you're ready to get stuck in there. What could be better than that?”

Jesse is a great teacher and guide to man, child and dog. In fact, you can pretty well understand who Jesse is when you know that for a long time he had a book in his bathroom called, “There Are No Bad Dogs.”

I guess that about sums Jesse up.

Rebekah, I hope you know what you are doing, because even if you don’t, I do, you’re choosing to spend your life with the best friend any man, woman or dog could ever ask for.

So knowing all that I know about Jesse (and quite a bit of stuff I wish I didn’t), I can say that I have absolutely no reservations in raising a glass, and inviting you to do the same to toast Jesse Haggar Long and Rebekah Lynn Long:

As Jack Erskin used to say, “May the road rise up to meet you, and may the wind be always at your back”. L’chaim, take care and get stuck in there!!!

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Nutmeat: A Burlesque Fairytale

With each new flop, incompetent puppeteer Ramon Martinez pushes his family closer to starvation. The battle between quixotic idealism and the reality of failure mounts, as frustrated wife Mimi resorts to knitting dinner and their adolescent son Martín seeks solace in an anatomically correct Barbary organ...

This physical comedy from French-American troupe Sous Un Autre Angle is quite charming in a sad, slightly grotesque way, and so far has been my favorite Fringe show. Written by Megan Campisi with the three main actors, it tells the story of Ramon Martinez, a puppeteer not really worthy of the title, and his wife and son who are cowed and starving due to his insistence on continuing with the family profession which isn’t earning anything. He tries to stage fairytales, but something always goes wrong to ruin the show, and it’s quickly clear that the Martinez’ own story is the real fairytale – of the dark, anxious Grimm Brothers sort (though O. Henry’s semi-uplifting “Gift of the Magi” takes a bow too). It’s painful to listen to Caroline Reck play the wife through an ill-fitting pair of fake bad teeth, the songs of the android-like Barbary organ that the son falls in love with are headache-inducing, and at times the slapstick is a little too slow-paced to be pulled off. But the company does so much with minimal set and props, and they strive and sorrow so winningly, that it’s hard not to be drawn to all of the characters, even the imperious Ramon. Nutmeat’s mixture of silly and dark jokes amuses but also cuts to the quick at times, a combination that makes both seem more real and makes the show as a whole rather artfully engaging.
(At Access Theater, 380 Broadway; http://gothamist.com/archives/arts_and_events/)

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Nutmeat refers to the sweet salty fatty goodness that drives us all to crack, chew, and rip our way through nutshells. And the nutmeat that awaits you in this 55-minute nutshell is the sheer pleasure of watching actors' imaginations at work. Though these pleasures aren't quite enough to hold this flimsily constructed show together, audiences should still catch this rare opportunity to see an NYC performance created by the always playful and often breathtaking alums of the highly distinctive physical theatre school Ecole Jacques Lecoq.

The tale, scripted by writer/director Megan Campisi and told by the players from Sous Un Autre Angle ("from a different angle"), concerns a family of impoverished puppeteers (hysterically pronounced "pooh-pah-teers" by the family's patriarch Ramon Martinez). Father Ramon builds puppets and, with son Martin, performs fairy tales which, without fail, end in disaster: tangled marionettes, torn costumes, and raging infernos, to name a few. Mother Mimi knits the family's woolen attire and there's also a barbary organ (played by Caroline Reck), "carved" in the likeness of Mimi, who belts out her own versions of (un)forgettable classics like "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Martin is in love with the mechanical chanteuse and the Oedipal implications are orgasmically sung out by the organ as Martin coitally "cleans her pipes." When the Martinez family's dinners devolve from pretzels to paper potatoes to yarn, Mimi and Ramon make a fairly grim—or Grimm; this is a billed as a fairy tale, after all—decision which I'll leave as a surprise, but all wraps up rather happily by show's end.

So, that's the plot in a nutshell, as it were, but unfortunately, it's neither engaging enough nor the relationships satisfying enough to make for hearty theatrical fare. But then there's the meat! Delights abound in the form of a virtuosic mime sequence, an outrageously clever puppet show performed by human marionettes, a butcher-paper set (credited, along with all of the production elements, to the ensemble) which the actors "change" with a sharpie, a charming stick puppet journey...the list goes on. The audience gasped and giggled at these theatrical treasures, and the glimpse into this collective's unconscious is well worth the price of admission.

At times, however, the ensemble falls victim to its fictional family's foibles, mostly in the form of continuity gaps: If they're so hungry, why do they crush stray pretzels (curiously packaged in a Smartfood popcorn bag) underfoot? If Mimi desperately needs wool to keep food on the table, why is a long piece of yarn forgotten on the floor? And if the barbary organ is made entirely of wood, why aren't her movements more consistently, well, wooden?

The ensemble expresses an endearing and palpable pleasure in performing its creation. Boomie Aglietti is quite a bit of fun as a proud Spaniard in the tradition of The Princess Bride's Inigo Montoya, and Max Dana is sweet as the mostly mute Martin. Marc Boucai and Lisa Frank make delicious cameos as the utterly adorable marionettes, and Campisi and Reck ably play Mimi and her wooden likeness, respectively (though one wishes that Mimi's false teeth did not muffle her voice so much).

As Ramon confesses, "Not every story has a nutmeat." While you might leave Nutmeat longing for substance, this ensemble's playful diversions certainly gave me quite a bit to chew on."
Copyright ©2006 The New York Theatre Experience, Inc. All rights reserved.
-http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/prnn/187.htm

More at www.kevinlapin.com

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The Kingdom of Dates

As you fly into Saudi (the Kingdome of) airspace, the flight attendants come through the cabin clearing all signs of alcohol. Then they distribute your landing card, where you have to identify your religion. Apparently, Christian and Muslim are the only acceptable responses.

When I came here with Jesse five years ago, I was surprised to find myself not wanting to write Christian on the little yellow card. As you may know I'm not a “big jew”, though as a Kohen (a priest from the tribe of Levi and a direct descendant of the Biblical Aaron) on both my mother and father’s side I could be called, if you were Hawaiian or my mother, a “big kahuna”. Nevertheless I was in a bit of a dilemma; something about knowing that Jews are not allowed in the country, I guess, even if I didn’t feel personally offended. I thought about leaving the question blank or writing Buddhist, but in the end decided it wasn't worth the hassle. You've got to pick your battles, right?

Inspite of, or because of, being conscious of not giving myself away, I found myself coming out with Yiddish words in random conversations, the types of Yiddish phrases that I don’t normally even use. I would be visiting a teacher’s house and admiring all the different decorations that they had acquired from Indonesia and Africa and say something about how I loved all their tchatchkes, or I would describe the usual food stain on Jesse’s chin and shirt as a bit of schmutze. We also had a funny moment when a teacher was talking about a race called the Hash and Jesse asked him whether he had some. Silence.

This time around I am prepared, at least for the landing card and long lines at customs, but sure enough as I'm filling it out I realize that the book I am using as a support, the one book I'm bringing into the country, is a Primo Levi book called “The Periodic Table”. Gulp. And as I'm reading the first few chapters I realize that it's not just a book by a celebrated Jewish holocaust author, it's his memoirs and the first few chapters are filled with anecdotes about his crazy Jewish-Piedmontese ancestors and all their funny sayings and quirks. In French this is called an acte-manqué, the Freudian slip of your actions/intentions. Oh, I wonder why I would have done that...

