Reception and Logistics
The "comfort station," providing cloths and sleeping bags for people
"People's Library"
"Occupied Wallstreet Journal"
Naomi Klein's speech was quite good, too.
hugs,
mark.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Keeping Occupied in the City
Reception and LogisticsThe "comfort station," providing cloths and sleeping bags for people"People's Library""Occupied Wallstreet Journal"Naomi Klein's speech was quite good, too.
hugs,
mark.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Mark- Ottawa
Hey friends,
I'm posting the below entry here because, although some less interesting version of it will go up on the PIP website, I really wrote it with all of you in mind. Yes, it is about the monarchy. No, I don't actually think that the monarchy is any good. But being around parliament (just like King's) has the tendency to make you think that traditions that seem stupid might actually be worth a damn. this is my Hegelian way of trying to understand why it might be. so enjoy!
Monarchy Malarky
“I have a considerable regard for The Queen and the monarchy although I’m a New Democrat and a socialist. I think that the monarchy has validity at a time when everything else is flying off in all directions […] I admire her stubborn refusal to break down and take the easy way, to conform with the constantly changing public image of how our leaders should act.”
—Farley Mowat
As images of William and Kate flickered across the television, squeals of delight and agony were heard throughout my office.
“They’re sooooo cute!” said somebody.
“Get rid of them!” roared a voice.
“Come on, they’re fun!” pleaded a third.
And off we went. We had tumbled into the oldest of traps, the most nagging of Canadian preoccupations: Monarchy, yay or nay? Keep it or scrap it?
What an interesting choice.
I say “interesting choice” because, as everyone knows, there was quite a long time when most of those ruled by monarchs did not have much of a choice in the matter at all. The King was it. He was nation, he was the government and he was the sovereign. That’s quite the word, “Sovereign.” Sends chills down your spine and makes you want to kneel right down, doesn’t it?
In the case of the Brits (and thus, in some tenuous way, for Canadians also), the Magna Carta in 1215 was the first step in what we often call a process of democratization. For the first time, limits were put on the powers of the King.
Parliament as we know it is the fruit of this long process. In the British context, the House of Lords (the progenitor of our Senate) served as a chamber in which nobles could come together to scrutinize the way that the King was spending their money. The House of Commons, in turn, sprung up as a mechanism for directly elected Members to represent the interests of the broader (non-sovereign and non-aristocratic) public. The King remained the absolute and the nobles remained the elites, but for the first time “the people” (that slippery and oft-neglected gaggle) had a seat at the table.
This original formation is retained throughout our legislative process, but perhaps most notably in nomenclature, where the Queen is still the ‘Crown,’ the Senate remains the ‘upper’ House and the Commons is still stuck with being the ‘lower’; constitutionally, the commoners are below the elites and both the Commons and the Senate are below the Crown.
...
But wait, if we have been democratizing ourselves, why do we still have a monarch at all?
Perhaps I can answer your question with one of my own. Have you watched Question Period recently?
Talking about the cunning of reason in History (and not at all talking about Parliamentary Democracy) the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel said this:
“Particular interests contend with one another, and some are destroyed in the process. But it is from this very conflict and destruction of particular things that the universal emerges, and it remains unscathed itself. For it is not the universal Idea which enters into opposition, conflict, and danger; it keeps itself in the background, untouched, and unharmed, and sends forth the particular interests of passion to fight and wear themselves out in its stead.” (Introduction to the Philosophy of History)
So perhaps the idea is something like this: the House of Commons and the Senate are, together, the mind of the Crown. They are the externalized thought process of a single individual.
And, frankly, how could it be otherwise? How could a single person ever grasp the issues and contradictions of an entire nation state? How could one man or woman create law (a power once reserved only for the gods themselves!) without some serious council and at least a few meetings. And that is, in some sense, the meaning of the institution that we call Parliament: a place for the particular things to come into conflict, destroy themselves, and allow the national idea to emerge unscathed.
Personal attacks might be launched, letterhead will be improperly used, scandals will rage and governments will certainly rise and fall. But, come crisis or vices, the original and absolute presence of the monarchy will stand as a human unity of a country’s many divisions. The Queen of Canada remains (or perhaps has the potential to finally become) a powerful emblem that we can share. And make no mistake, she is our Queen as much as she is anybody’s. She even said so.
…
Hmmm. That all came out quite forcefully. Come to think of it, I don’t recall even liking the monarchy at all last week.
I suppose that I have watched politicians tear into each other for long enough (and I have sensed Parliament disappearing into the abyss known as election for a sufficient number of months) that, perhaps, I just want something to hold onto. And perhaps the Queen is it.
But, on second thought, maybe the Maple Leaf will do.
Anyway, whatever else might come to pass, I can hope for only one thing. This is a hope that I have held in my heart for a long time and it is one that I shared with my office as images of the royal wedding danced in their heads: if we do keep the monarchy, I really, really, hope that it is not based on the highly tenuous claim that they are, in the words of many, “sooooo cute.” Because they aren’t.
And that’s not what monarchy is for.
(Oh, and the Governor General is good too. Maybe. I don't know.)
I'm posting the below entry here because, although some less interesting version of it will go up on the PIP website, I really wrote it with all of you in mind. Yes, it is about the monarchy. No, I don't actually think that the monarchy is any good. But being around parliament (just like King's) has the tendency to make you think that traditions that seem stupid might actually be worth a damn. this is my Hegelian way of trying to understand why it might be. so enjoy!
Monarchy Malarky
“I have a considerable regard for The Queen and the monarchy although I’m a New Democrat and a socialist. I think that the monarchy has validity at a time when everything else is flying off in all directions […] I admire her stubborn refusal to break down and take the easy way, to conform with the constantly changing public image of how our leaders should act.”
—Farley Mowat
As images of William and Kate flickered across the television, squeals of delight and agony were heard throughout my office.
“They’re sooooo cute!” said somebody.
“Get rid of them!” roared a voice.
“Come on, they’re fun!” pleaded a third.
And off we went. We had tumbled into the oldest of traps, the most nagging of Canadian preoccupations: Monarchy, yay or nay? Keep it or scrap it?
What an interesting choice.
I say “interesting choice” because, as everyone knows, there was quite a long time when most of those ruled by monarchs did not have much of a choice in the matter at all. The King was it. He was nation, he was the government and he was the sovereign. That’s quite the word, “Sovereign.” Sends chills down your spine and makes you want to kneel right down, doesn’t it?
In the case of the Brits (and thus, in some tenuous way, for Canadians also), the Magna Carta in 1215 was the first step in what we often call a process of democratization. For the first time, limits were put on the powers of the King.
Parliament as we know it is the fruit of this long process. In the British context, the House of Lords (the progenitor of our Senate) served as a chamber in which nobles could come together to scrutinize the way that the King was spending their money. The House of Commons, in turn, sprung up as a mechanism for directly elected Members to represent the interests of the broader (non-sovereign and non-aristocratic) public. The King remained the absolute and the nobles remained the elites, but for the first time “the people” (that slippery and oft-neglected gaggle) had a seat at the table.
This original formation is retained throughout our legislative process, but perhaps most notably in nomenclature, where the Queen is still the ‘Crown,’ the Senate remains the ‘upper’ House and the Commons is still stuck with being the ‘lower’; constitutionally, the commoners are below the elites and both the Commons and the Senate are below the Crown.
...
But wait, if we have been democratizing ourselves, why do we still have a monarch at all?
Perhaps I can answer your question with one of my own. Have you watched Question Period recently?
Talking about the cunning of reason in History (and not at all talking about Parliamentary Democracy) the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel said this:
“Particular interests contend with one another, and some are destroyed in the process. But it is from this very conflict and destruction of particular things that the universal emerges, and it remains unscathed itself. For it is not the universal Idea which enters into opposition, conflict, and danger; it keeps itself in the background, untouched, and unharmed, and sends forth the particular interests of passion to fight and wear themselves out in its stead.” (Introduction to the Philosophy of History)
So perhaps the idea is something like this: the House of Commons and the Senate are, together, the mind of the Crown. They are the externalized thought process of a single individual.
And, frankly, how could it be otherwise? How could a single person ever grasp the issues and contradictions of an entire nation state? How could one man or woman create law (a power once reserved only for the gods themselves!) without some serious council and at least a few meetings. And that is, in some sense, the meaning of the institution that we call Parliament: a place for the particular things to come into conflict, destroy themselves, and allow the national idea to emerge unscathed.
Personal attacks might be launched, letterhead will be improperly used, scandals will rage and governments will certainly rise and fall. But, come crisis or vices, the original and absolute presence of the monarchy will stand as a human unity of a country’s many divisions. The Queen of Canada remains (or perhaps has the potential to finally become) a powerful emblem that we can share. And make no mistake, she is our Queen as much as she is anybody’s. She even said so.
…
Hmmm. That all came out quite forcefully. Come to think of it, I don’t recall even liking the monarchy at all last week.
I suppose that I have watched politicians tear into each other for long enough (and I have sensed Parliament disappearing into the abyss known as election for a sufficient number of months) that, perhaps, I just want something to hold onto. And perhaps the Queen is it.
But, on second thought, maybe the Maple Leaf will do.
Anyway, whatever else might come to pass, I can hope for only one thing. This is a hope that I have held in my heart for a long time and it is one that I shared with my office as images of the royal wedding danced in their heads: if we do keep the monarchy, I really, really, hope that it is not based on the highly tenuous claim that they are, in the words of many, “sooooo cute.” Because they aren’t.
And that’s not what monarchy is for.
(Oh, and the Governor General is good too. Maybe. I don't know.)
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Simon - Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand
Well, I'd long suspected the receding tails of blog posts, but am glad to see the return of some former writers, most notably Mark's recent update. Honestly, just reading those well picked quotes was about half an hour's worth of fun. Well, at the risk of posting into dead net-space, I'm going to follow Mark's brave example and post my recent travel diary from the trip I and a friend took through Vietnam and Cambodia.
Forgive me for the length of this post, my collection of emails home, notes and ticket stubs. They are just as poorly organized as the trip was.
...
Appearance before the plane trip home:
Dirty. There is no escaping the layers of filth which are accumulating on me, scraped from the leather bus chairs and sidewalk squats. Fingernails, uncut, have black spots which cannot be dug out. Feet are no better, constantly roaming the streets in sandals, they have grown coarse and calloused. Some red sores and scars still have beach sand in them. I'm no stranger to dirt, but there's something just almost wholesome to Canadian dirt that makes this foreign grease a little more novel.
Sweaty. Saltwater pours out of my forehead in ways that might put an ascetic Brahmin to shame. With three days to go, I refuse to pay a dollar-fifty to wash my shirts, which if thrown against a wall will probably stick. Backpackers will usually break down and buy a novelty t-shirt (probably one that says “Same Same” or else “No money, no honey” – only one of these slogans is familiar to me after three weeks of travel). Not me. Nope.
Hairy. I am getting closer to my realization of hair long enough to be tied back, not exactly a dream, so much as an experiment. Unwashed, hair looks a lot like snakes, and oddly gets a lot of compliments for this reason. Also, for the first time in my life, I have an, albeit patchy and disgusting, beard. Work may let me keep it, but I suspect that Stefanie may set it on fire should I return with it.
Bracelets. Have several. Street urchins sell, halk, or else failing this give them to tourists to induce natural feelings of guilt and wealth disparity consciousness. After hanging out with a few kids in Sihanoukville, I helped weave a few, and my sponsor corrected my patterns. It is common destination, and not so often common aesthetics, that make all back packers look the same.
...
We began in Hanoi which is the centre of communist Vietnam, eventually pressing on to Hochimin City (Saigon), the centre of capitalist Vietnam. The contrast is fantastic. Hanoi is an old city with French style streets, five way intersections, roundabouts, and these really tall slim apartment buildings with five to infinity balconies. It was bombed into rubble during the war, but the old lay out still stands, and the imperial palace of the old empire is still standing and free to visit. Not so lucky was the Long bien bridge, a train and motorbike bridge built by the French during the colonial period, and the first to connect both sides of the Red River. It was bombed 14 times during the war, and there are parts where the reconstruction amounts to little more than iron bars soldered together. The pedestrian walkway is also an alarmingly simple set of concrete rectangles retained by iron frames, some of which wobble when you step on them.
In Hanoi (but in theory in all Vietnam), there's still a curfew, and the bar we went to there had to shut and open the steel shutters for us when we were going in or out. after 12, there's no one on the street. It's pretty nice if you're walking home with a few friends, but hard to find food right when you really need it.
As far as I can remember, that night we made a pretty fun word game up: condense the plots of some well known movies into one-line semi-cryptic descriptions or tag-lines. These then are riddles for "Guess the Movie". Here were some of the best (answers at the end of the post):
1. Kiss your mom and play Chuck Berry. It's lightning!
2. A theme park owner nearly kills family.
3. The weatherman takes an unexpected camping trip.
4. A cowboy and an astronaut go on a journey of self discovery and identity finding.
My own contribution was: (5.) A guy ditches class to open a box and punch a Nazi. It stumped people longer than I had expected it might.
...
Our midway destination in Vietnam was Hoi An, an old city midway along the coast of Vietnam and an hour from Danang (the arrival beach for American marines). Despite proximity, Hoi An was particularly lucky to have been one of the few old cities of Vietnam to have escaped the war without being bombed or its surrounding forests defoliated. This would have been a real tragedy. Hoi An was an old trading post, a port city where merchants from all over Asia would ship and trade goods. The merchants did very well of course and built rich homes and temples for themselves. The architecture of Hoi An is influenced from all over Asia with Chinese, Indian, Cambodian, Thai and Vietnamese styles popping up in different places. The pride of Hoi An is a Japanese covered bridge with it's own Buddhist altar and beautiful red paint. There are also many old wooden houses with some impressive “crab-shaped” archways and chalk lines depicting the water levels from past and often recent flooding. In the 1990s, the water reached five feet from the ground, and the owner proudly showed us a picture of himself in a boat floating in his living-room.
The other great fortune of Hoi An is to be close to the ocean. The beach is a little trek out of town, but for a dollar we rented bicycles all day to travel to and from the beach. The waves were even big enough to do a little body surfing.
...
Transportation:
Our trip began in Hanoi Airport, and ended in Bangkok's International Airport. Between there, we travelled by buses. In Cambodia, this means two seat rows with passengers leather chairs and bus rides that are not too long, but still twice as long as the rates advertized. In Vietnam however, it is convenient to jump onto the open tour service which offers nighttime sleeper-buses up and down the coast of Vietnam. These buses are overbooked, loud, uncomfortable, disorienting, and take twice as long as the rates advertized.
