Snarky Tofu

Dreams of a Travel Writer on Self Imposed Deadline

2012-01-31T02:20:00.001+08:00

3am and I am not asleep in a rather nice king-sized hotel bed in Hollywood, California. I turn on the TV, and a cartoon comes on. A familiar voice comes from one of the characters. It is, I am almost certain, my friend and fellow Staten Island native Eddie Pepitone playing a cartoon cop who is unable to do more than order a pizza to resolve a hostage situation at a strip club called Boners. The cartoon ends, and the movie Adaptation comes on. A good movie for the aspiring screenwriter, but the sight of Nicholas Cage masturbating destroys for me one likely area of sleep inducement.

None of this is a dream. Stone Cold insomnia is what it is.

It is now 5am, and I have to make at least major inroads for a 2500 word story for Bicycle Times Magazine before heading to Taiwan in 36 hours. Somehow, I fall into something more resembling a half awake fully conscious dream state.

One
I am riding my bicycle, fully loaded, somewhere in Western LA. The sun is going down, and I am late. Airplanes fly overhead, telling me that the airport is near, but all around me are hills and construction sites. I find myself at the edge of a chasm. A series of metal pipes curl above a rocky concrete ledge. I ask a man sitting on a porch sticking out the hill if there's a bus that goes to the airport. He shakes his head. No. I carry my bike down the impossibly steep, treacherous path in the hopes that the airport might suddenly appear at the bottom at the bottom of the pit.

My dream Los Angeles is a city built by an idiot playing Sim City.

As I climb down the pit, my bicycle begins to unravel. Bolts pop, wheels fall off. I try to collect the pieces as they roll down the chasm. A plane flies overhead, and I realize it is mine.

Two
I am in my hotel, but people are waiting outside my door to inform me that my reservation is invalid and I need to leave. Five minute warning. I pack my bicycle, propping netbook on handlebars. When I was a bicycle messenger I used to eat cold noodles with sesame sauce out of the carton with chopsticks while riding hands-free to the ferry terminal. Surely it stands to reason I can finish my story about the road from the road. The hotel room begins to dissolve. First the furniture, then the walls. All that is left is empty space, but there is a knock on the door.

Housekeeping?

Housekeeping?

I blink, back in the room. It is 9am. Sleep? I am grateful for it, whatever it was.

In Praise of Ridejoy

2012-01-26T11:45:00.000+08:00

"Hell is other People" wrote Jean Paul Sartre, and much of the time I'm inclined to agree. Still, methinks JP would've croaked a different tune had he spent much time thumbing lifts around California, either physically (best avoided) or digitally. Outside of Belize and Taiwan I don't hitchhike, so my preferred method of inter-city travel (when not bicycling, when other people - specifically those surrounded by a ton+ of speeding metal - really are hell) is either train or hitching rides digitally. Last month I did a lot of travel between LA and San Francisco - four trips.

Along the way I discovered a site called Ridejoy. Currently operating primarily in the West (but with plans to expand nationwide), the site basically allows people looking for rides to connect with people offering them, similar to the ride-share section of Craigslist but with the advantage of removing some of the anonymity factor of Craigslist.

Ride Joy Screen Shot

Enter in what you're looking for (to & from & date) and you're presented with a list of people either looking for rides or riders. Some of these are more or less like Craigslist, but the ones from users who have registered with Ridejoy have an icon that allows you to interact with them so you've got a better idea of who you'll be riding with. Once you register, they can check you out as well. One of the other cool things is that you get linked to people who are going in that direction as well as doing the exact trip. So if you're heading from SF to Portland, people who are heading to Seattle still pop up.

The service offers you a chance to confirm your ride online, and even pay for your trip via credit card or Paypal, removing further a bit of the uncertainty factor.

Ridejoy scored me my ride on last month's SF to LA for the fabulous Rob Schneider / Taiwan Tourism dinner. It was a complicated trip in that I was also bringing my bicycle, but it took all of a few emails and a couple of text messages to secure a ride with a couple who were moving from the East Bay to Santa Monica. By odd coincidence, one of them was an anthropologist who'd spent a good bit of time in both Belize and Guatemala, so we had stuff to talk about. Total price for the ride was $35, and the trip took way less time than either the bus or train (6 hours vs. 8-11, though granted the Amtrak route is way more lovely at twice the price plus shipping for the bicycle). Not bad.

Anyway fellow travelers, Ridejoy makes the hell that is intercity travel in our backwards, no High Speed Rail having, mandatory rectal exam in airports getting, glorious don't even think of hitchhiking anywhere inside United States of America (USA! USA!)