We started hanging out with a really cool teaching couple, the Gallaghers. The first thing they asked us when we walked in the door of their suburban house (suburban except for the compound walls, bomb proof security gates and Saudi desert beyond) was “white or brown”? This referred to the color of moonshine we wanted. The brown is the same distilled white alcohol that has been soaked in Jack Daniels bbq wood chips. It actually tastes pretty good. It's funny seeing grown adults discuss their “connection” meaning getting some smuggled hops to make beer in their house or a new batch of white.

Later in the week we go for a drive into Khobar (the city near the Aramco oil compound). There was a bombed out building where they had chased some Al-Queda, which they only refer to as deviants, then got in a stand-off and blew them up.

We learn there is no dancing in the Kingdom, or that’s not quite true, there may be dance places we are told, but women are not allowed. While it is not uncommon to see two men holding hands in public, public displays of affection between husbands and wives is frowned upon, between unmarried couples unheard of. Even the weddings are celebrated separately by the men and women. It’s one of the few times outside of the house that the women are able to dress in their jewels, western clothes and lingerie. The combination of this religiously repressive and gender segregated society leads to a certain amount of homoerotic and homosexual behavior among the men (and camels?) and apparently when you mix in a lack of sex education in schools the result is that it is not uncommon for women on their wedding night to be taken to the ER because they have been sodomized.

Women are also not allowed to drive, or only if they get a royal decree. And when his aforementioned royalness died recently all the state and oil employees got a raise or a bonus of one year's salary. Thanks to oil revenues, Saudi standards of living are extremely high. Manual labor has to be imported from Pakistan or India. I got the sense that Saudis sort of disdain this type of work and believe that they are above it.

People are quite friendly to us. There are a lot of security checks and although it is super strict it doesn't seem like suicidal fundamentalist crazy, though I guess they just send those types to Pakistan and/or fund them. And of course the oil continues to flow like ambrosia from the heavens at about 95 cents a gallon…

We meet another couple called the Snakenburgers. Both of them are gym teachers from someplace in the Midwest. I think because they spend all day yelling across gymnasiums their voices are a combination of loud and hoarse, even in small rooms, and this adds to their hard-core-Harley-driving-leather-wearing-beer-drinking mystique. We go over to their place for cocktails and a poker game. Snake, as even his wife calls him, tells us to remember to bring our swim trunks. “We like to party,” he tells us.

He’s right. They, too, immediately offer us glasses of brown or white, and then the homemade beer is pulled out of the fridge from behind the wet bar which has been built into their living room. Snake is, no surprise, a fairly aggressive poker player. He goes big and rarely goes home. He also likes to be in charge of rules and etiquette. At one point, he kind of starts barking at this neighbor who is a secretary at the embassy or something for making an inappropriate bet or maybe she went out of turn. It’s her first time playing and she breaks down crying. Snake doesn’t appear abashed.

At the next break in the action, Snake says, “follow me” and leads Jesse and I to his garage where he shows us his and his wife’s Harleys (the description above wasn’t just for effect). He explains that they even started the Saudi Arabian Harley club or something. Then he fires one up. Again. He’s revving it louder and louder and with the garage door closed it’s hits a deafening roar. All the while he’s grinning, slapping us on the back and explaining how he and his wife like to go to Bahrain (which he draws out into a Bah-rain) on the weekends to party at the yacht club where they are members. They don’t own a boat, but enjoy the privileges.

Back inside the game continues and pretty soon a woman arrives and joins the game. She is playing completely wild while continually laughing and chatting away about anything and everything. It’s hard to decide whether she is drunk and has no idea how to play poker or she is working us. She will call a raise and then turn over a small or middle pair, and the next hand win big without apparently knowing that she has the nuts. The next thing you know, she is standing up, waving an arm in the air like a rodeo rider and grabbing her crotch to emphasize a point. What point exactly, I can’t remember. Maybe it was just shit talking, which between her and Snake there is no lack of, in quantity or volume.

The party breaks up and Snake tells us to put on our trunks while he sets up the music. He drags two huge speakers out to the backyard where there is a small swimming pool. Now the classic rock (I remember a lot of Eagles) is booming out over the swimming pool and down half the block. Did I mention it’s a school night?

If we were wondering what kind of partying Snake and his wife liked to do, now was the moment of truth. We came out the sliding door to the wave of music and to the site of both Snake and his bobbing in the pool with big cups of moonshine beer in their hands, you know those plastic cups that you can put in the freezer to keep your beer extra cool on a sunny day or Saudi night…

I remember feeling nervous. I wanted to hide behind a fern like Ben Stiller in “Meet The Fockers”. Pretty soon though, Jesse and I are bobbing in the pool as well. We are kind of facing each other talking and I know Jesse is thinking that this is about one of the craziest situations we’ve ever gotten ourselves into (and Jesse’s been around the block, in fact the equator, once or twice too). Somehow it comes out that Snake was a collegiate wrestler for one of the big Midwest wrestling schools like Iowa and he is explaining to us how he mastered the arm drag, had taken it to new heights, past the technical, made it into an art form. We make the mistake of telling him that we wrestled in high-school and now Snake wants to demonstrate his stuff. Jesse kindly volunteers me and next thing I know I am being arm-dragged through and around the pool. Ground, water, sky, ground, water, sky. “What do you think of that?”

Jesse keeps talking about, “next year in the Kingdom...” and I have to say I don’t know at this point whether it is a threat or a promise.

Welcome to Saudi. The Desert. A kingdom of dates, but not dating. It's kind of like what Vegas would be like if it were run by Mormons.

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Brementown

"Brementown" is an adult and children’s paradise (for ages 7 to 77) which combines the magic of fairytales with the dynamic synergy of sound, shadow and object puppetry. Our story starts with a normal living room where the everyday objects we know so well transform into the characters of the story: a bellows becomes the head of an out-of-breath and aging donkey and the old tomes from the library shelf create a tall-tale-telling rooster literally filled with stories... The wonder and magic of the performance style will please the young while the deeper human themes brought out by our production will engage the more mature. Plus, "Brementown" leaves text behind and lets the virtuosity of the puppets tell the story for themselves, creating a truly international theater experience!

More at www.kevinlapin.com

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The Cradle and Crush of Humanity

My friends,

I recently returned from a trip to Ethiopia (the word trip somehow seems more appropriate than vacation). Some of you have been eagerly waiting for details or photos of our time in the "cradle of humanity", and I apologize for the delay, but it has been hard to sit down and write something.

Contrary to my previous trip around the Middle East and Africa, I have not felt the urge to write witty travelogues or goofy stories. Don't get me wrong, it was a lot fun, an amazing experience, but very intense and also somehow very elusive. Hard to chew up and spit out what you can't swallow, I guess, but here goes…

As I think about the trip, all the people we met and the injera we ingested, all the beautiful places and things we saw and all the ugly things we didn't want to see but needed to, the miles we drove and the showers we didn't take and the way time often seemed to float and drift like an afternoon nap, I think about catching and singing the sun in its flight with Jesse "hold-em" Long, getting to know Rebekah "café-con-leche" Fletcher, watching Trika "sparkling rain" Harm Zum Sprekel effortlessly making friends and, of course, spending every second possible with Megan "bad ass" Campisi, and when I try and think about all of this now, sitting here on the border of the 19th and 20th arrondissements in Paris, something about the whole experience is hard to grasp, hard to define. Somehow too personal or too grand for the simple recounting of.