The buses have beds set up in them for passengers to sleep on. There are two floors of buses in bunk-bed fashion and three lanes of them, except at the back were there are five side by side. Beds are sided by "protective?" metal dividers around the shoulders making them both impractical and uncomfortable, not to mention a lot like a hospital gurney. After about twenty hours in this condition you feel a lot like a hospital or maternity ward. Other interesting cultural details: (1) the dash and ceiling lights are an intricate rainbow of neon colours typical of a Buddhist festival, and there is incense burning from a holder on the front grill of the bus, as if it were a prayer holding the engine together. (2) Vietnamese drivers, like several of their Asian counterparts, use the horn as a turn and merging indicator. This takes the form of honking at oncoming traffic and cars or buses that we wish to pass. Unlike turn signals, which are visual and have multiple uses, the only effective statement a horn can make is "look, I'm here." and sometimes "deal with it!" In some vehicles, the designers understood this and built their horns to use an echo form that starts strong and diminishes.
On this particularly lovely ride, conditions were perfect. I was placed in the top back five by five row between two people propped onto two metal bars with no foot bar or seat-belts. This meant that when the bus stopped suddenly, I was on a sliding rail that threatened to hurl me into the aisle six feet from the floor. Also, my bus was blessed with two horns for a unique variety of honk types which began to be used extensively around six o'clock this morning. The entire travel time was 24 hours.
In what possible manner were conditions perfect? For dreams of course!
Of the only large sleep I managed to get on the bus, I had the most hilarious nightmare I've ever had. I was watching the evening news with my parents when a story about a new government financial scandal ended by reminding viewers to practice safe internet shopping. I went outside in a taxi and rounding the corner I saw a handful of people (no more than twelve), standing outside of Jack Layton's mansion chanting. It sounded to me like one of those fake mailbox generated protests probably organized my an opposition party, so I mocked them as I passed; I suppose I combined the maximum amount of nerdiness and Toryism, saying "Don't you people have work tomorrow?" (How old am I?). On the way back I started counting them aloud to mock them once again. One, Two, Three, Four...
Things usually go wrong, I've noticed, when I start to count in dreams. Around about nine, the mob began to approach. The cab driver started to quicken the pace, but the protesters were mighty fast for their ages. Their chant changed too and they could now be seen running and yelling, "Understand the riot! Understand the riot!"
The taxi turned a corner but then got a little confused and did a sort of panicky three-point-turn and pirouette. A few runners got around the corner and zoomed in on the car which was doing its best to speed away. I was now, for some reason on the trunk of the taxi and one or two of the zombies were catching up fast. As he got within biting distance, I aimed a good stomp to his face. My aim in the dream seemed to connect perfectly, but in reality I had connected perfectly with the seat in front of Michael, no doubt scarring the peasant tones out of some poor Chinese woman.
Luckily this passed without incident, save a good blister on my heel, but I suppose my excuse had I needed one would have been to say "Understand the riot!"
...
Compared to Hanoi, Saigon is a booming megapolis. There are night clubs and a strong youth culture that comes out on weekday nights to dance in parks, hang out on motorbikes around ice-cream trucks, or drink beer at the roadside cafes. We were there for valentines day, so we saw lots of cute looking couples (well, ok...pretty cute looking, but almost all cool looking asian guys look a little too thuggin for me to say that too confidently...I mean they have like motorbikes and know muai thai and stuff... still pretty cute).
Vietnam is a former French colony, and a lot of French culture has seeped into it even if it's hard work to find a young person who speaks French. There is a world famous coffee grown in the country. It's served in street-side cafes, like most food, and with shots of sweetened condensed milk, over ice too from time to time. Sandwiches come in baguettes, and Ban mi trang is a common street-food of Vietnamese meat cuts, pate and sauce stuffed into a baguette. Also, in Hanoi some people actually do wear berets... like unironically.
In Saigon, we had hopped off the bus in the middle of downtown and wandered into a guesthouse Mike found about an hour before we left the bus station in Hoi An. It turned out to be run by some very nice people who gave us lots of candied coconut and talked about our travels and Canada and the like. Mike became friendly, and flirtatious, with the daughter? cousin? who took us out for food and drinks, brought us out to eat dog, and eventually was seduced to Mike's persistent charm.
...
Dog 1:
A Chiwawah that guards the door to our guesthouse. It has teeth so bad, they make the old people seem charming. Emerging at forty five to eighty degree angles from the gums, they are better at mashing food that anything else. Luckily, the dog never smiles, but spends all its time barking at guests coming in and out the door.
I felt better about eating a dog earlier, realizing again that it's sentiment that makes us sympathize with the pretty dog while feeling less concerned for the filthy chicken. Not that that solves anything, but when animal rights are formally claimed, I will insist on their right to dental care.
...
After our time in Vietnam, we hopped the bus to Cambodia. We had bought it from the guesthouse and some language barriers sent our bus to Phnom Penh, as opposed to Sihanoukville. We made a hasty decision to stay and see the city in the morning while grabbing the bus out to Sihanoukville in the afternoon. That morning, we got up, travelled to the market, a booming almost Persian looking dome filled with jewelry and clothes selling stalls. We were there pretty early and got to see the jewelry sellers wiping down the mirrors in their display cases (that's what sells shinny stuff).
In Cambodia, we some time on the beach (well, in Vietnam we did too in Hoi An, but here was a longer time) in a place called Sihanoukville. It's like a beach vacation sponsored by the dollar store; everything is sold in American prices, usually for a buck or two, but you can also pay in riel. The experience of using two currencies at the same time is a little disorienting to say the least. Still, it beats getting used to Vietnam's dong, which for whatever reason is valued into tens of thousands (a bottle of water costs 15,000 dong).
This was where I was possibly most concerned for our eventual return and the safe recovery of our trip. Sihanoukville is like the Siren's isle of travellers, a place backpackers might come to die. It was here that the discovery of enormously cheap and sketchy Valium was illustrated to us from a friend who became a travelling companion for the remained of the trip, an Auzie from Brisbane. In all fairness, it made perfect sense for the remaining bus rides which were by now as terrible as ever. In the last push to Thailand, a woman with the boniest head I've endured slept on my shoulder the whole way giving me a tennis arm that lasted a day-and-a-half. I wanted to read my book, but suddenly found I couldn't keep my eyes open. Four hours later, we crossed the border and onto a new bus with roads and drivers switching to the left and right hand sides respectively.
...
Beach urchins in Sihanoukville:
Kid: Where you from man?
Me: Canada
Kid: Man FUCK Justin Bieber.
Me: Is he Canadian? Huh... sorry?
...
In Siem Reap, we went to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, the largest temple complex in the world. The biggest have been restored and cleared, but a lot of them are still in the state they were rediscovered in, with gigantic trees pulling them apart and roots crawling into the stone bricks. It's just like in an Indiana Jones movie. I also pushed hard to rent bikes for the day, so we got to travel at our own pace and got that wonderful feeling of relative size to movement while circling around the temples.
Siem Reap is also a relatively large town in Cambodia. It has a large student population, and lots of young people come to work in the service industry in hotels, restaurants and it's thriving bar street. We also managed to talk to a monk in Siem Reap's central Buddhist temple. Lots of young Cambodian men come to work for the temple as monks. It's a scholarship program that give them the opportunity to go study abroad. I asked how many women become monks shortly after this, knowing somewhat in advance that the answer is none (women are only allowed to be very devotional non-monks). So it seems like an unsteady start to a country trying eagerly to move forward to limit it's university experience to one half of the population. So it goes, slowly.
...
Dog 2:
Grey, bald, wrinkled, with the most perfectly menacing fangs I have ever seen on a dog. He hangs out on the top stairs of the western gate of Angkor Wat. There's no such thing as reincarnation, but if there was, this is the form priests who starved their six hundred slave peasants for the godhead and their own wicked wasted power would return to assume.
...
We finished our travel in Bangkok which was, frankly, comparatively more expensive and frustrating than anywhere else on our trip. We only stayed a couple days, and the only relatively cheap thing to eat was street side pad-thai, which is honestly quite good. (That and the pool table that was connected to the bar below our hotel. We played there all day for three days and only ordered maybe two beers a person.) Interestingly however, Pad Thai's not an authentic Thai dish. It's actually Vietnamese. During the nationalist push, the king encouraged Thais to eat and make it as a spur to rice farmers, hoping to strengthen the economy. It's just another indication of my preference for Vietnam I suppose.
...
A Coda: Reflections on a Thai Sex Show
What began with a tuk-tuk driver's insistent request and a cheap laminated program moved through the alchemical minds of my travel companions, emerging as a command, “we are going”. No use arguing when Mike gets this committed. Off we go, I guess.
This was the furthest out of the tourist district of Bangkok I ever travelled. Even further than my mid-day walking trip to the bell tower. Further than the clothes market where the buses go to rest for the night. The tuk-tuk drove us down streets that could have been confused for warehouses in Detroit had it not been for the humidity. I suppose a warehouse is a good place to hide a sex show from the forces of the “Super-police”, whose boastful placards adorn hotel signs and street maps. Here, outside of the watchful eyes of the international community, the Thai police are not so concerned for the international image of the country and it's royal family’s high opinion of it's own morality. Here is where the tuk-tuks get commission to travel. Pecunia non olet.
In the warehouse, past what looks like a Christmas tree except that it's covered in paper bills, is the door to the darkened room with seat all around the stage. It's dark, so it's hard to make out other face in a packed bar, but most seem to be young backpackers or middle aged Asian tourists. The spread of men and women is about half and half.
The show is one part magic show, one part anatomy, and a final part transgression. Women use their kegel musles to do a variety of complicated manoeuvres: smoking cigarettes, draining a bottle of cola, blowing out candles, firing a blow-dart at some balloons, or firing ping-pong balls into a cup. Lots of the acts seem, like any transgressive magic trick, dangerous at first sight but with the right slight of hand are safe enough to repeat all night safe. At one point, a woman pulls a string of razor blades out of her pussy, and then shows how they are able to cut paper into strips. It's admittedly more than the average trip to Club Supersex Montreal.
However, it's hard to say that any part of the show is really all that sexy. Even the conclusion to the show, in which a toned man performs intercourse with one of the show's girl's onstage in a variety of complicated gymnastic manoeuvres, focuses more on the extreme than on the sensual (even if the theme from titanic is being played by the D.J.).
What are the conditions of the girls, and boys, who perform this type of act? It's hard to say. For one thing, we stayed long enough to see the show three times, so a night must be a long thing indeed. For another, the performers do use protection, part no doubt of Thailand's often-earnest push to combat the spread of AIDS. But otherwise, it's hard to say. Patrons don't get to go wandering in the back of restaurants, and sex clubs are likewise if more serious about it. We can speculate all we want, but we are left with the educated guesses of NGOs and our own unique fears.
From what I have since learned, Thailand's sex trade (and here I'm talking about true prostitution and the massage racket) is strongly made up of men and women from the Hill tribe, a Thai minority from the north. Many lack citizenship papers and have no representation. The recent collapse of their traditional economy, in part due to opium eradication campaigns, have made it convenient to comply with the Thai sex trade. This would make them one of those unknown clusters of stateless people. Some NGOs have taken to representing them, and many take a neutral stance of prostitution, and this seems to me like a good way to approach the issue.
Prostitution is easy to give way to cheap moralism, and the victims of these purges are almost always the weakest participants. In a country where it is considered socially appropriate for men to have mistresses, and where the religious codes of Buddhism imply that there are hierarchies of women, some of whom it is appropriate to pay for, it is rare that clients will be the first to suffer the worst of the law. “Why do you lash that whore?” Shakespeare asks us. It is our duty to recognize our own commitment to responding appropriately to this awkward question, and overcoming the ugly deformities of our traditions.
I once wrote a brief reflection on prostitution and the sex trade for the Kings Feminist zine, and my opinions haven't changed much since then. This was certainly one of the tawdrier and more dispiriting corners of the sex trade, but then so was the one I was writing about earlier.
...
Dog 3:
A slum-dog if there ever was one. In Bangkok, he wears a kid's yellow soccer jersey, as filthy as he is. Tide should steal both and make a television commercial in which both are thrown into a washing-machine. The magic of television would turn a tragic ending into a commercially viable one.
...
On the plane out of Bangkok, the Thai English-Language newspaper left in the seat-pocket in front of me had an editorial cartoon of General Qaddafi, depicted as a statue mid-speech with soldiers shooting from the general's mouth into a crowd of unarmed protesters.
By the time I'd crossed through customs onto the Guangdong to Beijing flight, Xinhua's editorial cartoon depicted an oil drum watching televised coverage of middle-east protests and having a price inflating series of heart attacks. It's hard to say that America would have been so cynical even on a bad day, but China was just about one of the only leading nations at the UN to support the Iranian crackdown on political demonstrations.
The vacation's over. Welcome home.
...
Our midway destination in Vietnam was Hoi An, an old city midway along the coast of Vietnam and an hour from Danang (the arrival beach for American marines). Despite proximity, Hoi An was particularly lucky to have been one of the few old cities of Vietnam to have escaped the war without being bombed or its surrounding forests defoliated. This would have been a real tragedy. Hoi An was an old trading post, a port city where merchants from all over Asia would ship and trade goods. The merchants did very well of course and built rich homes and temples for themselves. The architecture of Hoi An is influenced from all over Asia with Chinese, Indian, Cambodian, Thai and Vietnamese styles popping up in different places. The pride of Hoi An is a Japanese covered bridge with it's own Buddhist altar and beautiful red paint. There are also many old wooden houses with some impressive “crab-shaped” archways and chalk lines depicting the water levels from past and often recent flooding. In the 1990s, the water reached five feet from the ground, and the owner proudly showed us a picture of himself in a boat floating in his living-room.
The other great fortune of Hoi An is to be close to the ocean. The beach is a little trek out of town, but for a dollar we rented bicycles all day to travel to and from the beach. The waves were even big enough to do a little body surfing.
...
Transportation:
Our trip began in Hanoi Airport, and ended in Bangkok's International Airport. Between there, we travelled by buses. In Cambodia, this means two seat rows with passengers leather chairs and bus rides that are not too long, but still twice as long as the rates advertized. In Vietnam however, it is convenient to jump onto the open tour service which offers nighttime sleeper-buses up and down the coast of Vietnam. These buses are overbooked, loud, uncomfortable, disorienting, and take twice as long as the rates advertized.