Whoops, on a tangent. Anyway, Ridejoy makes all that slightly less hellish. I'm the artist formerly known as Joshua "Traveling Sartre" Brown, and I approve of this message.

Devo: The Men (of a Certain Age) Who Make the Music

2012-01-16T14:36:00.008+08:00

Are We Not Middle Aged Men? Yes. We Are Devo. Cross from my ever shortening bucket list seeing Devo Live, saw 'em last night at the Fillmore in San Francisco, best 53 dollars I've spent in a while.

Whoo-ee! Top Show!

I may write something here at some point.

photos by Ingrid Mendez

Bicycle Friendly La La Land

2012-01-13T03:32:00.000+08:00

Howdy Ho from the road, spuds, a bit of which is now embedded in my skin thanks to a chance meeting with an automobile on Calistoga Road. The story has yet to be told, but it will soon be. For now I need to ride down to San Francisco.

Bicycle Friendly LA, my article on cycling in Los Angeles is now being featured at the Lonely Planet Website. Words are mine, Images not. So below, a collage of images from my Contour Roam, which I now truly regret returning to Amazon. I loved the quality; interface, not so much So it goes.

As per Standard Procedure, the first paragraph here at Snarky Tofu. To read the rest, click on the last words to be magically transported via interweb magic to the Lonely Planet Website.

Los Angeles is a magical place, known for celebrity sightings, beaches and sunshine. But it is also known for traffic, smog and gridlock — and first-time visitors often comment that the town seems to have been built as much for the convenience of automobiles as for people. ‘Bicycle friendly’ falls low on the list of terms a responsibletravel writer would use to describe this city. Yet here I am, doing just that.

(Click here for the rest of the story)

Rob Schneider ♥s Taiwan

2012-01-10T11:31:00.001+08:00

“Jia ba bei?”

Rob Schneider is a dude with some serious love for Taiwan. Ascending the stage at a press conference hosted by the Taiwan Tourism Bureau to promote the island at a hotel in Universal City, the SNL alumni, film star and director (not to mention star of an upcoming CBS sitcom) opens with a quip in the notoriously difficult Taiwanese language.

“Jia ba bei?”

It means Have You Eaten, and next to the Mandarin “Ni Hao” it’s the most common greeting in Taiwan - a nation of no minor culinary passions.

"The Taiwanese word for Man Whore is very funny"

The audience – mostly Taiwanese, with a handful of journalists from around LA - is suitably impressed. After a bit of chitchat, Schneider talks about what brought him to Taiwan in the first place. Not surprisingly, it was comedy. Schneider’s breakout film Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo told the tale of a hapless fish-tank cleaner forced by economic circumstances into the wacky world of Man Whoredom. The film was immensely popular in Taiwan, netting four times the American per-screen average. Schneider headed to Taiwan to find the secret to this unexpected bit of overseas celebrity. Translation, he says, may have had something to do with it.

“The Taiwanese word for Man Whore (Nán jì ; 男妓)) is very funny. I watched the movie with a Taiwanese audience, and you’d see the words and the audience would laugh before the joke. It was just fantastic.”

While in Taiwan for the film, Schneider fell in love with the country and its people. His return in the spring of 2011 was more about romance than comedy. Amidst much local fanfare, Schneider hit the streets of Taipei with his new bride, television producer Patricia Azarcoya Arce.

Rob, his wife Patricia, and your humble narrator.

Delving further into Taiwan’s culture, the couple explored the night markets, tea plantations (A serious tea aficionado, Schneider calls Taiwan’s tea “the finest in the world”) and got even deeper into some of the island’s stranger-to-western-palates dishes like chou doufu (stinky tofu) and ya buo (duck neck).

“You couldn’t have a crap meal in Taiwan,” Schneider says. “We like eating exotic foods, and Taiwan has amazing seafood restaurants with fish tanks in the front. The fish look at you and it’s like they’re saying who me? Oh no.”

Just a few months after the honeymoon visit, the actor says that he plans to go back in the next few months to explore more of what the island has to offer.

There’s even talk of a future movie project in Taiwan.

Patricia, Rob & Janice Seh-Jen Lai

“One of the honors of my life is how welcome the people of Taiwan have made me and my wife feel,” says Schneider.

Finally, Famous in the Vietnamese-American Press!