You see, you have this idea about what your Africa experience will be, but like a zen koan it eschews you. I for example had this idea about being able to observe these tribes that we were going to visit during out trip around the south, ideas about observing their 'otherness', their 'purity', or something like that. Observe as in calmly, from a distance.

In the capital, Addis Ababa, you're fine, because regardless of how awkward or different it is, it's still a city and so you can understand how or why people and things are the way they are. If you've got money you can get around, go out to bars, restaurants, or even Salsa classes at the Bulgarian Embassy. There are just enough idiosyncrasies to remind you that you are in a foreign land without making you feel lost. For example, besides the food and language there is the time which is measured with a 12-hour day starting just after daybreak at 1-o'clock (7am our time) and ending at dusk at 12-o'clock (6pm our time) and the calendar, based on the Julian system, which is about 7.5 years behind our Western Gregorian calendar.

But then you leave the city and find yourself in the heart of the Rift Valley. You step out of your 4x4 Land Cruiser in your first local village, and Whabbam it hits you. You are immediately surrounded, overwhelmed, lost. You thought you came to observe and look at these remote cultures, but you quickly realize that it's you who are being observed, you are the spectacle. Everyone, especially the kids, wants to hold your hand and show you something, they are asking for caramellos (candy) or they want you to buy a picture or beads, look at their goat, their hut, their wound, their baby. You feel like a movie star, everyone is watching you or wants to talk to you, just to say hello.

You have to know what you want, otherwise you will spend your whole visit to a village saying no thanks or haggling over a price. You have trouble seeing or focusing on the experience because there are so many kids and people around you, in your space. You don't realize it yet, but the experience you came for is right there in front of you, in fact the experience is pulling on your shirt, is smiling for a photo and asking you, "hey mister, 1 Highland" (Ethiopian brand of mineral water, the empty plastic bottles are useful and desired containers) or "please, I am student 1 pen".

You can't be afraid of reaching out and touching the experience, being touched, and as hard as you are reaching for that quintessential "African experience" or even that "deeper, more real thing", the more you find yourself back-peddling, taking a stance, playing a role, rationalizing, distancing yourself, thinking about what kind of story this might make, getting claustrophobic, hot, hypochondriac (it's terrible to find yourself worrying about diseases every time a little boy or girl holds your hand) or you just space out which is one of the mind's best defenses against this unknown and uncomfortableness.

More than once I made the mistake of offering something (a candy or Highland bottle) to too large a group of kids and had to watch as kids trampled and fought with each other over it, crying and screaming. This reminded me of a scene from a Primo Levi book where he witnessed a son strangle to death his own father in a blind struggle for a piece of bread that someone had tossed into their train wagon bound for Auschwitz.

But don't worry; it always comes back to you.

People are struggling or perhaps just plain living without any of the comforts and luxuries, like electricity and clean water, that you can't imagine living without, and they are more visibly happy and alive than most people you see at home. You find yourself feeling guilty, lucky, but wondering if you come from such a lucky country, why do people at home seem so much less happy and alive than these people? Then you question whether you are really helping or only making people dependent on begging by giving out that 1 bihr. You ask yourself how much can you give and is that enough? Are you supposed to just give everything away? If you don't give something, does that mean you are giving nothing? And what about teaching a man to fish, isn't that better than charity?

And so on and so forth you spin and spin the wheels until, selfishly, you feel a little defensive about being so lucky, maybe justified, angry even. Then you feel at home again, because you're thinking about you and not it or them or the little boy with black, dusty buns holding his or her hand out to you or maybe just sitting there with conjunctivitis clouded eyes. It’s safer thinking about you and what you are feeling, but is that the experience you were looking for?

It's not an exhibit.

It seems a little obvious, but you have to realize that there is a difference between what you are doing and visiting a museum in order to get passed that desire to "observe" and "study". You have to accept that by going you are contributing to the contamination of these tribes' culture and way of life, even though that is what you have traveled so far to see and experience. Which is growth and which is contamination? It's like a quantum system you can't observe it without influencing it.

I tried to short-circuit some of these mercantile and colonial mind-traps by juggling for people, but my (Western) idea of what that meant would often get in the way. It took me a while, for example, to realize that juggling doesn't necessarily mean sitting quietly and watching/appreciating my performance. I had to make it clear that these colorful balls weren't meant as gifts and weren't filled with food or beads so they shouldn't be grabbed out of my hands and torn open. And why shouldn't they think this? Most of the other stuff I was pulling out of my pockets were gifts.

Once I could get going, the kids were generally excited to watch and would even give me a ball back if I dropped one, but they were just as likely to keep inching forward wanting to touch or examine the balls. One time in the main village of Omorate some kids ran off and disappeared with my juggling balls. After explaining that I wanted the balls back and offering a small reward (1 ball, 1 caramello), I got all but one of them back. This was about half-way through our trip through the south and I was starting to feel a little used and tired.

Finally, we had to leave and I explained where our campground was and offered a reward of a few bihr if someone brought the final ball back. I had forgot that our campground was about 60 km back down the road near a smaller village called Turmi.

I was completely surprised when that night two of the older boys showed up at the campsite with the last juggling ball. It had been opened and sewn back together again, but it was there. The boys had paid 10 bihr each (which is like the equivalent of several days work) to hitch a ride on a transport truck to get there and had no way of getting back until the next day. Of course I gave them enough money to pay for their trip and a place to stay the night, but I was really touched by how far they had gone to return the ball. It was sort of a turning/breakthrough point for me.

After that I think I kind of loosened up and started having more fun. On our last visit, with the Mursi tribe known for their body painting, lip plates and aggressivity (the guidebooks warn you to watch your socks and the guides repacked our trucks so there was nothing on the outside) we ended up spending an hour or two with them. Afterwards our main guide/driver and friend, Germa, told us that most of his trips only spend about 10 minutes with the Mursi. I ended up playing catch/juggle with a couple of men and women mixed together, was able to joke around, ask questions and even didn't mind the woman who put the lip plate in my hand right away and then came back every 5 minutes to tell me I had to pay her 5 bihr for it. When I finally accepted and paid her, she immediately palmed a bihr and counted back to me that I had only paid her 4 bihr. I just laughed and shook my finger at her.

The times I felt the clearest about visiting these tribes, that is to say the most helpful, was when we were giving out the boxes of medicine and anti-fungal cream we brought along. It definitely seemed like a better thing than giving out candy or money. And I don't really like to buy stuff that I'm not going to use, so apart from the few souvenirs and beads for Megan I purchased, I wasn't doing a lot of "supporting the local economy". Aside from digging a well or something, giving out medicine seemed like a pretty good thing.

But still, I have to say that I think this ends up being another, perhaps more defensible stance, that you take to, to avoid being touched by the experience. It's not an equal form of interaction. Because however helpful what you're giving is, you stay in a power structure of I have, I know and I am giving to you. It's a simple relationship, we know its roles and how we are supposed to act in it so we don't have to struggle with this other more obvious thing: cultures and human beings who are very different and yet very much like you.

In the end, I had to give up or at least put aside a lot of my questions about "helping" or "hurting" and the ideas I had about what my African experience would be like. When I finally did that with the Mursi tribe, I realized that I had a lot of fun. I met them where they were at, not where I wanted or imagined them to be, and if that meant that I ended up haggling about a lip plate in the middle of playing catch with some people, then that was okay too.