The buses have beds set up in them for passengers to sleep on. There are two floors of buses in bunk-bed fashion and three lanes of them, except at the back were there are five side by side. Beds are sided by "protective?" metal dividers around the shoulders making them both impractical and uncomfortable, not to mention a lot like a hospital gurney. After about twenty hours in this condition you feel a lot like a hospital or maternity ward. Other interesting cultural details: (1) the dash and ceiling lights are an intricate rainbow of neon colours typical of a Buddhist festival, and there is incense burning from a holder on the front grill of the bus, as if it were a prayer holding the engine together. (2) Vietnamese drivers, like several of their Asian counterparts, use the horn as a turn and merging indicator. This takes the form of honking at oncoming traffic and cars or buses that we wish to pass. Unlike turn signals, which are visual and have multiple uses, the only effective statement a horn can make is "look, I'm here." and sometimes "deal with it!" In some vehicles, the designers understood this and built their horns to use an echo form that starts strong and diminishes.
On this particularly lovely ride, conditions were perfect. I was placed in the top back five by five row between two people propped onto two metal bars with no foot bar or seat-belts. This meant that when the bus stopped suddenly, I was on a sliding rail that threatened to hurl me into the aisle six feet from the floor. Also, my bus was blessed with two horns for a unique variety of honk types which began to be used extensively around six o'clock this morning. The entire travel time was 24 hours.
In what possible manner were conditions perfect? For dreams of course!
Of the only large sleep I managed to get on the bus, I had the most hilarious nightmare I've ever had. I was watching the evening news with my parents when a story about a new government financial scandal ended by reminding viewers to practice safe internet shopping. I went outside in a taxi and rounding the corner I saw a handful of people (no more than twelve), standing outside of Jack Layton's mansion chanting. It sounded to me like one of those fake mailbox generated protests probably organized my an opposition party, so I mocked them as I passed; I suppose I combined the maximum amount of nerdiness and Toryism, saying "Don't you people have work tomorrow?" (How old am I?). On the way back I started counting them aloud to mock them once again. One, Two, Three, Four...
Things usually go wrong, I've noticed, when I start to count in dreams. Around about nine, the mob began to approach. The cab driver started to quicken the pace, but the protesters were mighty fast for their ages. Their chant changed too and they could now be seen running and yelling, "Understand the riot! Understand the riot!"
The taxi turned a corner but then got a little confused and did a sort of panicky three-point-turn and pirouette. A few runners got around the corner and zoomed in on the car which was doing its best to speed away. I was now, for some reason on the trunk of the taxi and one or two of the zombies were catching up fast. As he got within biting distance, I aimed a good stomp to his face. My aim in the dream seemed to connect perfectly, but in reality I had connected perfectly with the seat in front of Michael, no doubt scarring the peasant tones out of some poor Chinese woman.
Luckily this passed without incident, save a good blister on my heel, but I suppose my excuse had I needed one would have been to say "Understand the riot!"
...
Compared to Hanoi, Saigon is a booming megapolis. There are night clubs and a strong youth culture that comes out on weekday nights to dance in parks, hang out on motorbikes around ice-cream trucks, or drink beer at the roadside cafes. We were there for valentines day, so we saw lots of cute looking couples (well, ok...pretty cute looking, but almost all cool looking asian guys look a little too thuggin for me to say that too confidently...I mean they have like motorbikes and know muai thai and stuff... still pretty cute).
Vietnam is a former French colony, and a lot of French culture has seeped into it even if it's hard work to find a young person who speaks French. There is a world famous coffee grown in the country. It's served in street-side cafes, like most food, and with shots of sweetened condensed milk, over ice too from time to time. Sandwiches come in baguettes, and Ban mi trang is a common street-food of Vietnamese meat cuts, pate and sauce stuffed into a baguette. Also, in Hanoi some people actually do wear berets... like unironically.
In Saigon, we had hopped off the bus in the middle of downtown and wandered into a guesthouse Mike found about an hour before we left the bus station in Hoi An. It turned out to be run by some very nice people who gave us lots of candied coconut and talked about our travels and Canada and the like. Mike became friendly, and flirtatious, with the daughter? cousin? who took us out for food and drinks, brought us out to eat dog, and eventually was seduced to Mike's persistent charm.
...
Dog 1:
A Chiwawah that guards the door to our guesthouse. It has teeth so bad, they make the old people seem charming. Emerging at forty five to eighty degree angles from the gums, they are better at mashing food that anything else. Luckily, the dog never smiles, but spends all its time barking at guests coming in and out the door.
I felt better about eating a dog earlier, realizing again that it's sentiment that makes us sympathize with the pretty dog while feeling less concerned for the filthy chicken. Not that that solves anything, but when animal rights are formally claimed, I will insist on their right to dental care.
...
After our time in Vietnam, we hopped the bus to Cambodia. We had bought it from the guesthouse and some language barriers sent our bus to Phnom Penh, as opposed to Sihanoukville. We made a hasty decision to stay and see the city in the morning while grabbing the bus out to Sihanoukville in the afternoon. That morning, we got up, travelled to the market, a booming almost Persian looking dome filled with jewelry and clothes selling stalls. We were there pretty early and got to see the jewelry sellers wiping down the mirrors in their display cases (that's what sells shinny stuff).
In Cambodia, we some time on the beach (well, in Vietnam we did too in Hoi An, but here was a longer time) in a place called Sihanoukville. It's like a beach vacation sponsored by the dollar store; everything is sold in American prices, usually for a buck or two, but you can also pay in riel. The experience of using two currencies at the same time is a little disorienting to say the least. Still, it beats getting used to Vietnam's dong, which for whatever reason is valued into tens of thousands (a bottle of water costs 15,000 dong).
This was where I was possibly most concerned for our eventual return and the safe recovery of our trip. Sihanoukville is like the Siren's isle of travellers, a place backpackers might come to die. It was here that the discovery of enormously cheap and sketchy Valium was illustrated to us from a friend who became a travelling companion for the remained of the trip, an Auzie from Brisbane. In all fairness, it made perfect sense for the remaining bus rides which were by now as terrible as ever. In the last push to Thailand, a woman with the boniest head I've endured slept on my shoulder the whole way giving me a tennis arm that lasted a day-and-a-half. I wanted to read my book, but suddenly found I couldn't keep my eyes open. Four hours later, we crossed the border and onto a new bus with roads and drivers switching to the left and right hand sides respectively.
...
Beach urchins in Sihanoukville:
Kid: Where you from man?
Me: Canada
Kid: Man FUCK Justin Bieber.
Me: Is he Canadian? Huh... sorry?
...
In Siem Reap, we went to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, the largest temple complex in the world. The biggest have been restored and cleared, but a lot of them are still in the state they were rediscovered in, with gigantic trees pulling them apart and roots crawling into the stone bricks. It's just like in an Indiana Jones movie. I also pushed hard to rent bikes for the day, so we got to travel at our own pace and got that wonderful feeling of relative size to movement while circling around the temples.
Siem Reap is also a relatively large town in Cambodia. It has a large student population, and lots of young people come to work in the service industry in hotels, restaurants and it's thriving bar street. We also managed to talk to a monk in Siem Reap's central Buddhist temple. Lots of young Cambodian men come to work for the temple as monks. It's a scholarship program that give them the opportunity to go study abroad. I asked how many women become monks shortly after this, knowing somewhat in advance that the answer is none (women are only allowed to be very devotional non-monks). So it seems like an unsteady start to a country trying eagerly to move forward to limit it's university experience to one half of the population. So it goes, slowly.
...
Dog 2:
Grey, bald, wrinkled, with the most perfectly menacing fangs I have ever seen on a dog. He hangs out on the top stairs of the western gate of Angkor Wat. There's no such thing as reincarnation, but if there was, this is the form priests who starved their six hundred slave peasants for the godhead and their own wicked wasted power would return to assume.
...
We finished our travel in Bangkok which was, frankly, comparatively more expensive and frustrating than anywhere else on our trip. We only stayed a couple days, and the only relatively cheap thing to eat was street side pad-thai, which is honestly quite good. (That and the pool table that was connected to the bar below our hotel. We played there all day for three days and only ordered maybe two beers a person.) Interestingly however, Pad Thai's not an authentic Thai dish. It's actually Vietnamese. During the nationalist push, the king encouraged Thais to eat and make it as a spur to rice farmers, hoping to strengthen the economy. It's just another indication of my preference for Vietnam I suppose.
...
A Coda: Reflections on a Thai Sex Show
What began with a tuk-tuk driver's insistent request and a cheap laminated program moved through the alchemical minds of my travel companions, emerging as a command, “we are going”. No use arguing when Mike gets this committed. Off we go, I guess.
This was the furthest out of the tourist district of Bangkok I ever travelled. Even further than my mid-day walking trip to the bell tower. Further than the clothes market where the buses go to rest for the night. The tuk-tuk drove us down streets that could have been confused for warehouses in Detroit had it not been for the humidity. I suppose a warehouse is a good place to hide a sex show from the forces of the “Super-police”, whose boastful placards adorn hotel signs and street maps. Here, outside of the watchful eyes of the international community, the Thai police are not so concerned for the international image of the country and it's royal family’s high opinion of it's own morality. Here is where the tuk-tuks get commission to travel. Pecunia non olet.
In the warehouse, past what looks like a Christmas tree except that it's covered in paper bills, is the door to the darkened room with seat all around the stage. It's dark, so it's hard to make out other face in a packed bar, but most seem to be young backpackers or middle aged Asian tourists. The spread of men and women is about half and half.
The show is one part magic show, one part anatomy, and a final part transgression. Women use their kegel musles to do a variety of complicated manoeuvres: smoking cigarettes, draining a bottle of cola, blowing out candles, firing a blow-dart at some balloons, or firing ping-pong balls into a cup. Lots of the acts seem, like any transgressive magic trick, dangerous at first sight but with the right slight of hand are safe enough to repeat all night safe. At one point, a woman pulls a string of razor blades out of her pussy, and then shows how they are able to cut paper into strips. It's admittedly more than the average trip to Club Supersex Montreal.
However, it's hard to say that any part of the show is really all that sexy. Even the conclusion to the show, in which a toned man performs intercourse with one of the show's girl's onstage in a variety of complicated gymnastic manoeuvres, focuses more on the extreme than on the sensual (even if the theme from titanic is being played by the D.J.).
What are the conditions of the girls, and boys, who perform this type of act? It's hard to say. For one thing, we stayed long enough to see the show three times, so a night must be a long thing indeed. For another, the performers do use protection, part no doubt of Thailand's often-earnest push to combat the spread of AIDS. But otherwise, it's hard to say. Patrons don't get to go wandering in the back of restaurants, and sex clubs are likewise if more serious about it. We can speculate all we want, but we are left with the educated guesses of NGOs and our own unique fears.
From what I have since learned, Thailand's sex trade (and here I'm talking about true prostitution and the massage racket) is strongly made up of men and women from the Hill tribe, a Thai minority from the north. Many lack citizenship papers and have no representation. The recent collapse of their traditional economy, in part due to opium eradication campaigns, have made it convenient to comply with the Thai sex trade. This would make them one of those unknown clusters of stateless people. Some NGOs have taken to representing them, and many take a neutral stance of prostitution, and this seems to me like a good way to approach the issue.
Prostitution is easy to give way to cheap moralism, and the victims of these purges are almost always the weakest participants. In a country where it is considered socially appropriate for men to have mistresses, and where the religious codes of Buddhism imply that there are hierarchies of women, some of whom it is appropriate to pay for, it is rare that clients will be the first to suffer the worst of the law. “Why do you lash that whore?” Shakespeare asks us. It is our duty to recognize our own commitment to responding appropriately to this awkward question, and overcoming the ugly deformities of our traditions.
I once wrote a brief reflection on prostitution and the sex trade for the Kings Feminist zine, and my opinions haven't changed much since then. This was certainly one of the tawdrier and more dispiriting corners of the sex trade, but then so was the one I was writing about earlier.
...
Dog 3:
A slum-dog if there ever was one. In Bangkok, he wears a kid's yellow soccer jersey, as filthy as he is. Tide should steal both and make a television commercial in which both are thrown into a washing-machine. The magic of television would turn a tragic ending into a commercially viable one.
...
On the plane out of Bangkok, the Thai English-Language newspaper left in the seat-pocket in front of me had an editorial cartoon of General Qaddafi, depicted as a statue mid-speech with soldiers shooting from the general's mouth into a crowd of unarmed protesters.
By the time I'd crossed through customs onto the Guangdong to Beijing flight, Xinhua's editorial cartoon depicted an oil drum watching televised coverage of middle-east protests and having a price inflating series of heart attacks. It's hard to say that America would have been so cynical even on a bad day, but China was just about one of the only leading nations at the UN to support the Iranian crackdown on political demonstrations.
The vacation's over. Welcome home.
...
Answers:
1. Back to the Future
2. Jurassic Park
3. The Day After Tomorrow
4. Toy Story
5. Raiders of the Lost Ark
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Mark- Ottawa
‘Government is like the referee in a society that is like a boxing ring. A socialist government jumps into the ring to help beat up one side of an issue on behalf of the side that they perceive to be the little guy. Now, the prototypical extreme right wing would do the opposite and beat up on the plaintiff on behalf of the defendant, but really, Mr. Chair, the point is that a good government doesn't go to either of those extremes. A good government instead simply equips both parties with boxing gloves and a good ring and training, and then lets them go to it and lets the merit of the matter determine the issue’
–Stephen Woodworth, Conservative Member of Parliament for Kitchener Centre, yesterday’s environment committee
‘Capitalism is the greatest wealth-producing machine known to human beings. But there’s a problem with it: those who have money tend to get more of it until the people who started with less end up with much less. That’s why you need a welfare state to step in and ensure that the country does not deteriorate into haves and have-nots. Although that does seem to happen anyway… from time to time’
-undisclosed former Canadian Prime Minister
‘Canada’s Health Care system is a massive wealth redistribution machine from the rich to the poor.’
-Geoffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail Journalist, last week
“Don't be afraid of asking, brother!
Don't be won over,
see for yourself!
What you don't know yourself,
you don't know.
Add up the reckoning.
It's you who must pay it.
Put your finger on each item,
ask: How did this get here?
You must take over the leadership”
-Bertold Brecht, a while ago
Hi friends! Long time, no blog! Sorry about that… let’s see what I can do to fix that.