2012-01-09T03:45:00.000+08:00

Taiwan (and your humble narrator) Got some good ink in an article called Where to go in 2012?
(Story by ANH DO, Photos by HUNG NGUYEN)

Nice shot, eh? I got hit by a car yesterday, so need to write about that, and about strange things found on the side of the highway. For now, here's the URL for the Nguoi Viet story.

Bicycling to Harbin Hot Springs

2012-01-08T04:35:00.000+08:00

In repose, unplugged, taking time away from writing after a very serious session of batting my screenplay SPINNING KARMA into final draft (using Final Draft, fine software) in preparation to hand it to a very cool Hollywood-type celebrity for consideration. And the travel, by Bob’s smoking pipe, it never ends.

Olympia to Portland to San Francisco to Hollywood to Redondo Beach to San Francisco to Santa Rosa, and now to Harbin Hot Springs, from where I now type for the first time in days. Whew!

I brought my bike with me for the whole trip, but the only leg I did fully by bicycle was this one, that is, Santa Rosa to Harbin. Google Maps calls it under 40 miles, but if I’ve ever done a more difficult 40 I can’t say when. My bike is a modified-for-touring Specialized Rockhopper (the same one once infected with deadly Colorado Goats Heads; flat-free since the insertion of Mr. Tuffy’s, and since leaving Colorado for that matter).

The new tires are absolutely slick, a small and good mercy at 10:00 am as I climbed what was to be the first of two mountains, the winding, shoulder-free Calistoga Road. It was cold and humid, and I was listening to show tunes, Fiddler on the Roof. I was half blind, having given up on keeping my glasses fog-free, shoving them instead into a jacket pocket, huffing wet air as the road rose through the cloud line just south of the Petrified forest.

Somewhere in the middle of If I was a rich man I stopped, changed tights for tattooed skin and took a few pictures. Then it was more up, winding up, cars passing too close for god-damned comfort up. I’d never taken this road before, not on any of my previous trips to Harbin, and of course the thought occurred to me what if I am on the wrong road?

That would suck. I stopped and asked a local. I wasn’t. All was good.

I reached the junction of 128 at 11:30. There was no reason to go into Calistoga proper, so I stopped at a roadside café for a coffee. The last of the morning fog had burned off, and behind the café stood Mt. Saint Helena, which I’d climb for lunch. On a motorcycle the road had seemed like an endless series of winding switchbacks, requiring delicate throttle work. I’d never bicycled it. I had my coffee with a chocolate cranberry granola bar, and tried not to be intimidated. I left the café at high noon and headed down Tubbs Road past Old Faithful (Music by Tom Waits, which seemed appropriate given the scenery).

I’d returned the helmet camera to Amazon (conflicting stylistic viewpoints, it and me), and was back to shooting with the dSRL. The camera was stuck to the beast’s bullhorns with a flexible Gorilla Grip Tripod, and every now and then I shot off a couple of random shots as I climbed. The jury is still out on whether or not the setup is worth the trouble.

The uphill began immediately, and the beast seemed unusually heavy, so much so that I wondered if something was amiss, a malfunctioning brake shoe. Nope. Just gravity. Switchback. More climbing. Bone Machine in my ears, up and up and up some more. Water. Another Granola bar.

I had forgotten how long the uphill switchbacks lasted. On a motorcycle it only seemed like forever. On The Fully Loaded Beast, it might as well have been. I stopped to take a picture of a white cross looming over the valley I’d come from, no indication of how much further left to climb there might be.

A sign read “Fruit Stand: ¼ mile,” but the stand was closed. My legs were cramping. There was a glinting on the shoulder of the road, and I saw dimes, dozens of them, weather beaten as all hell. I used it as an excuse to get off and push, collecting close to four dollars in rough coinage. The dimes jangling in my pocket, I climb further after changing the music: Syd Barrett, reflecting altered consciousness. Another switch back. And another.

Then a sign, more weather beaten than the dimes and with a few bullet holes besides: Robert Louis Stevenson State Park.

I stopped, propping the bike against the faded sign, fading fast, and ate half a bag of dried cranberries mixed with dark chocolate chips, finished half a bottle of water. No cell phone reception. Cold breeze coming from the north, good sign. Mounted the beast for last chunk of uphill, scream out a leg cramp. Note to self: Stretch copiously Someday.

The state park is the top, too densely wooded to offer a view of more than trees, but the road began a merciful descent. The only music was wind. I’d forgotten to put my earphones on.