I would say I learned that If you push through the differences to the similarities (or vice versa) and aren't afraid of getting dirty or a little malaria or yellow fever or diptheria, then Ethiopia's rewards are worth it.

Egziyaber istelign (may the Lord bless and give to you)
Beh-teh-leh-ku Ewedehalehu (I love you big)

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Gong Hey Fat Choy

see all the Silent Night greeting cards at www.kevinlapin.com

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Love and Hate (after Robert Frost's Fire and Ice)

Love and Hate

Some say it's best to rule with love
Some say with hate.
If there's truth in life above
I hold with those who favor love.
But in our present state
I think I know enough of fear
To say that for ruling hate
Though no more dear
May be our fate.

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Rough Cut

Stonefence

What I remember most about working on my college’s literary magazine The Stonefence Review is warmth and laughter. In the late spring and summer, a certain easy, languid light would stream in and warm us from the outside; the rest of the year, steam heat and tea would warm us from the inside. Monday afternoons, we would meet in Sanborn library, surrounded by shelves of old books and sitting in big comfy chairs, to read and discuss the latest batch of poems and stories that had been submitted to us. This cozy atmosphere created a literary and critical mood that made us more prone to jocularity than to passionate debate, or any other emotions you might associate with working on a literary magazine.

After we had read and discussed a piece we would vote on whether to hold it over or not. Since every piece, which remained anonymous until publication, would be reviewed and voted on a second time before making it into an issue of the Stonefence, the whole thing remained a pretty easy-going affair. The focus and discussion was always on the text at hand, never on the author or on The Stonefence Review as a magazine. And the discussion, though critical, was usually pretty good-natured.

I think we were all a little wary of becoming some sort of pretentious literary clique; the result being that we probably often fell short of hypocrisy, landing instead on the fartsy side of artsy-fartsy. For example, it never failed to get a giggle from us when Giano Cromley would finish reading another of the 'you broke my heart and left me love rants' and announce, "a poem, by Chris Ferry" or insert one of the other editor's names who happened to be present.

We weren't (overly) unkind, and we weren’t elitist about our 'art'; although that was something of the reputation that the Stonefence had inherited, and this despite the fact that the submissions and weekly meetings had always been open to anyone in the community and that everyone attending could vote. Quite the opposite, if some of the laughter was directed at, rather than with, the poems we were considering for publication, it is not that we were being snobbish, we had all written and would probably write several hundred kilobytes more of similar "angst" ridden love poems ourselves, so it was wise to have a sense of humor about it.

Everyone knows that one of the Ten Commandments of writing is "write what you know", and, frankly, what else did we know about life at that point. I mean we were all sitting there in the safe and warm comfy chairs of an Ivy League library working on a literary magazine 'fer goddsakes', right?

I shouldn't give the impression that the poems and stories were all terrible or that we were really that jaded. We took the Stonefence Review seriously; we just didn’t take ourselves too seriously. And most of the submissions had at least a glimmer of quality. If they lacked the same polish and perspective that we as writers and college students lacked, what could you expect?

The whole process of selecting pieces and publishing them was a little like going to skip rocks at the beach. There was never a shortage of rocks (submissions) from which to choose, but no matter how hard you looked, you could never quite find the perfect one. Like most rocks you find at the beach, the majority of submissions were rough or uncut, and generally unsuitable for skipping, or publishing. The really raw and uncut poems, intensely felt and written during a late night burst of creative inspiration, tended to fall short of the mark the morning after, making a dull, failing impression (kerplop!) when they were read aloud (perhaps for the first time) at one of our Stonefence meetings.

Many poems, or some, had different aspects of a good skipping rock: a phrase here, an image there, but most, as I said before, just hadn't been refined enough to go the distance (…across the great and timeless seas of literature and art…). The end result, though, after a bit of enjoyable searching and digging, was a handful of rocks of varying qualities that taken as a whole made for a good hour of skipping--or in our case, reading.

Basically, we were a group of people who got together once a week who truly enjoyed reading, listening to, discussing and finally publishing a journal of poetry and prose. Perhaps that warm light that in my memory (I'm trying to forget the longs weeks of waiting for winter to pass and spring to break) was always streaming in the windows mellowed our moods a little and helped us to take the Stonefence Review with pleasure and a certain healthy lightness. In the end, I think I got more from those meetings in the way of learning to enjoy and to appreciate language and literature than I got from any 'lit' class I took in college.

Stonewall
So except for one notable exception, I remember Stonefence meetings as being a good time and worth a guffaw or two.

That exception came about while we were working on putting together our summer issue. We were all sophomores (perhaps in more ways than one) on the editorial board at the time, and someone had submitted to us a short story that by all accounts was, well, rock solid. If most of what we read wasn't perfect, or far from it, this story certainly came the closest in my book. It had all the elements of great art: it was entertaining, beautiful and thought provoking.

It was the story of a college guy just like you or me (or James Joyce) out walking on Friday night, checking out the 'frat scene'. The whole story was basically a recreation or retextualization of a chapter of Joyce's "Ulysses". It was written in perfect Joycean style and in a setting that all of our readers were sure to recognize. In fact, if you had been to almost any college campus or fraternity row in America, you could have read and enjoyed this story.

I was told later, after we had read the story and voted to hold it over for publication in the forthcoming issue, that the author had submitted the story as a paper in an English class on Joyce and had been given a rare and coveted citation for it. So for what it was worth, a literature professor and Joyce scholar had apparently thought the story was pretty good too.

During a meeting of just the managing editors, I learned that not everyone shared this rosy opinion of the story. I can't remember exactly how it was brought up, but a couple of the editors questioned whether we, The Stonefence Review, should publish such a story?

This took me by surprise, as I saw no reason why we would even be discussing such a question. First, it would probably be the strongest piece of writing in the whole issue and I was proud of it. Second, the story had already been voted on and accepted during the regular review process. Third, we had made a clear editorial policy that the Stonefence would be a magazine that was open to all types of content and styles, and that we would publish submissions based solely on aesthetic and qualitative considerations, not political or other.

The story was at its core a satire of the college fraternity and social scene. Although the account was fictional and no real names were used, it had clearly been based on the writer's experiences and observations at Dartmouth. The geographic layout of the fictionalized 'frat row' was recognizably Dartmouth’s, and apparently the description of one of the fraternal songs overheard by the protagonist could be identified as belonging to one specific fraternity. Dare I even now mention which one?

As it turned out, the two most vocal proponents for not publishing the story were brothers of that same fraternity. Surprise?!? That being said, all the members of the editorial board, including myself, belonged to one fraternity or another.

The two editors in question felt the story was unfair and was a personal attack against them, or at least their fraternity. They even suggested that the story could be considered slander or libel and that we could be opening ourselves to a lot of trouble by publishing it. I believed the story, to its credit, exceeded the particular details of which ‘house’ it may have been based on and was at once describing and being critical of the fraternity system in general, and from there the college social scene as a whole.

I did some research and found that for something to be legally defined as libel or slander it had to be knowingly untrue and created with the express purpose to harm the reputation of a specific person or organization. I showed this to the editorial board and argued that the story failed to pass the test on both accounts, and that given our editorial policy we had no right to stop a story from being published that had already been properly and democratically voted on and accepted. This lead to some long discussions about whether a fictional story could be considered libelous and whether we would be effectively taking a political stance by allowing the story to be published.