Lez just get some factual business on the table: I'm into the second half of the programme now, which means that I've switched to my second allocation. I was previously working for the Liberal critic for citizenship and immigration Justin Trudeau and now I'm working for a Conservative by the name of James Bezan who is chair of the Environment committee. He's a Manitoban cattle rancher turned business man turned politician. He’s a procedural whiz-kid and a serious dude. So far I'm having an amazing time in the office and doing pretty cool stuff. You can see evidence of this by watching this brutally long and not particularly exciting video for which I wrote the script.
On the whole, navigating the office dynamics and the general transition that is known as 'crossing the floor' has been somewhat stressful but also hugely educational. Almost no staffers on the Hill have the opportunity to work for multiple parties, which can create a bit of awkwardness and tension depending on how dogmatic the folks around you happen to be. As you can imagine, there can be some real zealots amongst MPs and staffers. Interestingly though, it is a dynamic that we interns are well-adjusted to by this point, so it is actually more awkward for other people than it is for us. You can see the gears screeching to a halt as people try to process the generally unacceptable two-facedness of our mixed tenure on the Hill. Being on both sides of the House has forced me to take seriously positions that I have never fully dealt with—-but I’ll save that thought for another time.
As I've already explained to most of you, the program is pretty cool in other ways besides the office placements themselves. We just got back from our second study tour, this one to Brussels and London (with stops in Vimy and Cardiff along the way). While in Brussels, in addition to the EU parliament, we visited the Belgian federal institutions. This government has not been officially formed for more than 200 days because the Flemish separatist party got the most seats in the last election and has decided to demonstrate the uselessness of the federal system by, um, preventing it from existing. This is like if the Bloc Quebecois won the Canadian federal election and decided to boycott parliament to demonstrate its insignificance.
We also saw Westminster, the Welsh "devolved" parliament and a variety of other political contraptions. To my sensibilities, Europe in general seems riddled with mind-bending political contortions that make the provincial relations in Canada look positively comprehensible. I also saw some sweet musicals in London and spent a great afternoon at the British Museum (note: check out the BBC podcast “a history of the world in 100 objects,” it is the illest). We will have two more study tours this year, one to Washington and one to Nunavut.
To other matters! Am I living ethically? Our program is sponsored not by public money but largely by corporations such as bombardier, CIBC and Scotiabank. Discussing the issue with one Liberal MP (who tends more towards the left than his party affiliation would indicate [a somewhat common affliction which I would be happy to talk about another time]), I was told that I must be participating in a corrupt and inherently exploitative program because of the source of our funding. This is something that I've yet to really work out, although I politely requested that that Member explain to me how the corporations are using me as a pawn before he insists that they are.
Regardless of whether my life is perfectly examined, it is certainly quite pleasant. We've had really amazing access to people and places. On Thursday, for example, a few of us had lunch with former parliamentary intern ('72) and Globe and Mail columnist Geoffrey Simpson, who presented his thoughts about the failures of the healthcare system and insisted that we cease to idolize our own system so that we might actually begin to improve it.
On Friday, we had lunch with Allan Rock (former Health, Justice and Industry Minister and former Canadian Ambassador to the UN [and Steve’s father!]) who brought some different perspectives to the issue and insisted that softer solutions (like no more fee for service for doctors!) would make the difference. As one of the other interns suggested after the meeting, Rock might be best understood as "a raging Liberal from the 1990's." I agree with that assessment but I would also stress that this shouldn’t be thought of as an entirely bad thing.
We also sat down with Megan Leslie who is the COOLEST. Instead of asking us to introduce ourselves with where we’re from, she asked us to declare our favourite West Wing character and explain why. Thank the sweet lord that I’ve devoted so many waking hours to that artistic masterpiece.
(Unrelated but inspiring quote from Megan Leslie: ‘So it turned out that, instead of building another coal power plant, Nova Scotia Power could just go into people’s homes and make repairs to the things that were inefficient. Fix windows, install new furnaces. So that’s what we did. And it worked.’)
So yes: as you can tell from my unwieldy explanations, lurching sentences and unpredictable narrative style, there is far too much to tell. The other interns are insightful and I learn as much from their experiences in their respective offices as I do from my own.
Despite poor contact-keeping, I miss all of you greatly (even you, Sebs. We’re FB friends now, dontcha know) and I dream of the day when I will be with you all again (I’m imagining some kind of serene afterlife but it could just as easily be ‘Halifax’ or ‘Toronto’ in the summertime). So stay true to the game.
All my lovin’,
Mark.
PS: we have a research paper to write for this program and so I’m working on… guess what? Hegel! Hegel and Parliament! And digital democracy. It is going to be King’s as hell.
PPS: Should I say things about non-internship stuff? Yes, I should. But maybe you should skype me. markdance3 is me!
–Stephen Woodworth, Conservative Member of Parliament for Kitchener Centre, yesterday’s environment committee
‘Capitalism is the greatest wealth-producing machine known to human beings. But there’s a problem with it: those who have money tend to get more of it until the people who started with less end up with much less. That’s why you need a welfare state to step in and ensure that the country does not deteriorate into haves and have-nots. Although that does seem to happen anyway… from time to time’
-undisclosed former Canadian Prime Minister
‘Canada’s Health Care system is a massive wealth redistribution machine from the rich to the poor.’
-Geoffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail Journalist, last week
“Don't be afraid of asking, brother!
Don't be won over,
see for yourself!
What you don't know yourself,
you don't know.
Add up the reckoning.
It's you who must pay it.
Put your finger on each item,
ask: How did this get here?
You must take over the leadership”
-Bertold Brecht, a while ago
Hi friends! Long time, no blog! Sorry about that… let’s see what I can do to fix that.
Lez just get some factual business on the table: I'm into the second half of the programme now, which means that I've switched to my second allocation. I was previously working for the Liberal critic for citizenship and immigration Justin Trudeau and now I'm working for a Conservative by the name of James Bezan who is chair of the Environment committee. He's a Manitoban cattle rancher turned business man turned politician. He’s a procedural whiz-kid and a serious dude. So far I'm having an amazing time in the office and doing pretty cool stuff. You can see evidence of this by watching this brutally long and not particularly exciting video for which I wrote the script.
On the whole, navigating the office dynamics and the general transition that is known as 'crossing the floor' has been somewhat stressful but also hugely educational. Almost no staffers on the Hill have the opportunity to work for multiple parties, which can create a bit of awkwardness and tension depending on how dogmatic the folks around you happen to be. As you can imagine, there can be some real zealots amongst MPs and staffers. Interestingly though, it is a dynamic that we interns are well-adjusted to by this point, so it is actually more awkward for other people than it is for us. You can see the gears screeching to a halt as people try to process the generally unacceptable two-facedness of our mixed tenure on the Hill. Being on both sides of the House has forced me to take seriously positions that I have never fully dealt with—-but I’ll save that thought for another time.
As I've already explained to most of you, the program is pretty cool in other ways besides the office placements themselves. We just got back from our second study tour, this one to Brussels and London (with stops in Vimy and Cardiff along the way). While in Brussels, in addition to the EU parliament, we visited the Belgian federal institutions. This government has not been officially formed for more than 200 days because the Flemish separatist party got the most seats in the last election and has decided to demonstrate the uselessness of the federal system by, um, preventing it from existing. This is like if the Bloc Quebecois won the Canadian federal election and decided to boycott parliament to demonstrate its insignificance.
We also saw Westminster, the Welsh "devolved" parliament and a variety of other political contraptions. To my sensibilities, Europe in general seems riddled with mind-bending political contortions that make the provincial relations in Canada look positively comprehensible. I also saw some sweet musicals in London and spent a great afternoon at the British Museum (note: check out the BBC podcast “a history of the world in 100 objects,” it is the illest). We will have two more study tours this year, one to Washington and one to Nunavut.
To other matters! Am I living ethically? Our program is sponsored not by public money but largely by corporations such as bombardier, CIBC and Scotiabank. Discussing the issue with one Liberal MP (who tends more towards the left than his party affiliation would indicate [a somewhat common affliction which I would be happy to talk about another time]), I was told that I must be participating in a corrupt and inherently exploitative program because of the source of our funding. This is something that I've yet to really work out, although I politely requested that that Member explain to me how the corporations are using me as a pawn before he insists that they are.
Regardless of whether my life is perfectly examined, it is certainly quite pleasant. We've had really amazing access to people and places. On Thursday, for example, a few of us had lunch with former parliamentary intern ('72) and Globe and Mail columnist Geoffrey Simpson, who presented his thoughts about the failures of the healthcare system and insisted that we cease to idolize our own system so that we might actually begin to improve it.
On Friday, we had lunch with Allan Rock (former Health, Justice and Industry Minister and former Canadian Ambassador to the UN [and Steve’s father!]) who brought some different perspectives to the issue and insisted that softer solutions (like no more fee for service for doctors!) would make the difference. As one of the other interns suggested after the meeting, Rock might be best understood as "a raging Liberal from the 1990's." I agree with that assessment but I would also stress that this shouldn’t be thought of as an entirely bad thing.
We also sat down with Megan Leslie who is the COOLEST. Instead of asking us to introduce ourselves with where we’re from, she asked us to declare our favourite West Wing character and explain why. Thank the sweet lord that I’ve devoted so many waking hours to that artistic masterpiece.
(Unrelated but inspiring quote from Megan Leslie: ‘So it turned out that, instead of building another coal power plant, Nova Scotia Power could just go into people’s homes and make repairs to the things that were inefficient. Fix windows, install new furnaces. So that’s what we did. And it worked.’)
So yes: as you can tell from my unwieldy explanations, lurching sentences and unpredictable narrative style, there is far too much to tell. The other interns are insightful and I learn as much from their experiences in their respective offices as I do from my own.
Despite poor contact-keeping, I miss all of you greatly (even you, Sebs. We’re FB friends now, dontcha know) and I dream of the day when I will be with you all again (I’m imagining some kind of serene afterlife but it could just as easily be ‘Halifax’ or ‘Toronto’ in the summertime). So stay true to the game.
All my lovin’,
Mark.
PS: we have a research paper to write for this program and so I’m working on… guess what? Hegel! Hegel and Parliament! And digital democracy. It is going to be King’s as hell.
PPS: Should I say things about non-internship stuff? Yes, I should. But maybe you should skype me. markdance3 is me!
Friday, November 12, 2010
Melina
Wow. I just want to say that I am thrilled to be a part of this and that it is such a great idea and a wonderful way to stay in touch. I’m not sure where to begin or how much I will write, so please be patient as I ramble on. I think that I may not be alone in feeling that this task is ridiculously huge, to give everyone a glimpse into my life after this time apart. I know that I have always taken friendship for granted in some way, because it’s always been easy to remain in contact with people at the same school, when you see each other nearly every day, but now I’m realizing what effort it takes to maintain a true contact with those who are physically farther away.
So, to keep some sort of order, I will attempt to keep this chronological. My summer was spent working for my father’s aerial photography company, based out of Toronto, but travelling around to various job sites in Quebec, Ontario and then Ecuador. My parents sold their house this spring, and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in May. I stayed in the partly converted sun room, with a makeshift bed cut to fit, with most of my things in a storage room, but spent so much time away from home due to work, it mostly worked out. It’s interesting because I’ve never felt a strong connection to Toronto, and this summer I was hardly there, but I now think that maybe I could end up there at some point.
At the end of July I headed down to Ecuador, flying down in the tiny twin engine airplane that we were going to be using for our work down there. We (my pilot and I) took four days to get from Toronto to Guayaquil, and most of our delays were due to customs issues. Our first day took us down to Fort Lauderdale, where we had to pick up a new GPS system for the airplane because the built-in system only had precise information up until Panama. The next day, after picking up the system, and after organizing an over-flight permit for Cuba, we flew into Kingston, Jamaica. We were planning on going straight through that same day to Panama, but ended up being held up by island time. It took a few hours to clear through customs and immigration, and by the time we started getting our fuel, we were told that they couldn’t accept credit card payment and that all of the banks, in which we could change travelers’ cheques, were closed. So we spent the night, leaving around the middle of the following day, and going down to Panama. We arrived in the heart of a huge thunderstorm, and luckily the clouds cleared just enough in the minute before our landing so that we could see the runway. Our flights always took us nearly to the end of our fuel reserves.
In Panama, we were suddenly immersed in Spanish, which neither my pilot or I spoke properly; our month of being lost in translation had begun. We arrived and were whisked away by a trio of men from an agency that assists foreign aircraft and crew, and were given muddled Spanglish instructions on what to do the following morning. All that we understood was that we would likely be picked up in the morning from the hotel where they brought us, and that they would organize our flight to Ecuador. The following morning, sure enough, we got a phone call from someone in their organization, and I tried to use what little Spanish I knew to communicate our intentions, and we waited in the lobby of the hotel to try to determine the best plan of action on how we could fly out with all of the storms around. At the airport we were assured that everything was taken care of for our flight to Ecuador, the most terrifying stretch of the journey because it was almost all over open-ocean.
Halfway through the flight, we got a radio call from Cali, Colombia, over whose airspace we were flying. They stated that we did not have the requisite permits and that we had to turn back to Panama and wait for the permits – for Colombian airspace as well as for Ecuadorian landing – to go through. Not only did we not have enough fuel to legally fly the distance back to Panama, there were such storms in Panama that we didn’t dare to do it on such short fuel reserves. Eventually we convinced Cali that we were in fact allowed to land in Ecuador, and that we didn’t really have any choice anyway, and continued on our way, but it was a very stressful twenty minutes in the air over Colombia. We had no idea what the Colombians would do to us if we didn’t comply, but also knew that we had to keep going in order to land safely.
Guayaquil was an interesting experience. Because we were always on call, waiting for sunny weather (which hardly ever came), we didn’t ever get a chance to see any more of the country than that one city. And because I was there with my pilot who refused to do any cultural activities, and I was not allowed to go out on my own, I didn’t really even see much of what the city had to offer. Nevertheless, it was an exciting opportunity to attempt to learn rudimentary Spanish, and the city itself seems like it could be a really cool place to be. All the same, life on the road wore me down, and by the end of August I was desperate to go home.
I spent two weeks in Toronto, mostly saying goodbye and packing everything that I owned into boxes and bringing them to a storage room, trying to wrap my head around how I felt about my now-familiar feeling of homelessness. I had planned an extensive trip to Europe for this year, allowing myself to believe that I wanted to move to Berlin, or somewhere equally exciting, but really having no idea what I would be doing after the beginning of October, my cousin’s wedding.
My trip began with two weeks in Rotterdam, visiting my sister and winding down after the stress of the summer. Most of that time was spent figuring out where to go next, in terms of my travels but also in terms of real plans for the future. I began for the first time to realize how King’s never taught us where we could go next, but rather just left us with the vague feeling that we could go anywhere. And Anywhere is a pretty huge place to start looking for a future.
Since the beginning of October, I have been spending my time trying to get to know my family in Vienna and in Innsbruck, trying to pay attention to photos and stories that have always seemed so far away. My father moved to Canada with his family when he was two years old, and now his siblings have almost all moved out west; with the exception of one sister in Niagara Falls and his mother in Mississauga, my immediate family has hardly any tangible connection with this far-flung family. My mother moved to Toronto when she was 19 years old and had gotten married to my father (that is a long story in itself, but they met in Austria, had a two-year long correspondence in which they “dated”, and then were married in Austria as she was finishing her high school exams), leaving the rest of her family over here. It was interesting to read Orion’s comment about roots and rootedness, and the desire for community, because I have often felt uprooted, without home, without a stable starting point. My father’s parents moved their entire family to Canada in an attempt to escape the burden of history, and then my mother also emigrated and left everything behind. I feel like these decisions came out of a willingness to erase the family, erase all ties, and those are the threads which I am now attempting to gather together into some sort of tapestry, however patchwork and bare.
In Vienna, my paternal grandfather was born the youngest of five. His grandfather had emigrated from Italy, and had found employment as the accountant for the Habsburg family. Religiously speaking, he was from the Greek Orthodox church (some generations back I have roots in Greece), and was furious when his son decided to marry an Austrian catholic. My grandfather’s older brother, Gilbert, had three daughters, one of whom I stayed with, my father’s cousin Monika. My father’s immediate family, however, are the only Giannelias left in the world. I feel a kind of responsibility to the name and to the history, this family of wanderers who had moved on, changed names, changed citizenship, changed religion, and hardly ever stayed put.
Monika told me about the family gossip and intrigue from the 20th century, the Viennese century: the distant uncle who had three children through an affair with a woman, who he then set up in a house which his “legitimate” children were supposed otherwise to inherit; the great-grandmother who would stand in the doorway of their downtown tobacco shop screaming about the Nazis in 1940 Vienna; another distant uncle who had found a way to give Greek citizenship to a Jewish family, and then later fled to France, leaving behind a wife and four children; Hans (my grandfather) meeting my grandmother, who 10 years later would decide to move the entire family to Canada; the gambling problems of the two Giannelia brothers who never could hold on to their money, &c, &c. I would look at the distant photographs, the old portraits of the Giannelias with their crazy monarchist beards, and begin to get a glimmer of understanding that this was my family, the family who had been left behind in the search for peace and a future in the new world. I am now also starting to realize the power of the concept “new world,” a place not so darkened by the shadows of death and war and human catastrophe.
I left Vienna at the end of October, making it to Innsbruck for Halloween – not a tradition – and Alle Heiligen, or “All Saint’s Day”, which is very much a tradition. On the first of November, all the cemeteries hold a service to remember the dead. It is a national holiday, everything is closed, and all you can hear are the bells. The times of the services are staggered, to allow each person the opportunity to go to all of the different cemeteries where their families lie. I went with my Oma (my mother’s mother) to two different cemeteries, one for my grandfather and his brother, and the other where the rest of her family rests. We met with different distant relatives in both cemeteries, and the roads were filled with people all on their way somewhere. This holiday is something that I can’t remember ever hearing about, a method of remembrance that lies so far outside of my immediate family experience, and I felt incredibly lucky to be able to spend the time here.
Every year on the first of November, my grandmother makes a “Kugelhupf”, a delicious cake with almonds, as well as a simple meal, and invites everyone over for coffee and cake after the cemeteries. The entire experience is a whole day long affair, because many people go to different places and spend time with different parts of their families (such as my cousins with their long-term girlfriends who have become family by now), and Oma and I just stayed at her apartment as the other relatives came and went. I heard stories about my Czechish great-grandmother and her three sisters, about my grandfather and his family, and tried to take it all in.
Since then, I’ve been spending most of my days with my Oma, probing her for more stories and spending hours poring over photo albums. I’ve now seen photos of her kindergarten class, photos of her climbing mountains with an aunt at the age of 8, the wedding photo of my great-grandparents, and baby photos of my mother and her brothers. I’ve heard about my great-grandmother’s sisters, none of whom had any children and hardly any luck, and about my grandfather trying to convince his parents that he should be allowed to go to art school. All around this apartment are examples of his work, clay sculptures and ceramics mostly, but also paintings, miniature books, jewelry, tinwork and more, although he never did get to follow his dreams as an art student. My mother has told me how every night when he got home from work (he worked as a city official of some sort, I’m not sure of the details, but I know that he organized wedding certificates and did some work with food quality control), he would spread out all of his art supplies and begin to work.
My Oma and I talk every day, about politics, the state of today’s youth, the idea of marriage and motherhood, and how to live well in the world. She laughs about how she is so old fashioned, and I assure her that she is supposed to be old fashioned at the age of 85. We speak in German (she learned English in school, but never spoke it since), and I struggle to keep up with the complexity of the stories. I kick myself everyday for never having taken a German language course, for not being able to better understand my family. I’m trying to write down the stories, to keep them fresh, but it almost feels fresher when they are not written on a page. My ideas about language, writing and translation are becoming stronger, truly taking shape as I try to understand my personal roots through the sometimes-hilarious process of misunderstanding. Every day I feel my German becoming stronger, and I’ve even started to understand a few jokes!
I am now more than halfway through my trip, and the slow pace of my life is starting to feel normal. Most of my time is spent chatting with my Oma or some cousins, and then I do some reading or writing when I feel motivated. I try to go on a walk every day, attempting to take advantage of the glorious mountains that surround me on all sides. I am looking forward to going back to Canada in January, but I feel like the unknown that faces me in Europe now (where to go next, who to stay with, what to see, &c) is somehow more bearable than that which I am going to hurtle into in the new year. Grad school? A job? A new apartment? So-called “real life”? So, as I venture into the unknown, I gather strength from all that I read here, and am aware that travelling has a knack for illuminating the ordinary. Now that I am becoming closer to my roots, I am also feeling more confident in my ability to bring something important to life, over in the new world.
Best wishes from across the ocean,
Melina
So, to keep some sort of order, I will attempt to keep this chronological. My summer was spent working for my father’s aerial photography company, based out of Toronto, but travelling around to various job sites in Quebec, Ontario and then Ecuador. My parents sold their house this spring, and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in May. I stayed in the partly converted sun room, with a makeshift bed cut to fit, with most of my things in a storage room, but spent so much time away from home due to work, it mostly worked out. It’s interesting because I’ve never felt a strong connection to Toronto, and this summer I was hardly there, but I now think that maybe I could end up there at some point.
At the end of July I headed down to Ecuador, flying down in the tiny twin engine airplane that we were going to be using for our work down there. We (my pilot and I) took four days to get from Toronto to Guayaquil, and most of our delays were due to customs issues. Our first day took us down to Fort Lauderdale, where we had to pick up a new GPS system for the airplane because the built-in system only had precise information up until Panama. The next day, after picking up the system, and after organizing an over-flight permit for Cuba, we flew into Kingston, Jamaica. We were planning on going straight through that same day to Panama, but ended up being held up by island time. It took a few hours to clear through customs and immigration, and by the time we started getting our fuel, we were told that they couldn’t accept credit card payment and that all of the banks, in which we could change travelers’ cheques, were closed. So we spent the night, leaving around the middle of the following day, and going down to Panama. We arrived in the heart of a huge thunderstorm, and luckily the clouds cleared just enough in the minute before our landing so that we could see the runway. Our flights always took us nearly to the end of our fuel reserves.
In Panama, we were suddenly immersed in Spanish, which neither my pilot or I spoke properly; our month of being lost in translation had begun. We arrived and were whisked away by a trio of men from an agency that assists foreign aircraft and crew, and were given muddled Spanglish instructions on what to do the following morning. All that we understood was that we would likely be picked up in the morning from the hotel where they brought us, and that they would organize our flight to Ecuador. The following morning, sure enough, we got a phone call from someone in their organization, and I tried to use what little Spanish I knew to communicate our intentions, and we waited in the lobby of the hotel to try to determine the best plan of action on how we could fly out with all of the storms around. At the airport we were assured that everything was taken care of for our flight to Ecuador, the most terrifying stretch of the journey because it was almost all over open-ocean.
Halfway through the flight, we got a radio call from Cali, Colombia, over whose airspace we were flying. They stated that we did not have the requisite permits and that we had to turn back to Panama and wait for the permits – for Colombian airspace as well as for Ecuadorian landing – to go through. Not only did we not have enough fuel to legally fly the distance back to Panama, there were such storms in Panama that we didn’t dare to do it on such short fuel reserves. Eventually we convinced Cali that we were in fact allowed to land in Ecuador, and that we didn’t really have any choice anyway, and continued on our way, but it was a very stressful twenty minutes in the air over Colombia. We had no idea what the Colombians would do to us if we didn’t comply, but also knew that we had to keep going in order to land safely.
Guayaquil was an interesting experience. Because we were always on call, waiting for sunny weather (which hardly ever came), we didn’t ever get a chance to see any more of the country than that one city. And because I was there with my pilot who refused to do any cultural activities, and I was not allowed to go out on my own, I didn’t really even see much of what the city had to offer. Nevertheless, it was an exciting opportunity to attempt to learn rudimentary Spanish, and the city itself seems like it could be a really cool place to be. All the same, life on the road wore me down, and by the end of August I was desperate to go home.
I spent two weeks in Toronto, mostly saying goodbye and packing everything that I owned into boxes and bringing them to a storage room, trying to wrap my head around how I felt about my now-familiar feeling of homelessness. I had planned an extensive trip to Europe for this year, allowing myself to believe that I wanted to move to Berlin, or somewhere equally exciting, but really having no idea what I would be doing after the beginning of October, my cousin’s wedding.
My trip began with two weeks in Rotterdam, visiting my sister and winding down after the stress of the summer. Most of that time was spent figuring out where to go next, in terms of my travels but also in terms of real plans for the future. I began for the first time to realize how King’s never taught us where we could go next, but rather just left us with the vague feeling that we could go anywhere. And Anywhere is a pretty huge place to start looking for a future.
Since the beginning of October, I have been spending my time trying to get to know my family in Vienna and in Innsbruck, trying to pay attention to photos and stories that have always seemed so far away. My father moved to Canada with his family when he was two years old, and now his siblings have almost all moved out west; with the exception of one sister in Niagara Falls and his mother in Mississauga, my immediate family has hardly any tangible connection with this far-flung family. My mother moved to Toronto when she was 19 years old and had gotten married to my father (that is a long story in itself, but they met in Austria, had a two-year long correspondence in which they “dated”, and then were married in Austria as she was finishing her high school exams), leaving the rest of her family over here. It was interesting to read Orion’s comment about roots and rootedness, and the desire for community, because I have often felt uprooted, without home, without a stable starting point. My father’s parents moved their entire family to Canada in an attempt to escape the burden of history, and then my mother also emigrated and left everything behind. I feel like these decisions came out of a willingness to erase the family, erase all ties, and those are the threads which I am now attempting to gather together into some sort of tapestry, however patchwork and bare.
In Vienna, my paternal grandfather was born the youngest of five. His grandfather had emigrated from Italy, and had found employment as the accountant for the Habsburg family. Religiously speaking, he was from the Greek Orthodox church (some generations back I have roots in Greece), and was furious when his son decided to marry an Austrian catholic. My grandfather’s older brother, Gilbert, had three daughters, one of whom I stayed with, my father’s cousin Monika. My father’s immediate family, however, are the only Giannelias left in the world. I feel a kind of responsibility to the name and to the history, this family of wanderers who had moved on, changed names, changed citizenship, changed religion, and hardly ever stayed put.
Monika told me about the family gossip and intrigue from the 20th century, the Viennese century: the distant uncle who had three children through an affair with a woman, who he then set up in a house which his “legitimate” children were supposed otherwise to inherit; the great-grandmother who would stand in the doorway of their downtown tobacco shop screaming about the Nazis in 1940 Vienna; another distant uncle who had found a way to give Greek citizenship to a Jewish family, and then later fled to France, leaving behind a wife and four children; Hans (my grandfather) meeting my grandmother, who 10 years later would decide to move the entire family to Canada; the gambling problems of the two Giannelia brothers who never could hold on to their money, &c, &c. I would look at the distant photographs, the old portraits of the Giannelias with their crazy monarchist beards, and begin to get a glimmer of understanding that this was my family, the family who had been left behind in the search for peace and a future in the new world. I am now also starting to realize the power of the concept “new world,” a place not so darkened by the shadows of death and war and human catastrophe.
I left Vienna at the end of October, making it to Innsbruck for Halloween – not a tradition – and Alle Heiligen, or “All Saint’s Day”, which is very much a tradition. On the first of November, all the cemeteries hold a service to remember the dead. It is a national holiday, everything is closed, and all you can hear are the bells. The times of the services are staggered, to allow each person the opportunity to go to all of the different cemeteries where their families lie. I went with my Oma (my mother’s mother) to two different cemeteries, one for my grandfather and his brother, and the other where the rest of her family rests. We met with different distant relatives in both cemeteries, and the roads were filled with people all on their way somewhere. This holiday is something that I can’t remember ever hearing about, a method of remembrance that lies so far outside of my immediate family experience, and I felt incredibly lucky to be able to spend the time here.
Every year on the first of November, my grandmother makes a “Kugelhupf”, a delicious cake with almonds, as well as a simple meal, and invites everyone over for coffee and cake after the cemeteries. The entire experience is a whole day long affair, because many people go to different places and spend time with different parts of their families (such as my cousins with their long-term girlfriends who have become family by now), and Oma and I just stayed at her apartment as the other relatives came and went. I heard stories about my Czechish great-grandmother and her three sisters, about my grandfather and his family, and tried to take it all in.
Since then, I’ve been spending most of my days with my Oma, probing her for more stories and spending hours poring over photo albums. I’ve now seen photos of her kindergarten class, photos of her climbing mountains with an aunt at the age of 8, the wedding photo of my great-grandparents, and baby photos of my mother and her brothers. I’ve heard about my great-grandmother’s sisters, none of whom had any children and hardly any luck, and about my grandfather trying to convince his parents that he should be allowed to go to art school. All around this apartment are examples of his work, clay sculptures and ceramics mostly, but also paintings, miniature books, jewelry, tinwork and more, although he never did get to follow his dreams as an art student. My mother has told me how every night when he got home from work (he worked as a city official of some sort, I’m not sure of the details, but I know that he organized wedding certificates and did some work with food quality control), he would spread out all of his art supplies and begin to work.