The two opponents of the story made some good arguments about needing to be responsible for the content of our magazine and any harm that it could cause. What if it was a fascist oriented tract, or had been critical of Jews on campus? They also made some arguments that were not as good, like threatening to quit working on the magazine if we published the story.

I felt that the story was good and moreover that the criticisms leveled against the fraternity system or college social life were accurate. Although I was sort of the de facto editor-in-chief of the issue for having been doing most of the work on it, the decision was clearly going to be decided by the group, and the other three members of the editorial board were sort of divided or unclear about what they wanted. It seemed, as the meeting carried on, that the majority was swaying towards the path of least resistance, which would be not to publish the story.

The situation was made more difficult by the fact that I had known all of the other editors since our freshman (first) year, one since elementary school, even. I didn't want to disagree or be disagreeable and found it hard being the only one arguing in the story's favor. Even if I had had the ability or authority to just make the decision, I'm not sure it would have been the right way of dealing with the situation. Mostly, I guess, I wanted the other editors to like me and didn’t want to appear to be an asshole. I was trying to be reasonable.

We went back and forth for a couple of hours and finally left without coming to a resolution. I was confused and nervous. I couldn't believe that it would even be a question of whether we should publish the story in the first place, but now I didn't know what to do or what would happen. I was angry that I hadn't been able to convince the others that we should publish the story and felt I would be doing something wrong if I let the story be censored.

It was a true moral dilemma for me: I felt that I had to choose between hurting and possibly losing friends and doing what I thought was right. And all of this heavy stuff, over a short story that someone had submitted to our funny little campus literary magazine. Ha!

Back in my dorm room I started crying as I tried to explain the situation to my roommate, Blake. Blake was one of the all around smartest and coolest guys I knew, and I felt stupid to be crying in front of him. I wondered what he would think of me, but he listened carefully and didn't try to tell me what he thought was right or what he thought I should do. What he said was simply, "Kevin, I think you know what's right and what you have to do."

It was so simple, and it was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. It was empowerment. When I thought about it, or perhaps more accurately, when I felt about it, I realized he was right, I did know what I had to do, I was just scared to do it.

I regret that I cannot do the story or the situation justice in my describing it here. I also regret that I was not able to give the story the full justice that I felt it deserved at the time, because although I took Blake's advice and did what I felt I had to do, which was face the editors again and fight for the story to be published, I did compromise in the end, agreeing to ask the author to change the passages describing the location of the fraternity house and the words to the ritual song to make them less recognizable.

When I explained the situation, the author willingly made the changes (it wasn't a big deal to him) and the story was published without further ado, except that the two editors who had been most opposed to the story's publication slowly stopped coming to meetings.

Looking back, I think we found the best possible compromise to our problem, but I was and am still not completely happy when I think about it. I had always thought that compromise was desirable and ideal only in the world of politics, not in principles. Until then, however, I had never been forced to test my principles in the 'real world' where every decision has consequences and even something as seemingly harmless as working on a literary magazine can force you to choose between friendships and moral integrity.

Between A Broken Wall & Fallen Curtain -- A Post Script
I wrote this piece in November of 2000 while I was traveling with longtime friend and (rogue) photographer Jesse Long. I had received a forwarded email about the possibility of submitting something for an upcoming anniversary issue of the Stonefence. Apparently, they were inviting past editors and contributors to send something as part of a big issue they were trying to put together.

We were in Egypt at the time and were about to move on to Kenya where we were going to work a school and then take a week or so off to do some safari-ing. So I banged off a rough draft and sent it to the co-editors with a note explaining to them that I was traveling abroad and would be not be in radio contact for about a week, but would definitely send them a final draft when I got back into Nairobi.

Well, the next time I checked my email there was a message waiting for me from them saying that they were under deadline and had gone ahead and edited my story because they were trying to get the issue out before Christmas break. I was not happy to hear this. I felt my rough draft was just that, rough, and, what's more, I didn't like the way that they had edited it either. Hadn't I made it clear that I was going to send them a final draft? I had it right there, ready to go. I mean, had they even read my submission, couldn't they see the deontological irony in it all?

Anyway, I wrote them a very curt (maybe even nasty) email saying that I would rather have the whole thing pulled if they could not print my final edited draft. I had learned my lesson: "Once shame on you. Twice shame on me", right? This time I was making a stand for what I thought was right, no compromises.

As it turned out, they had some other printing or editing delays (blame it on the bluelines) and were able to make the changes for me, although I think a couple of errata still crept into the final version. The issue ended up coming out during the winter of 2001.<>

The Great Wall And Beyond – A Post, Post Script
This story took another bizarre (and perhaps final) twist this past summer when I was recounting it to my roommate at the Green Gulch Zen Center one day while we were seeding trays for the nursery. It turns out that this guy had been friends since high school with the author who had originally submitted the story to us in the first place. In fact, he had just gone on a road trip with him to a wedding in Arizona or something, and he was studying to become a rabbi. My roommate called and asked him about the story, but he also didn't remember thinking it was that big of a deal at the time.

It's funny how all these paths have diverged, submerged and then reconverged. And like the seminally misunderstood poem about the two roads that diverged in a wood, by Dartmouth's adopted great woods poet Robert Frost, this whole story may be more of a lesson about the way memory works then which path I took and why.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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J'aimerais bien

J'aimerais bien

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux de toi,
Toi qui m'intrigue et qui me hante
même dans mes pensées les plus refoulées.

Je voudrais éviter tous ces sentiments
ordinaires qui font la béquille, le sel
de nos vies trop ordinaires (quotidinnes).

Otons le filet de sécurité,
cette emblème d'un jeu trop peu osé
qui berce les relations habituelles.

Tends-moi la main,
Fais-moi confiance;
N'hésitons pas devant l'impossible.

Figeons nos pas basculants
au bord du précipice qui souffle
la sensation foudroyante du vertige.

Etreignons nos corps
balançant un instant
entre la vie et la mort.

Ne saute pas dans le gouffre noir
né de l'oubli
et nourri de l'amer ennui.

Laisse plutôt voltiger nos esprits
dans l'éther trop léger
pour la matière terrestre.

Là, dans les astres,
nos émotions pures peuvent
s'éclater dans le paroxysme amoureux,

Espèce de douce folie
qui étouffe la voix
dans une marée de tendresse.

Emparons-nous de l'un et l'autre
sans question et sans pudeur.
Mets à côté les masques qui nous cachent.

Mais ne retire pas le voile du mystère
qui nous aveugle de la réalité
trop désespérante sous nos pieds.

J'aimerais bien
ne pas lâcher ce rêve trompeur,
narcotique, plein d'attraction.

J'aimerais bien garder cette aspiration,
fécond grain d'inspiration
qui éveille ma pauvre imagination.

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux de toi,
Toi qui me mets mal à l'aise
qui me noies sans gilet de sauvetage,

Et de qui devant les yeux perspicaces
toute parole semble ridicule,
toute comédie inutile.

Rien n'est assez profond
pour sonder tes yeux,
tourbillons à surface blasée.

Ta beauté infranchissable
se moque de la banalité
et fait une platitude de la logique.

J'aimerais bien ne pas tomber amoureux toi
pour au moins un instant, et garder un peu
l'empreinte de ce songe sur mes lèvres.

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Next Year In Palestine

Dear Friends and Family,

Jerusalem is a magical city. I’m not sure whether there is a God, but after visiting Jerusalem I’m pretty sure that if there is one, he or she is hanging out there. It’s a magical city. Thanks to the preponderance of Jerusalem rock, the city has an architectural and aesthetic unity as well as a sort of golden glow.