My Oma and I talk every day, about politics, the state of today’s youth, the idea of marriage and motherhood, and how to live well in the world. She laughs about how she is so old fashioned, and I assure her that she is supposed to be old fashioned at the age of 85. We speak in German (she learned English in school, but never spoke it since), and I struggle to keep up with the complexity of the stories. I kick myself everyday for never having taken a German language course, for not being able to better understand my family. I’m trying to write down the stories, to keep them fresh, but it almost feels fresher when they are not written on a page. My ideas about language, writing and translation are becoming stronger, truly taking shape as I try to understand my personal roots through the sometimes-hilarious process of misunderstanding. Every day I feel my German becoming stronger, and I’ve even started to understand a few jokes!
I am now more than halfway through my trip, and the slow pace of my life is starting to feel normal. Most of my time is spent chatting with my Oma or some cousins, and then I do some reading or writing when I feel motivated. I try to go on a walk every day, attempting to take advantage of the glorious mountains that surround me on all sides. I am looking forward to going back to Canada in January, but I feel like the unknown that faces me in Europe now (where to go next, who to stay with, what to see, &c) is somehow more bearable than that which I am going to hurtle into in the new year. Grad school? A job? A new apartment? So-called “real life”? So, as I venture into the unknown, I gather strength from all that I read here, and am aware that travelling has a knack for illuminating the ordinary. Now that I am becoming closer to my roots, I am also feeling more confident in my ability to bring something important to life, over in the new world.
Best wishes from across the ocean,
Melina
Monday, November 8, 2010
Sebastian
I love hanging out in Motels all alone! I am totally jonesin’ around all over the place in room 11 of the Last Port Motel in Canso, Nova Scotia. You don’t know where that is? Canso is at the pee hole of the Northern Nova Scotia peninsula. I drove here in the dark, talking to myself to stay awake. This was out of necessity because the Tim Horton’s coffee product doesn’t have enough caffeine. I had to drink Tim Dog’s because there isn’t much of a market for the fresh roasted, grinded and brewed beans in rural Nova Scotia in November. Isn’t the drive through line just so much more appealing then being served some by a groovy hippy? Did you know Slim Horton doesn’t even brew real coffee anymore? Earlier this year they switched to the instant stuff without telling anyone. Well, no one noticed, so after a few months they spilled the beans. Anyway, back to what you really want to hear about - me. I was driving along, all tired like. Just when I needed it most, my good buddy Caleb calls me up. Boy, was he excited.
“Seb! Have you heard about EARTHSHIPS?”
I’m happy to be on the same team as Caleb. Especially now that he is excited about earthships. GOOGLE. Earthships are low impact, high efficiency homes built mostly from recycled and natural materials. They are the coolest. Most of them are off the grid, use very little energy and produce most or all of the energy they do use themselves. The most common type seems to be built half below ground, half above, using old tires and mud. Caleb wants to build one. I want to help build one and then build at least twelve more.
Maybe you’ve heard some conversing about acquiring some land as a group. Some people seem to be interested, and it’s great to hear the excitement. Land in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is cheap. It’s really cheap, and it is also beautiful and fertile. With a little bit of effort and one less cup of Tim’s a day, in a few years we could be digging our very own earthship holes. Seriously though, in the near-distant future (?) we could all be kicking back in futuristic mud huts. Let that process while I spin some groovy tales:
In October, over Thanksgiving, I spent some time in New Mexico for the Balloon Fiesta. Coincidentally, at the same time my cousin Caitlyn was getting married to Steve, who just so happens to be one of the best dudes. They met at Middlebury where they were both studied fine arts. They love each other so much they decided to get married. The wedding was beautiful and simple. My grandfather presided over the non-denominational ceremony, which was awkward because Steve’s parents are fundamentalist Christians (his Dad is one of the boss men).
It was great to spend time with family and friends during such a festive love party, but I was just happy to be back in New Mexico. I was born there, in Albuquerque, where my family lived until I was 5. I don’t remember much from those days, and I don’t get to spend much time there. When I am lucky enough to be back in “The Land of Enchantment” (state nickname) do I feel a strong connection with the landscape, the people, the art, and maybe most importantly, the food. The red chile ristras are hanging anywhere anything can be hung. The green chile roasters are roastin’ in most of the vacant lots, where the smell is sure to gather in your good weather clothes.
New Mexican cuisine is unlike Texican food in that it is less greasy, less fried, but still sort of greasy and sort of fried, and it should always be smothered in red or green chile sauce. Much of it is meaty, but I spent most of the trip with my vegetarian brother and sister in (sort of) law, Elijah and Moorea, and they were never unsatisfied. Even my vegan cousin Sarah was happy, but she’s been known to cheat the cheese rules.
I also mentioned art. Albuquerque is where my dad studied fine art and where he began his career painting and doing graphic design. It is where the newly wed couple moved to pursue careers in art. When I spent a summer there a few years ago, I found work with an artist named Allan who only paid me in cash, disappeared for a few hours at a time every afternoon, and had a tear-drop birthmark/tattoo (?) below his left eye. What I’m getting at is that there are all kinds artists all over the place, and that might sound like the worst, but it is amazing because people really appreciate art. Art art art art. Public art is everywhere: on the highways, parks, buildings, street corners, etc. Most of it is reminiscent of the ideas that stem from the people of New Mexico’s roots. It’s a fine blend of Peublo Indian, Mexican and American. Earthy with a hint of turquoise. I guess it is the same aesthetic behind the Adobe style architecture that is everywhere.
One of the greatest parts of being in New Mexico is getting to know the friends my parents had when they were my age. My brother and I decided it would be worthwhile to pursue a career in time travel in order to be able to hang out with them our-age parents in the 70’s. One of them was my dad’s old roommate Ken, now living in Taos. In a gas-mobile, you can get to Taos from Albuquerque in three hours. The driving is nothing, though, because the landscapes are so hot! New Mexico isn’t all deserts, although if you ask me, the desert is some of the best scenery.
Beyond the billboards littered along most highways (My dad was proud to point out that the now-metal sings are the solution to the relentless war that he fought - with axe and saw - against what used to be wooden bill-board posts) are vast stretches of open, empty land covered with sagebrush. I couldn’t stop humming THIS. In fact, you should probably let that play as you continue reading. There are also mesas and plateaus, beyond those are mountains. Lots of mountain ranges: the Jemez, Sandia, Zuni, even the Rockies. Between the mountains are these lush valleys that are fed by rivers like the Rio Grande. There are also a few incredible canyons and gorges. Geologically, the place is fucked. There is a continental rift running through the state, so when the continental plates are bumpin’ and grindin’, the vibes are amplified. I think that is why the landscape is so cool, but another reason is because it is really dry. Only the toughest plants can survive, plants that you don’t see in the moist soils of Nova Scotia. People get really creative in their landscaping. Only the crazies have grassy lawns, because in draught times, the lawn watering types are heckled. The lawnscaping you do see is called xeriscaping: using only indigenous plants that can survive without being hose fed like little babies. Having a gravely backyard full of cacti and shrubs is a reality for a lot of people, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. It looks great with adobe houses. Ok, back on the topic of Adobe. I mentioned Ken earlier; we visited him in Taos. Besides fighting forest fires, teaching skiing and white water rafting, Ken makes a living building and selling Adobe houses. He cuts and mills his own wood, sources his own gypsum from the local mine and uses it to build houses that he designs. They are nice. When the climate is hot and dry, the doors really open up in terms of how you can build a house. Wood doesn’t rot, first of all. You don’t even need to pressure treat wood with chemicals that turn it green. There were three houses that Ken built within a few minutes walk, so we went to check them out. All I’ve wanted to do since then is learn to build these Adobe houses. They are sort of what gave rise to the earthships that Caleb called me to talk about. YES, ok, back on earthships. Now, here is the plan: when I am done school I am probably going to eventually find my self back in New Mexico, at least for a year or two. So now you understand that all of that ramblin’ was mostly a ploy to get all of you thinking about how cool New Mexico is so you will come hang out with my while I live there. Caleb is coming, he already signed up to come learn how to build earthships / adobes with me. My cousin is planning on starting an organic farm to provide all the produce for a hot restaurant in Albuquerque that friends of our parents run. So while we aren’t building, we can farm! Won’t that just be a time?
After a stint in NM though, I fully plan on coming back to the Maritimes. In fact, I might not even leave. Either way, pretty soon we’ll be ready to buy up a pretty little (100+ acres) piece with a lake, forest and farmland. I got to drive 1100 kms around the province last week, and oh my!
We’ll build ultra sustainable eco homes, grow our own food and generate our own electricity. Our green houses heated by Nick’s wood gas stoves will be producing Avocados in January! This kind of land is easier to secure in really rural areas, but I think that is just great. Our electric vehicles will have just enough range to get around, if necessary. I’ll probably run whatever business I will have started by then out of a lab/workshop/garage/office that I will have also created by then in my earthship, so no need for a commute. No need for a mortgage either, because your house cost less than $50,000 to build and there will never be electricity bills. Or expensive plane tickets to visit old friends, because they will live just behind the peach orchard, or around the herb (weed) garden, or across the root vegetable field, near the chicken coop. I think some of them will be living in tree houses as well.
See what I mean?
Thanks for reading.
Love, Sebastian
P.S. In case you were wondering why I am in the Last Port Motel in Canso, and why I drove a thousand kilometers around the province, it was for work. I work for Efficiency Nova Scotia, which used to be the Conservation and Energy Efficiency Dept. of Nova Scotia Power. My job is to help Commercial and Industrial customers reduce energy usage by retrofitting their facilities to become more energy efficient. The projects we do could include switching out lighting (incandescent to high efficiency fluorescent), installing new motors or pumps, switching resistance heating for heat pumps, even installing solar thermal panels. We help by providing incentives and financing for projects to make them economically feasible. It’s a good program. It is funded entirely by you and all the other NSPI customers.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Monica - Bonjour mes amis
Bonjour toute le monde,
Sorry my poste is a little late. Also, as an EMSP grad I have to disagree with the statement that we have never been modern, but laisse tomber. I am in the south of France in a town of 40 thousand called Ales, a 45 minute train ride from Nimes or an hour from Montpellier. I have the best roommates ever (except of course for those of you I lived with in Halifax). I'm living with a German girl Mareike who is also working as a language assistant in primary schools and three french guys. One, Kenji, is doing a work placement in Ales until the end of November and then he is going back to Grenoble. Manu is finishing his last year of high school and is pretty much always high. Clement is a physchologist and just started working in Ales, and despite better judgement of not dating roommates, on est ensemble. Ales is not the prettiest town, and it is funny when we decide to go to one of the two bars in town because as there's no university it's all high school students or real grown ups. We have a huge garden and a veranda which was really nice when it was warm and sunny we would eat outside but it is getting cold now and most of the leaves are gone. Cold relatively speaking, light jacket and scarf weather. I am working in three schools teaching kids from age 6-11 and for the most part the kids have been great, really enthousiastic about learning english which is nice. I know for a fact though that I do not want to be a teacher after this. I work about 12 hours a week, and the rest of the time I plan lessons, drink coffee and eat a whole lot of baguette with Mareike. Last week we were on holiday and went to Barcelona for a few days. I still can't believe that you can get on a bus and six hours later be in Barcelona. From Toronto you would be in Montreal. I like Montreal, but no comparison. For the most part I really like it here. I told my mom that I was dating one of my roommates and she said "fine, just come home at the end of it. and don't start smoking." Bon. On verra bien. I miss the wonderful world that was King's, but France is pretty great too. and if any of you want to come visit me please do! et, c'est tout. A bientot.
Monica
Monday, October 18, 2010
Hi everyone!
I am posting the oxford street full feature movie. Unfortunately, the only way I could manage to share it was by splitting it into different youtube videos. So, please be patient as you have to load the videos in their even worse than usual quality!
follow the links and enjoy.
xo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mwIWR1OUsg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXRZdlictrU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1SDiwJugIg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTi9cNAGQN0
I am posting the oxford street full feature movie. Unfortunately, the only way I could manage to share it was by splitting it into different youtube videos. So, please be patient as you have to load the videos in their even worse than usual quality!
follow the links and enjoy.
xo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mwIWR1OUsg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXRZdlictrU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1SDiwJugIg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTi9cNAGQN0
Friday, October 1, 2010
Orion - Correspondence
Hot Damn everyone; formative experiences you're on.
Also, gosh. I want book reviews. The Halifax Review of Books. My mother always told me to write down a few words in a special book everytime I finished a book, so that I would remember. Well let’s do it collectively online. Ella – you are reading plays. I want to hear about them. And also read them in a hammock with you. But mostly read about you reading them online. Jacob – you have been reading Tompson Highway, Nick impersonated him for a long time on Facebook – I’m sure he’d like to hear about his work. Cynthia – you have just exhausted an author! I have wanted to read Douglas Coupland for a while. Well? I hereby declare a modification to the Blog format! Anyone can skip the schedule to toss 100 words down as a review of some cultural production.
Alright fine. Nevermind. ‘We’ don’t have to.
Where am I and what am I doing? I’m not sure. Many of us are in between times which is why Natalie made this blog, right?
This blog is great. How come? Well here is a long story of why. I’m in Halifax, but have just recently returned from a long two weeks in Michigan where I was with my family, grandparents, aunt and cousin.
My time was split between Ann Arbor a small university town bigger than Halifax, and our idyllic family cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan – our small chunk of a collectively owned land my grandparents were part of buying when my father was still a serious little child. It was a wonderful time to be with my family. I used to go there every summer but this was the first time in years. I have a nephew now, Istvan, who is almost 1 ½ and cute and funny as hell. He is well on his way to being a Dal jock – his two most common words (and activities) being ‘Ball’ and ‘Cheers.’ He also loves to go clubbing – particularly when ‘all the single ladies’ comes on. 
We all made a special effort to be there for a sad reason. My Grandfather, Nagypapa, had cancer for the past three years – and we knew this might be his last summer. Right at the end of our visit he died. We were out shoe shopping at the time. Before we’d gone out shopping we’d been hanging out, and Nagypapa asked me what I’m excited about these days. I answered with vague excitement about the future and made comments about all my options and how I felt between communities – Toronto? Halifax? Elsewhere? Academia? Activism? Arts? Nagypapa responded that the question of roots and rootedness has been a theme of his thinking and experience throughout his life.
More recently in specific intellectual guises he has pursued the theme in studying the history of the ancient near east, and linguistics. In linguistics he is a fierce proponent of the out of Africa Theory. He holds that all languages stem from a common single language, and hence single people and single place in Africa. As opposed to language evolving separately in several homo-sapien-sapien communities already spread out geographically and culturally. In the ancient near east he studied the roots of the west, the history of the bible, Sumerians etc.
But right from his childhood Nagypapa was living during reign of nationalism and much of his life has involved crossing borders and changing identities. He was born to a Slovakian mother and a Hungarian father in 1920. 1920 that’s three years after the Russian revolution. He would be ten when the great depression would hit North America. When he turned 20 the Second World War was breaking out. He spent his early childhood in a rural town in Slovakia. He learned Slovakian and Hungarian in the home. In Slovakia he was made fun of for his Hungarian accent, while later in Hungary he would be made fun of for being a Slovak. As well as his two parental tongues his father began teaching him to read Hebrew and German when he was three. His father was a deeply or perhaps a desperately religious Jew. After a military career in the Hungarian Army (wrong side of WWI) he became a Cantor and ritual slaughterer and made a meager living as religious functionary. He would wake up four year old Nagypapa before dawn and violently force him to learn Hebrew and religion by studying and memorizing the old testament. Nagypapa loved the Bible. He identified with its stories of the poor and oppressed. But he quickly rebelled against his father’s violence and rejected religion. He consciously held himself to be an atheist before he was ten. Nagypapa found no home with god nor would he find roots with the jewish community – though he would never be gentile in his own eyes or the eyes of others.
When Nagypapa was seven his father disappeared. Seven years earlier borders had changed and Czechoslovak Republic was formed. His father had not done the necessary paperwork and found himself without citizenship. He snuck from Czechoslovakia to Hungary. A year later, the family received word that he had found a job and they picked themselves up and tried to follow him to Hungary. For travel documents they had a letter from the local Catholic priest stapled to a family photo. It beseeched Hungary’s authorities to allow the family across the border to be re-united. They tried to cross by train four times in different places and were rejected each time accompanied by anti-semitic invective.
Finally they ended up in a jail in a small border town. The town’s Jews heard that a jewish family was being kept in jail and got them out, welcoming them into their own homes instead. Nagypapa’s mother took her youngest and snuck across the border by foot. The rest of the children were scattered amongst different Jewish families in the town. They stayed with their new families for months with no concept of what was going on. Nagypapa’s adopted family began having him memorize the details of their son’s life, who was about the same age. It was a mystery to him why. Eventually, they took him across the border with their Slovakian passports, claiming to be on holiday and claiming Nagypapa as their son. He was questioned by the border guard. They passed. This occurred in various ways with his siblings and they were re-united with mother and father in a Hungarian town – Albertirsa where there was a small jewish community that his father found work.
The Jewish community was quite assimilationist. His father’s insistence on orthodox practices won the family no love. At the same time the public school he attended when he turned six had no Jews except he and his sister. He was bullied and beaten often both for his timid malnourished-ness as well as his shorn head with prominent orthodox ear locks.
Most striking to me of his tales of persecution is perhaps his story of being late. It points to those deep subtle persecutions which are often dismissed and overlooked in favour of more spectacular violence. He was a star pupil and loved school. His teacher marked him fairly but treated him coldly. She was a proud Hungarian nationalist, and as a Slovakian Jew, his bettering of his classmates was begrudged. Her anger towards him grew, however, because he was late every Monday and Thursday morning. According to his father’s practice a prayer service had to be held every Monday and Thursday morning. A ‘minyan’ of ten adult jewish males had to be present for the service to be held. The quorum was almost never met and Nagypapa was enlisted into spending each of those mornings running all over town trying to convince a few more congregation members to show up. He was inevitably late for school. But he had to meet his teachers demands for an explanation with silence that made him seem insubordinate and arrogant. In a town where jewishness and more so orthodoxy were scorned and belittled, he could not begin to explain about his father and a minyan -neither of which he himself believed in- to a proud Hungarian National. Nor could he hope to have it pass as an excuse. So he stood dumbly and received the rod.
Nagypapa describes himself living in three different worlds simultaneously at this time, none of which he felt at home in completely. One was the religious, rigorous, tedious and abusive world of his father, which he rejected, but parts of which he admired and was inspired by. One was the gentile world of school, where he saw other poor children like him, where he learned songs and stories of Hungary that he loved, but which rejected him as a Slovakian Jew. The third was his own private world in the fields, the attic, the chicken coop and other hiding places he could escape to where he mused about the world, and fell in love with nature, but felt alone and frightened of shadows and his imagination.
When he was ten Nagypapa moved away from home to go to school. He went to a Jewish seminary on singing scholarship. He was passed from jewish household to household to be fed – going to a different house each day for his meals. It was this time that he found one of his homes in revolutionary Marxism. I’ll quote him about it:
Charlie Mann, the alto soloist abandoned school and went to work in a bicycle repair shop. He was a jolly, strong, easy-going, very likable fellow. He took pity of me, as I was constantly crying. One day he told me, I will take you with me to a place, but you must never tell about it to anybody and whatever you see, you must keep it as secret forever. He took me to a decrepit courtyard in the back of it was an almost empty junky apartment with a few benches as furniture. There were pictures and some posters on the wall. It was Friday night. Soon young people began to arrive, mostly boys in their late teens, early twenties, a few girls of the same age. Their attire betrayed that they were workers or poor students. They were very friendly and treated me gently with interest and kindness.
Charlie had introduced me to a clandestine Marxist youth group. Despite my tender age, I was integrated in a cell with older kids which was led by a 17 year old student by the name of Lichtman whom I greatly admired. We met clandestinely and read, studied and discussed watered down scientific Marxist theories and leftist literature. In the spring we went on hikes in the thick forest that surrounded Debrecen. With my short but heavy life experiences I was destined to be part of this movement. It was a natural evolution of things for me that I felt I found a meaning of my life amidst these young people, to become a revolutionary, to dedicate myself to the struggle against injustice, oppression, exploitation, violence, and prejudice. We also had discussions about the peculiar situation of Jews in this configuration which befuddled us with its complexities because the Jewish proletariat was subject to all above, but in addition it also shared with the Jewish bourgeoisie the ethnic prejudice and hatred directed at them collectively as Jews. What is the solution??? Hungary was a fiercely anti-Semitic country. I remember agonizing a lot over this dilemma. In short, "the movement" became the center of my life. Charlie introduced me to the rudiments of clandestine practices of an underground movement, to watch out for informers, to see if anybody is following you, to maneuver your approaches when you go to a meeting or to the headquarters.
Hungary was led by a fascist regime from 1919 to the end of the second world war. Socialists were fiercely persecuted, and the movement had to remain absolutely underground. Eventually Nagypapa’s activities were discovered and he was expelled from school. Being expelled was a disaster for Nagypapa – for a moment his dreams were dashed. School had meant a lot to him, and he could not afford to go to any other. The seminary had been free. Further, he feared for his life. If word of his commitment to a communist reading group (then for his age ‘the movement’ was little more – apart from some hiking and singing) reached other authorities he could be jailed or killed. Cell leaders – also teenagers, had been discovered a year before. They had been arrested and thrown out the police station window. Their parents were told they committed suicide.
He eventually made it into another school by passing rigorous examinations. This time it was a more secular Jewish Gymnazium. He almost didn’t make it in, and was set back six months in his education, because of another little ethnic conflict. One of the entrance exams was in English. He had no way teaching himself English until a kind Presbyterian minister in his hometown helped tutor him with some books he’d scrounged. Unfortunately, the minister had learned his English at St. Andrews seminary in Scotland. Nagypapa’s examiner knew Oxford english. When Nagypapa opened his mouth his examiner was disgusted by his accent and failed him.
He would succeed six months later. He managed to pay by working various jobs and eventually becoming a Hebrew tutor, and then a respected tutor in general. One classmate began quietly bringing him lunch. In his second year – he could not afford to enroll and so stayed away – he classmates asked after him and then raised enough for his tuition amongst themselves and brought him back.
He graduated with dreams of becoming a filmmaker but he could not immediately afford to get to France or Italy where he would study. Also, by this time the second world war had begun. He became a shoemaker, and he became good enough that the skill, and the favour it won him, would save his life in the concentration camp.
In 1941 he was drafted into the Hungarian Army. He would not fight but was put into a Jewish Brigade of forced labourers. They were gradually stripped of their uniforms and status as citizens and finally as humans.
He survived the holocaust, he says, due to his experience with hardship and hard labour growing up, luck, and his bootmaking ability which was highly prized amongst the officers. His camp was liberated by Russian soldiers.
After the war he finally went to Paris. He wrote a letter from there to his cousins in Michigan. He’d never met them before, but had heard of them and tracked down their address. It’s a funny and amazing document – written in his school learned English, at 24 or 25 years old – he tells these distant familiar strangers about himself and asks about them. The majority of his family, including his parents, did not survive the holocaust. In the letter it is evident he is reaching out to any family he has left in the world, just for the sake of having family.
In Paris he met my nagymama – she was washing her socks at a fountain at the moment. She was an American girl, from a not very well off family in Michigan that had also found its way to hope in communism. She had collected money from friends to make the trip to france with a group to aid in restoration. After a week they agreed to be married. Then Nagymama went back to Michigan for two years to finish her university degree. The corresponded. Afterwards she returned to Paris and they were married. My aunt was born and they moved to Budapest; they were both devoted to helping build socialism in Hungary.
However, Nagypapa became frustrated in Hungary. Again, he almost did not make it across the border. Once he was in he was treated with constant suspicion because of his American wife. There was a fear that he was some sort of spy or counter-revolutionary. He got a job in a library, but wallowed in the same position for years. It was a bitter experience because he was quite ambitious.
In 1956, when my father was a two, there was an uprising in Hungary against the existing socialist regime. It was lead or sparked by the students. Nagypapa believes it to have been a real revolutionary attempt made by committed communists against a regime they considered to have strayed from the communist cause. The soviets soon moved in a squashed the uprising. They re-instated a pro-soviet status quo. But in that brief interim the borders became more permeable. My grandmother and baby father and aunt took the opportunity to defect. Nagypapa, for some reason stayed behind and followed later. I’m kicking myself right now for not remembering this particular story in more detail. But once again he was repulsed on several occasions by national lines. Finally he escaped through farmer’s fields, carrying his dress shoes in his hands.
Before he left Hungary, his younger brother, like all good brothers gave him a parting gift of a couple pairs of underwear. Nagypapa’s brother is the opposite case of Nagypapa. He did not have his ambitions blocked by the communist party. Instead in communist Hungary he found respect and rose to heights of responsibility that a poor jewish peasant could never have dreamed of otherwise. He was in the army. And his underwear were army issue, with ‘Hungarian Army’ printed in bold Hungarian script on their elastic.
Nagypapa is on a ship crossing the atlantic. He is coming from England and he is on his way to McCarthy era United States. In his bag are underwear boldly declaring their membership in the Peoples’ Republic of Hungary Armed Forces. His bunkmate is an American. Nagypapa begins to get nervous. Is his bunkmate just any American? Or is he C.I.A. – is there even a difference? Nagypapa is nervous and getting paranoid. Finally, after several days of amiable conversation, during which nagypapa is constantly on the verge of vomiting, it gets to be too much. In the middle of the night he sneaks out of his bunk anxiously clutching his underwear under his coat. He creeps up to the deck and with furtive looks around, shaking with fear, he casts his brother’s underwear as far as he can into the middle of the Atlantic. Nagypapa always laughed telling of that nervous purge and liked to wonder where those underwear ended up.
There was a huge picture and headline in the local newspaper when Nagypapa arrived in Michigan. The press snapped up any story of defectors from the Soviet Bloc. It made large of the family escaping the clutches of communism. The story Nagypapa told the reporters was that he had moved back to postwar Hungary because as an aspiring short-story writer he felt he could only make it in his mother-tongue. This was partially true. He would never say that he had moved there to help build socialism. In the united states he could never identify as a socialist and dream of a future. So began a new identity of the rigorous academic of library science.
Just two months ago, we were sitting down for lunch in Ann Arbor. We’ve gotten into the habit of singing a song before each meal (I mouth along). Nagypapa picks the songs usually. Being jumbled in ethnicities and nationalities {link?} all his life, he’s taken delight in learning folk songs and national anthems and passed them on to his grandkids. This time before we sat down he said, go and close the windows. We thought, hmm, it’s mighty hot, but we closed them. He said we are going to sing l’internationale. L’internationale is the anthem of the international communist movement. We did and when we were done he said okay go open the windows now, and we ate.
….After calling all this depth of life history to mind –being tossed between motherlands and ethnicities, being split amongst worlds, and rarely finding an unproblematic home- he said to me ‘And you know, Orion, what I finally concluded? That home is where the junk-mail finds you.’ He was grinning with pride at this bad joke, this little gem of ironic wisdom. Home is where your name is known, you have a place associated with you – and most importantly, people keep track of you. Too bad its people who want to sell you crap, but at least its people keeping track of you. So that’s why this blog is so great. We can all send each other periodic junk mail and feel a little kept track of and a little at home with each other. It’s such a nice bonus that the mail isn’t junk.
Thanks,
Orion
p.s. thanks especially if you made it through. I planned more humour - cause that happens with boundary crossings and Identity confusions --- but I dunno it went this way instead.
Also, gosh. I want book reviews. The Halifax Review of Books. My mother always told me to write down a few words in a special book everytime I finished a book, so that I would remember. Well let’s do it collectively online. Ella – you are reading plays. I want to hear about them. And also read them in a hammock with you. But mostly read about you reading them online. Jacob – you have been reading Tompson Highway, Nick impersonated him for a long time on Facebook – I’m sure he’d like to hear about his work. Cynthia – you have just exhausted an author! I have wanted to read Douglas Coupland for a while. Well? I hereby declare a modification to the Blog format! Anyone can skip the schedule to toss 100 words down as a review of some cultural production.
Alright fine. Nevermind. ‘We’ don’t have to.
Where am I and what am I doing? I’m not sure. Many of us are in between times which is why Natalie made this blog, right?
This blog is great. How come? Well here is a long story of why. I’m in Halifax, but have just recently returned from a long two weeks in Michigan where I was with my family, grandparents, aunt and cousin.