We knew we didn't have much time to spend in the city, so we decided it would be best not to push it and just do one or two traditional things. We thought about waging holy war on each other, but changed our minds when we heard that there was a good exhibit going on at the museum. It was the collection of an ancient Hebrew glass blower called Chihuly. It cost a few shekels more than a catapult and battering ram, but was definitely worth it. The exhibit was great: the kind of thing you just couldn't see back home.

It was getting dark after the exhibit, so we decided to grab a beer and call it a night. On our way back to the hotel we had a little problem and needed to run our own personal relief mission. Luckily, we found this old Wailing Wall where we could relieve ourselves.

Due to the recent violence (a few days before we arrived a bomb went of a couple blocks from the school and right outside the main market, by the time we went to the market there was almost no trace of the explosion) there haven't been a lot of tourists running around Israel and the coast was pretty much clear in the old city.

As you can imagine, it is difficult to capture the essence and wonder of being in the holiest of Holy cities. So why try when below we have a first-hand perspective on the situation. It is from a law student at UW, who received a grant to do a year-long study in Israel. She's a mother of two and has been in Ramallah for about three months now on her grant/study.

At about the same time that we were in Jerusalem, my parents were in Ireland kissing the Blarney stone. With this in mind, I thought I would end our Jerusalem account with the following little limerick:

There once was a man named Kevin
Who knew the Deadly Sins, all seven
He's not a good Jew
But he's better 'n you
For he made Aliyah and can go to Heaven


Shalom,
Kevin


####
Well....what can I say about this place?!! I have a love hate relationship with it. I don't even know
where to begin.

First of all...I feel like I am hostage to the Israeli media. Every day when I watch the news I know I am being brain washed. I get angry at the way they talk about Arabs of both the territories and inside Israel.

One thing that is very apparent is how they demonize Palestinians. They hardly ever talk about them as a people....they keep referring to Arafat this and Arafat that-ad nauseum. In doing so they focus the hatred on this supposed demon. I feel angry because there is no empathy towards the "other". I know that I am not Arafat...my family and friends are not Arafat....and the Palestinian people are not Arafat.

My auntie and her husband who live in Ramallah are doing fine. This is the worst situation they have seen since 1967....not even then did they experience such an intense Israeli shelling and closure. They have everything they need in terms of food and other needs and they just take the shelling noise in stride. They don't complain because they don't want people to worry about them. Their two daughters who live in Jerusalem try and visit them as much as they can. They have to time the visits around closures and events. They don't visit anywhere near as often or as long as they would like to in fear of being caught inside Ramallah or in the demonstrations and rock throwing that take place every day...usually after school is out.

My friend Maha, a social worker, and her husband Zuhair, a lecturer at Bir Zeit, also live in Ramallah. Maha was not able to go to work in East Jerusalem for two weeks during the height of the events. Their eight year old daughter asks them every morning..."is there a war today"? Her dad took her to see the confrontations from a distance and explained to her what was going on...this was an attempt to get her to be less fearful of the news and the shelling sounds. Still she is very scared. Two nights ago they were awakened at midnight by Israeli shelling in nearby
Betunia. This shelling continued until 3:00 a.m. Zuhair told me that he stayed up looking outside his balcony. He kept listening for shots from the Palestinian side but heard none...yet the Israeli shelling continued. He believes that the shelling is an attempt to unnerve the people and is paving the way for Israeli recapture of some of the regions which had been returned to the Palestinians in the Oslo agreement. This recapture would allow the Israeli's more control especially close to some of their settlements. The settlements that are not
supposed to be there in the first place under international law. The settlements that continued to
grow despite Oslo.

Inside Israel...things have calmed down considerably. However, there is tension. Jews are avoiding Arab populated areas and Arabs are avoiding areas where extremist Jews live. Businesses such as restaurants in Jaffa and Arab stores in Wadi Nisnas in Haifa are
suffering a noticeable drop. Political activities have been banned at all Israeli Universities for the
first four weeks of classes....we are now in the second week. However, I did hear that there will be a demonstration on campus next Wednesday....I plan to keep a distance.

What is really striking to me is that no matter how much politically to the left Israeli Jews are....They just don't get it that their Zionism came at a high price to the Palestinians and why the Palestinians fought Zionism in the first place. They don't understand how the Palestinians are Palestinian first and Arabs second...how Arabs are not all the same and how they have different interests. They still don't get why the Palestinians are mad and why Oslo gave
them nothing. They are convinced that Barak offered Arafat some kind of unbelievable treasure at Camp David...which Arafat so ungratefully turned down. And then...if they go that far...they always get stuck......so where can we go? We are not wanted anywhere...besides..this is now our home. Well...it was home to another people at one time. All I hear from them is this fear fear fear fear of annihilation as a people. I know and understand where it is coming from but how are they going to break this cycle of fear with its accompanying aggression....whose responsibility is it to do the healing?

One final story:
Two weeks ago I attended orientation in the Overseas Department at the University of Haifa. One of the directors assured the students...mostly young Americans coming to live in Israel for a year of "the Jewish experience"...that she is there to take care of their every need. If they needed to not have an Arab roommate or apartment mate in the dorms (there are two to a room and six to an apartment)...they just need to let her know and she will accommodate. I was so shocked I did not speak. I just felt a very sharp pain as if I was emotionally stabbed in my core. I felt very sad that she was giving the students a way out of what could be a very healing opportunity they may never get anywhere else. I remembered how the beginning of the process that brought me to the point of being able to be here amidst Jews was that I had the opportunity to work with an Israeli Jew on a paper when I was taking a summer course at GeorgetownUniversity in 1986. I remember how I felt when I first met my fellow student and how I felt at the end of the course...having gotten to know him as a human being and not just as the enemy. Not that we agreed in the end...but what a difference. Yet, here..this director was offering the students a way out of growth and understanding.

Well...i thought to myself....most of these students are American...they have studied the civil rights movement...they know the struggle of blacks against racism in the U.S....they are enlightened beings...surely no one will take her up. Unfortunately...the second stab in the core I felt that evening came after orientation was over and when I heard one student tell the director that he and his roommate do not wish to be in an apartment with Arabs.

On this sad note.....I will end. Call me an eternal optimist but I still have hope despite the sadness.

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Eastern Bloc and Roll

The country of Eastern Europe was formed as a result of the French-Indian War. A group of 'les indiens' moved from Monte Carlo after losing their money and needing a new place to settle.

Our journey began in Kiev which is a lot like Disneyland, except all the buildings are gray cinderblock, people wear a lot more black leather, listen to Bryan Adams and don't smile as much.

Upon landing we were greeted by a large woman with mustache answering to the name of Boris. She handed us our immigration cards and we realized that capitalism had definitely begun to breach the iron curtain. Advertisements for casinos, Aquanet, and Rubik's cubes covered the form. We had never seen anything like it.

People here are tough: men can regularly be seen chewing nails and shaving with rusty razors, and women wear mini-skirts in two feet of snow.

Actually, Kiev is a pretty cool place, with a busy and friendly downtown. And, yes, the Beatles were correct.

Next stop Zagreb, Croatia. A beautiful town with the highest café/bar per capita ratio this side of the Dagobah system. With so many cafes, restaurants, theaters and boutiques, Zagreb reminded us of Western Europe-without the scads of tourists.