My time was split between Ann Arbor a small university town bigger than Halifax, and our idyllic family cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan – our small chunk of a collectively owned land my grandparents were part of buying when my father was still a serious little child. It was a wonderful time to be with my family. I used to go there every summer but this was the first time in years. I have a nephew now, Istvan, who is almost 1 ½ and cute and funny as hell. He is well on his way to being a Dal jock – his two most common words (and activities) being ‘Ball’ and ‘Cheers.’ He also loves to go clubbing – particularly when ‘all the single ladies’ comes on. 
We all made a special effort to be there for a sad reason. My Grandfather, Nagypapa, had cancer for the past three years – and we knew this might be his last summer. Right at the end of our visit he died. We were out shoe shopping at the time. Before we’d gone out shopping we’d been hanging out, and Nagypapa asked me what I’m excited about these days. I answered with vague excitement about the future and made comments about all my options and how I felt between communities – Toronto? Halifax? Elsewhere? Academia? Activism? Arts? Nagypapa responded that the question of roots and rootedness has been a theme of his thinking and experience throughout his life.
More recently in specific intellectual guises he has pursued the theme in studying the history of the ancient near east, and linguistics. In linguistics he is a fierce proponent of the out of Africa Theory. He holds that all languages stem from a common single language, and hence single people and single place in Africa. As opposed to language evolving separately in several homo-sapien-sapien communities already spread out geographically and culturally. In the ancient near east he studied the roots of the west, the history of the bible, Sumerians etc.
But right from his childhood Nagypapa was living during reign of nationalism and much of his life has involved crossing borders and changing identities. He was born to a Slovakian mother and a Hungarian father in 1920. 1920 that’s three years after the Russian revolution. He would be ten when the great depression would hit North America. When he turned 20 the Second World War was breaking out. He spent his early childhood in a rural town in Slovakia. He learned Slovakian and Hungarian in the home. In Slovakia he was made fun of for his Hungarian accent, while later in Hungary he would be made fun of for being a Slovak. As well as his two parental tongues his father began teaching him to read Hebrew and German when he was three. His father was a deeply or perhaps a desperately religious Jew. After a military career in the Hungarian Army (wrong side of WWI) he became a Cantor and ritual slaughterer and made a meager living as religious functionary. He would wake up four year old Nagypapa before dawn and violently force him to learn Hebrew and religion by studying and memorizing the old testament. Nagypapa loved the Bible. He identified with its stories of the poor and oppressed. But he quickly rebelled against his father’s violence and rejected religion. He consciously held himself to be an atheist before he was ten. Nagypapa found no home with god nor would he find roots with the jewish community – though he would never be gentile in his own eyes or the eyes of others.
When Nagypapa was seven his father disappeared. Seven years earlier borders had changed and Czechoslovak Republic was formed. His father had not done the necessary paperwork and found himself without citizenship. He snuck from Czechoslovakia to Hungary. A year later, the family received word that he had found a job and they picked themselves up and tried to follow him to Hungary. For travel documents they had a letter from the local Catholic priest stapled to a family photo. It beseeched Hungary’s authorities to allow the family across the border to be re-united. They tried to cross by train four times in different places and were rejected each time accompanied by anti-semitic invective.
Finally they ended up in a jail in a small border town. The town’s Jews heard that a jewish family was being kept in jail and got them out, welcoming them into their own homes instead. Nagypapa’s mother took her youngest and snuck across the border by foot. The rest of the children were scattered amongst different Jewish families in the town. They stayed with their new families for months with no concept of what was going on. Nagypapa’s adopted family began having him memorize the details of their son’s life, who was about the same age. It was a mystery to him why. Eventually, they took him across the border with their Slovakian passports, claiming to be on holiday and claiming Nagypapa as their son. He was questioned by the border guard. They passed. This occurred in various ways with his siblings and they were re-united with mother and father in a Hungarian town – Albertirsa where there was a small jewish community that his father found work.
The Jewish community was quite assimilationist. His father’s insistence on orthodox practices won the family no love. At the same time the public school he attended when he turned six had no Jews except he and his sister. He was bullied and beaten often both for his timid malnourished-ness as well as his shorn head with prominent orthodox ear locks.
Most striking to me of his tales of persecution is perhaps his story of being late. It points to those deep subtle persecutions which are often dismissed and overlooked in favour of more spectacular violence. He was a star pupil and loved school. His teacher marked him fairly but treated him coldly. She was a proud Hungarian nationalist, and as a Slovakian Jew, his bettering of his classmates was begrudged. Her anger towards him grew, however, because he was late every Monday and Thursday morning. According to his father’s practice a prayer service had to be held every Monday and Thursday morning. A ‘minyan’ of ten adult jewish males had to be present for the service to be held. The quorum was almost never met and Nagypapa was enlisted into spending each of those mornings running all over town trying to convince a few more congregation members to show up. He was inevitably late for school. But he had to meet his teachers demands for an explanation with silence that made him seem insubordinate and arrogant. In a town where jewishness and more so orthodoxy were scorned and belittled, he could not begin to explain about his father and a minyan -neither of which he himself believed in- to a proud Hungarian National. Nor could he hope to have it pass as an excuse. So he stood dumbly and received the rod.
Nagypapa describes himself living in three different worlds simultaneously at this time, none of which he felt at home in completely. One was the religious, rigorous, tedious and abusive world of his father, which he rejected, but parts of which he admired and was inspired by. One was the gentile world of school, where he saw other poor children like him, where he learned songs and stories of Hungary that he loved, but which rejected him as a Slovakian Jew. The third was his own private world in the fields, the attic, the chicken coop and other hiding places he could escape to where he mused about the world, and fell in love with nature, but felt alone and frightened of shadows and his imagination.
When he was ten Nagypapa moved away from home to go to school. He went to a Jewish seminary on singing scholarship. He was passed from jewish household to household to be fed – going to a different house each day for his meals. It was this time that he found one of his homes in revolutionary Marxism. I’ll quote him about it:
Charlie Mann, the alto soloist abandoned school and went to work in a bicycle repair shop. He was a jolly, strong, easy-going, very likable fellow. He took pity of me, as I was constantly crying. One day he told me, I will take you with me to a place, but you must never tell about it to anybody and whatever you see, you must keep it as secret forever. He took me to a decrepit courtyard in the back of it was an almost empty junky apartment with a few benches as furniture. There were pictures and some posters on the wall. It was Friday night. Soon young people began to arrive, mostly boys in their late teens, early twenties, a few girls of the same age. Their attire betrayed that they were workers or poor students. They were very friendly and treated me gently with interest and kindness.
Charlie had introduced me to a clandestine Marxist youth group. Despite my tender age, I was integrated in a cell with older kids which was led by a 17 year old student by the name of Lichtman whom I greatly admired. We met clandestinely and read, studied and discussed watered down scientific Marxist theories and leftist literature. In the spring we went on hikes in the thick forest that surrounded Debrecen. With my short but heavy life experiences I was destined to be part of this movement. It was a natural evolution of things for me that I felt I found a meaning of my life amidst these young people, to become a revolutionary, to dedicate myself to the struggle against injustice, oppression, exploitation, violence, and prejudice. We also had discussions about the peculiar situation of Jews in this configuration which befuddled us with its complexities because the Jewish proletariat was subject to all above, but in addition it also shared with the Jewish bourgeoisie the ethnic prejudice and hatred directed at them collectively as Jews. What is the solution??? Hungary was a fiercely anti-Semitic country. I remember agonizing a lot over this dilemma. In short, "the movement" became the center of my life. Charlie introduced me to the rudiments of clandestine practices of an underground movement, to watch out for informers, to see if anybody is following you, to maneuver your approaches when you go to a meeting or to the headquarters.
Hungary was led by a fascist regime from 1919 to the end of the second world war. Socialists were fiercely persecuted, and the movement had to remain absolutely underground. Eventually Nagypapa’s activities were discovered and he was expelled from school. Being expelled was a disaster for Nagypapa – for a moment his dreams were dashed. School had meant a lot to him, and he could not afford to go to any other. The seminary had been free. Further, he feared for his life. If word of his commitment to a communist reading group (then for his age ‘the movement’ was little more – apart from some hiking and singing) reached other authorities he could be jailed or killed. Cell leaders – also teenagers, had been discovered a year before. They had been arrested and thrown out the police station window. Their parents were told they committed suicide.
He eventually made it into another school by passing rigorous examinations. This time it was a more secular Jewish Gymnazium. He almost didn’t make it in, and was set back six months in his education, because of another little ethnic conflict. One of the entrance exams was in English. He had no way teaching himself English until a kind Presbyterian minister in his hometown helped tutor him with some books he’d scrounged. Unfortunately, the minister had learned his English at St. Andrews seminary in Scotland. Nagypapa’s examiner knew Oxford english. When Nagypapa opened his mouth his examiner was disgusted by his accent and failed him.
He would succeed six months later. He managed to pay by working various jobs and eventually becoming a Hebrew tutor, and then a respected tutor in general. One classmate began quietly bringing him lunch. In his second year – he could not afford to enroll and so stayed away – he classmates asked after him and then raised enough for his tuition amongst themselves and brought him back.
He graduated with dreams of becoming a filmmaker but he could not immediately afford to get to France or Italy where he would study. Also, by this time the second world war had begun. He became a shoemaker, and he became good enough that the skill, and the favour it won him, would save his life in the concentration camp.
In 1941 he was drafted into the Hungarian Army. He would not fight but was put into a Jewish Brigade of forced labourers. They were gradually stripped of their uniforms and status as citizens and finally as humans.
He survived the holocaust, he says, due to his experience with hardship and hard labour growing up, luck, and his bootmaking ability which was highly prized amongst the officers. His camp was liberated by Russian soldiers.
After the war he finally went to Paris. He wrote a letter from there to his cousins in Michigan. He’d never met them before, but had heard of them and tracked down their address. It’s a funny and amazing document – written in his school learned English, at 24 or 25 years old – he tells these distant familiar strangers about himself and asks about them. The majority of his family, including his parents, did not survive the holocaust. In the letter it is evident he is reaching out to any family he has left in the world, just for the sake of having family.
In Paris he met my nagymama – she was washing her socks at a fountain at the moment. She was an American girl, from a not very well off family in Michigan that had also found its way to hope in communism. She had collected money from friends to make the trip to france with a group to aid in restoration. After a week they agreed to be married. Then Nagymama went back to Michigan for two years to finish her university degree. The corresponded. Afterwards she returned to Paris and they were married. My aunt was born and they moved to Budapest; they were both devoted to helping build socialism in Hungary.
However, Nagypapa became frustrated in Hungary. Again, he almost did not make it across the border. Once he was in he was treated with constant suspicion because of his American wife. There was a fear that he was some sort of spy or counter-revolutionary. He got a job in a library, but wallowed in the same position for years. It was a bitter experience because he was quite ambitious.
In 1956, when my father was a two, there was an uprising in Hungary against the existing socialist regime. It was lead or sparked by the students. Nagypapa believes it to have been a real revolutionary attempt made by committed communists against a regime they considered to have strayed from the communist cause. The soviets soon moved in a squashed the uprising. They re-instated a pro-soviet status quo. But in that brief interim the borders became more permeable. My grandmother and baby father and aunt took the opportunity to defect. Nagypapa, for some reason stayed behind and followed later. I’m kicking myself right now for not remembering this particular story in more detail. But once again he was repulsed on several occasions by national lines. Finally he escaped through farmer’s fields, carrying his dress shoes in his hands.
Before he left Hungary, his younger brother, like all good brothers gave him a parting gift of a couple pairs of underwear. Nagypapa’s brother is the opposite case of Nagypapa. He did not have his ambitions blocked by the communist party. Instead in communist Hungary he found respect and rose to heights of responsibility that a poor jewish peasant could never have dreamed of otherwise. He was in the army. And his underwear were army issue, with ‘Hungarian Army’ printed in bold Hungarian script on their elastic.
Nagypapa is on a ship crossing the atlantic. He is coming from England and he is on his way to McCarthy era United States. In his bag are underwear boldly declaring their membership in the Peoples’ Republic of Hungary Armed Forces. His bunkmate is an American. Nagypapa begins to get nervous. Is his bunkmate just any American? Or is he C.I.A. – is there even a difference? Nagypapa is nervous and getting paranoid. Finally, after several days of amiable conversation, during which nagypapa is constantly on the verge of vomiting, it gets to be too much. In the middle of the night he sneaks out of his bunk anxiously clutching his underwear under his coat. He creeps up to the deck and with furtive looks around, shaking with fear, he casts his brother’s underwear as far as he can into the middle of the Atlantic. Nagypapa always laughed telling of that nervous purge and liked to wonder where those underwear ended up.
There was a huge picture and headline in the local newspaper when Nagypapa arrived in Michigan. The press snapped up any story of defectors from the Soviet Bloc. It made large of the family escaping the clutches of communism. The story Nagypapa told the reporters was that he had moved back to postwar Hungary because as an aspiring short-story writer he felt he could only make it in his mother-tongue. This was partially true. He would never say that he had moved there to help build socialism. In the united states he could never identify as a socialist and dream of a future. So began a new identity of the rigorous academic of library science.
Just two months ago, we were sitting down for lunch in Ann Arbor. We’ve gotten into the habit of singing a song before each meal (I mouth along). Nagypapa picks the songs usually. Being jumbled in ethnicities and nationalities {link?} all his life, he’s taken delight in learning folk songs and national anthems and passed them on to his grandkids. This time before we sat down he said, go and close the windows. We thought, hmm, it’s mighty hot, but we closed them. He said we are going to sing l’internationale. L’internationale is the anthem of the international communist movement. We did and when we were done he said okay go open the windows now, and we ate.
….After calling all this depth of life history to mind –being tossed between motherlands and ethnicities, being split amongst worlds, and rarely finding an unproblematic home- he said to me ‘And you know, Orion, what I finally concluded? That home is where the junk-mail finds you.’ He was grinning with pride at this bad joke, this little gem of ironic wisdom. Home is where your name is known, you have a place associated with you – and most importantly, people keep track of you. Too bad its people who want to sell you crap, but at least its people keeping track of you. So that’s why this blog is so great. We can all send each other periodic junk mail and feel a little kept track of and a little at home with each other. It’s such a nice bonus that the mail isn’t junk. Thanks,
Orion
p.s. thanks especially if you made it through. I planned more humour - cause that happens with boundary crossings and Identity confusions --- but I dunno it went this way instead.
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