Croatia has fought hard for its independence and wants to maintain their unique cultural identity. Nevertheless, there was something familiar about this fast food restaurant we found, and we were pleasantly surprised with the 'Big Mark'.

In the 15th century, Orthodox Byzantines, Catholic Romans, Jews of the Diaspora and Muslims coexisted relatively peacefully in the Balkan peninsula which at that time was part of the Turkish Empire. In the late 19th and early 20th century the ethnic and religious mix began to fall out of balance. In 1991, Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina all declared independence from Yugoslavia. This lead to a bloody and confusing three-way war (not even counting the ethnic cleansings of Albanians in Kosovo) which basically centered around our next stop, Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina.

After landing, we drove through what used to be called "snipers' alley". Thankfully, the violence has stopped now and Sarajevo is working hard to rebuild itself. Although life has returned to normal and shops have quickly reopened, it still kind of looks like someone made Swiss cheese out of Sarajevo and forgot to pass out the crackers. Bullet holes and shell damage can be seen everywhere, and a huge cemetery dominates the hillside as you enter the city. The National Stadium's practice field was even converted into a cemetery to accommodate the overload of bodies from the war.

Still recovering from tragedy, Sarajevo strikes us as a tough place to be. So tough, in fact, that they had to fly in Robert De Niro to drive one of their city buses.

Vienna, our final stop in Eastern(ish) Europe, reminded us of Paris, only cleaner, with less attitude and with more schnitzel. Lots of museums, classical music and old important looking buildings. Very stylish. Walking around for the day, we discovered that Vienna has one classy establishment that even Paris doesn't have (yet): Hooters!

The city happened to be holding tryouts for the Boys Choir and we were lucky to get a call back to the second round. We refused to perform any further, however, when we found out that if we were picked to join the choir we would have to become eunuchs.

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Jesse for President

Ducci, I was at a local indian restaraunt in Chennai (madras) and everyone was eating with their fingers so I did too. People were laughing at me because

1. I was a foreigner eating like a local
2. I was making a mess all over myself.

I said to the guy across from me that I liked eating with my hands and he replied to me in an indian accent. 'God gave you five fingers and that's better than a fork'

cheers and take care,
Jesse

==
From: "Jeff Howell"
To: "Kevin Lapin"
Subject: painting the passports brown
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 14:36:35 -0800

I'm sitting over here in this United States of America place, watching the news...the politicians... the 'candidates and I'm thinking...man these guys suck! What we need is a genuine grassroots campaign. Jesse long for President. Of course we wouldn't change a thing about him, there'd be no spin doctors, no handlers, hell, we wouldn't really even keep him informed on the issues. We'd just throw him up there behind the podium and let him work his magic. This country needs a feller who knows himself. A fella not afraid to go a few days without washing. A fella who once wore jackets that looked like they were made from carpet patterns. A guy with a closet, not full of skeletons...but useless Kung Fu pads. A fella with a dog named Duke and Samuel Clemens for a father. A scrabble lover. A traveler. The type of man who'll give up sugar for a while. And a guy who's not afraid to throw back a few shots of wheat grass. Because when it comes down to it, there are very few people have what it takes to run a country...few who have the ability to motivate the peoples! See, when it comes to getting folks off their asses and into motion some know the way, but most, how should I put this... do not have way. Jesse has way.

All the way.

Just one man's opinion.
Jeff

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Pakistan

Pakistan, where we have spent the last ten days, gets its name from an 'Urdu' word meaning 'land of no lingerie stores'. It is a vibrant and colorful country and one of the crazier places you'll ever go--unless, of course you go, like, you know, to the funny farm.

Right away on our plane ride into Islamabad, our first stop, we knew Pakistan would be different when we saw three different passengers on the plane travelling with hawks. It seems that the country really appreciates birds as aviaries abound.

There are also these sort of mini-van buses that would make Gaudi blush everywhere you go. These colorful buses are privately owned and decorated, and run regular routes. The proud owners will spend as much as $3,000 to have one of their buses hand-decorated, and this is a lot of money when you consider the people taking the bus are generally working over 12 hours a day for less than a dollar.

The Pakistani aesthetic tends to a sort of circus baroque where more is definitely more. You can see this in the garish colors, ornate mosques decorated with gold and silver, bright clothes and in the saccharine histrionics of the thousands of music videos and movies produced every year in 'Bollywood'. It's very happy and energetic, like the Pakistanis themselves.











Pakistani ebullience literally pours out into the streets, as going somewhere in Pakistan consists of getting on, or hanging on, one of the crowded buses; loading up your camel and cart; hailing a three-wheeled motorized (or not) rickshaw; riding a bicycle with huge bales of cargo strapped to it; or cramming your whole family onto a small motorcycle (I'm not kidding, we regularly saw a man driving with a woman sitting side-saddle and two young kids on a motor bike that was probably no more than 100cc). The only rule of the road seemed to be that of Inshallah, or god willing. What's amazing is that despite this mayhem of dust and traffic and zig-zagging, pedestrians and vendors coming to your window offering papadam or coconut and the staccato symphony of short honks, which everyone uses to let other drivers know that they are overtaking, or that, yes, they are running that red light and cutting across three lanes of traffic containing five lanes worth of vehicles to make a left turn, that through all of this, everyone seems to be fairly calm and enjoying themselves. There's no road rage!

The people, and there are at least 15 million of them crammed into Karachi, are incredibly friendly and helpful, unless, I suppose, you're from India. One taxi driver explained to us as that he didn't like the people from India because he thought that they put on nice faces but had empty hearts. While this may show the driver's prejudice (a prejudice which may be understandable given the two countries' ongoing strained relationship) it also shows the Pakistani value on 'having heart'.

The countryside is beautiful, but there is no work. There are also a fair amount of armed terrorists wandering around in the north. Artisans still practice their craft of weaving, carving, needle pointing etc. exactly as it has been done for hundreds of years. They may work for a week on decorating one cloth band that sells in the market for the equivalent of a dollar.

So, many Pakistani men are faced with the decision of staying in their home village where there is no work and little to no facilities (school, clean water, Internet etc.), or move to the crowded, polluted city and work for almost nothing (by even their standards). Luckily, there are no bars in predominantly Muslim Pakistan and 'Keno' hasn't been invented yet, so most of the money they earn makes it home to their families, which on average consists of seven or eight children a wife and parents or grand-parents. No pressure, right? The other choice is to join a work gang in Saudi Arabia or Dubai or another of the wealthy oil countries in the Gulf. This generally entails getting and then giving up your passport (the employers keep the passports “for your protection”) and working for several years at a time without returning home.

As a result of this cheap and abundant labor force, all the hotels and nice restaurants are ridiculously overstaffed. It was almost a nuisance to arrive at the hotel and have three people trying to open doors and help us with our luggage (tip, tip, tip), then we would get to our room and every five minutes there would be a knock at our door with someone offering to get us water or do laundry or clean our room, again! Despite or because of this extra-help, I'm not sure which, you still never quite get what you want. And that, of course, is what makes Pakistan so crazy and so much fun.

I think it would be difficult to live in Pakistan for several reasons. First, although I loved the energy and craziness, you would want at least a few things to work like you expected, for instance a flight leaving when it says, rather than earlier, later or just not at all. Second, it is still a primarily Muslim culture which means that men and women don't talk much (or hold hands) until they are married, which even then is generally arranged for them. Third, it ain't easy to find what Jesse calls a 'brew-ha'. Fourth, and most significantly, it would be hard to live around so much poverty. I would feel uncomfortable having a cook, a driver and a gardener, but would also feel guilty not hiring them with so many people in need of work. Alas, life is a paradox and I lost one of my dox in the washing machine!

Speaking of washing machines, you won't find many here. What you see in the photos below is the enormous laundry land in Karachi. We were told that this sprawling maze of concrete troughs, basins, children and piles of clothes services the whole city. Like a Fed-Ex fleet on foot, women work their routes picking up dirty laundry from people’s houses and delivering them, dunked, beaten, twisted and cleaned laundry several days later.

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Bye Bye Dubai

Dear Friends and Family,

Our five days in Dubai were a welcome break after our month stretch in Saudi Arabia. Dubai is an oasis and gem in the middle of the Arabian peninsula. It is a beautiful and bustling city in the United Arab of Emirates. It is also one of the few places in the Arab world where you can get a beer (legally).

As far as cosmopolitan centers goes, Dubai is a great place to visit. If you are going to build massive steel and glass altars to commerce, then this is how they should be done. The offices and sky-scrapers of Dubai are brilliant and give the city a boost of energy and light. One of the most famous hotels, called the Burj-Al-Arab is here. It’s the only five-star hotel or something like that and each room comes with it’s own valet.

We have reason to believe that there are some interesting museums and tourist type things to do in Dubai as well, although we wouldn't know because we quickly decided to spend our few days of vacation in a different emirate, Fujirah, at the Sandy Beach Resort.

From the picture of the beach, you can get an idea of how little we did for two days straight. The snorkeling was great. They say that the Gulf War put a dent in the flora and fauna, but it looked pretty good to us. The sand was warm and the sound of the sea relaxing.

One of our creative projects 'en cours' is to put together a un-phonetic alphabet with things like ‘p as in pneumonia’ and ‘k as in knife’. Our other project is a book of weird and surreal signs from around the world. Here are a couple interesting ones to give you an idea. If you see any more let us know.

Bye-bye Dubai, Hello Pakistan...

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Heading to Dammam (Dishtar Aramco Rock Version)

Heading to Dammam
(Dishtar Aramco Rock Version)

Head out on the highway
Driving to Dammam today.
Driving through the desert
You gotta pray five times a day
No way, no way,
No way, no way.

If you're a woman in Saudi
Then you've gotta wear a veil.
When you're driving through the desert
The weather's never cloudy, oh well.

All the men, so sheik,
Ya' know they pray five times a day
Better get down on your knees for Allah
Or you know you're goin' to hell.

Head out on the highway
Heading to Dammam.
Driving through the desert,
The cradle of Islam.
Dammam (4x).

Camels to the left,
Camels to the right,
Sleeping with bedouins
Gives me such a fright.

No alcohol, no bourbon
Hide, hide, hide it
Under your turban.
Bet you didn't know that the Kingdom's kind of urban.
(triple rhyme)

In the desert dry of water
Mint tea in my eye (ouch).
Is this Arab guy offering me a camel or his daughter.

chorus

Mostly sand, not much soil,
Katsudon lots of oil.
All the princes, oh so many
Ruling country
Petrolled hands clenched so tight.
The Koran says if you're riding a camel you ain't Shi'ite.
(go Sunnis)

That's the way it goes in Saudi of Arabia (ah, ah).
I say, maybe, oh maybe
I'll get back some day (eh, eh).
There's just ain't much social life
And it's hard to have fun and play (hey, hey)
When all the parties you go to are BYOW (Bring Your Own Wife),
Ya' know it's true-oooh.

chorus (2x)



Hope you enjoyed and keep it Pretty Simple,
Kevin & Jesse

PS email us if you are interested in the tab for the sung version.

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The Saudi Shuffle

Friends and Family,

I hope this will be the first of a series of emails documenting Jesse and my super-photolicious-Fall-trip.

Today was day 3 of 90 and our first shooting day. All I can say so far is, “well, we made it”. I’m reminded of the guy who jumped off the Empire State building and as he was falling past each floor was heard to say, “So far, so good.” It’s not the fall that counts, though, it’s the landing. Anyway, I guess it takes a funny sort of optimism to undertake this kind of adventure.

Although our journey began a number years ago, I’ll skip right to our actual departure. In the photo below, you can see Jesse and I standing outside the Harden House Saturday afternoon with all of our gear. As you can see there is about 295 pounds of lights and photo equipment and about 5 pounds of clothing, all of which has to last us 3 months.

At the British Airways counter, the ticket agent told Jesse that his carry-on was too heavy and would have to be checked for safety reasons. Jesse explained that we were already paying a couple hundred dollars in excess baggage fees (which was nothing compared to the $1,000 that Air Africa tried to charge him on his last trip). Jesse didn’t want to check any more bags than necessary, so he offered to make his computer bag lighter by removing a couple of CDs. Are you kidding me?

Before dropping us off, Jesse’s parents told me to look out for Jesse while we travelled. At the airport, my Dad pulled Jesse aside to tell him that he was personally responsible for my safety. Jesse and responsible are two words that are not normally found in the same sentence. In fact, the idea that our parents were relying on us to keep each other out of trouble struck me as some sort of zero-sum chiasmus.


Luckily we were saved from looking up any more big words in the dictionary by our now best friends Von and Amy, who surprised us at the airport with a bag of Red Mill burgers (thanks again Von and Amy, you rock!). The combination of Red Mill bacon burger and Xanax made for a very relaxed flight to London.


After a short eight-hour layover in Heathrow (where we had ample time to worry about the baggage return system), we boarded our flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As our plane taxied for take-off I was having some second thoughts and reservations about what kind of trip this would turn out to be, travelling throughout the Middle East and Africa for three months as Jesse’s assistant. Just then the little girl in the next seat wearing traditional Saudi robes turned to me and vomited all over my lap. Ce n’est pas la chute qui compte, n’est-ce pas, c’est l’aterrisage…

From the moment you land in Riyadh, you get a feeling of how different (and how hot) it is here. I think Jesse described it best when he said, “It’s weird, it’s like being in a foreign country.” There you have it. You can see from the two pictures below some of the foreign foods and places we have already found:










By the way, you have to be careful about taking pictures in Saudi Arabia, as you can get into a lot of trouble. I learned this the hard way taking the picture of the Washington apples above.

There’s an old saying in Saudi Arabia which goes, “All roads lead to Dammam.” Although this isn’t quite true, it is true that Jesse and I seem to end up on one of the ones that do lead there every time we get into our rental car. We were told by one of the administrator’s of the school that we are taking pictures for that you can’t get lost in Riyadh as long as you use the tower below, which is the only tall building around, as a landmark. It's the one near chop-chop square which is named for the corporal punishments that are still publicly carried out there.

Maybe it was the jet-lag, but the tower kept moving around on us as we tried to make our way to visit the U.S. Embassy in the Diplomatic Quarter. In the end we made it, although were not sure how. The DQ turned out to be pretty cool. I would have taken some pictures to show you, but the armed guards looked even more threatening than the manager at Safeway--especially the armed guards who look like their fifteen.

Despite the armed guards and ‘compounds’ everywhere, Saudi Arabia turns out to be a pretty safe and friendly place. I suppose the public beheadings and stonings, the strict prohibition, and the religious fundamentalism have something to do with it.

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