Years ago, too many to recall, I was on a similarly grueling ride, this one over a mountain in Northern Jersey. I’d been riding a Cannondale racing bike, my friend Tim was on his Bianchi. Light bikes, next to no gear, and when we hit the top we kicked it into high gear and were less than cautious. Tim wiped out on gravel, earning a steel plate in his collarbone, and I got my first tattoo that day, chunks of Ramapo Mountain you can still spot in a certain light. Tim is long gone, and I am older and wiser. I take it slow, kick into high gear, yes, but carefully make my way down.

Twenty minutes later I am pumped, at a supermarket in Middletown. The clock reads three PM – the ride from almost-Calistoga took three hours, not bad considering a few picture breaks. In need of calories, I wolfed down deli counter beef, baked garlic, juice, potato chips before mounting the beast again for the last five mile ride to Harbin Hot Springs, from where I now write.

I leave tomorrow morning, anticipating an easier ride. If the road is merciful, I will upload this from Calistoga, which I regret not having visited on the way up.

*Post Script: Uploading from Calistoga. Ride back was way easier. More observations to come

My Twitter Account Was Hacked

2011-12-23T02:38:00.000+08:00

Dear Readers,

My twitter account was recently hacked, and several posts were put out under my name for which I should not be held responsible.

Please be advised that, contrary to tweets tweeted over the past week I categorically deny endorsing any of the following products:

EZ Burn Weight Loss System
(The $12.99 I spent in promise of losing 15 pounds of ugly fat netted a handwritten note reading "cut your head off, fatty" - I was not amused.)

Doctor Excitement's Ready Anytime Love Pump
(The enclosed instruction booklet was vague at best, and the attitude of the emergency room nurse who wound up removing it did not further endear me to this company's products. I am currently looking into the medical credentials of this "Doctor Excitement")

B-Massive Grow'n'Girth Enlargement Pills
(The package was shoved through my mail slot, where it was consumed by my Rottweiler, Butch, who shortly after chewed through the door and did unspeakable things to my neighbor's three Persian cats, Princess, Fluffy, and Waffles the Wonderkitty. A lawsuit is pending. Needless to say, I am not happy with the B-Massive company.)

My password has since been reset. Thank you for your kind attention in this matter.

Riding where I am Writing From

2011-12-19T06:01:00.000+08:00

I've been a poor corespondent lately. This blog has been going since 2006, with lulls like these occurring occasionally for two reasons: Either there's not enough going on, or too much. In this case it's definitely the latter, having just a week ago left my temporary cabin in lovely Olympia (where some roots wound up planted beautifully deep and unexpectedly and old limbs bearing bitter fruit were finally pruned*) and headed south through beautiful Portland, south more still to San Francisco (across from which I'm writing now) where I taught ninja lessons to children dressed as a Sith Hobo (Sorry Monkey, I'm taking that one back; do you have any questions or comments for me at this point?), met some wonderful new people (yes, Ridejoy article forthcoming), had a wonderful time at the Lonely Planet Christmas Party (where I sang "Gates Of Steel" by Devo), sent out several pitch letters for upcoming stories and prepared for some very cool happenings in Los Angeles, where I am heading tomorrow (for very cool Taiwan Related Reasons; watch this space) after this strange trip through Salsulito, from where I actually am writing.

Too much to tell. Life sometimes moves faster than I can type. Apologies, readers. Northward, so I can catch my ride southward!

*How's that for poetic, Herr Doctor D?

Engine 29 is Up!

2011-12-09T09:56:00.000+08:00

Hola Amigos from your humble narrator, again about to be on the move. Just a quick post to show off the amazing Engine 29. A project about constructing an argument for arts journalism put together by the good folks at USC Annenberg & the Getty Foundation, The experiment brought together 29 arts journalists from across America and around the world for ten days in November 2011 to work on six projects that poked and prodded notions of what arts journalism is, should be, or might be.

The group that I co-led with Alissa Walker and Michele Siegel - we spent four days exploring LA by bicycle, on foot and using public transportation. Check out our section of the Engine 29 Website to see what we uncovered, or go to www.engine29.org to browse all the groups.

Packing...packing...packing...same as it ever was!

Virgin in the Dive Zone

2011-11-23T16:00:00.001+08:00

For much of my life I've been frightened of open water. If I can see land, I can usually keep fear in check. Once I'm in a spot with nothing but water all around, I get a bit...panicked.

Earlier this year, Demian Solano, Publisher of Destination Belize, asked me to write a story for his magazine on a suitable subject. I thought about it for a bit, and decided that the theme of Conquering Fear in Belize had a nice ring to it. I sent a pitch to Demian, and we hashed it over a bit. A few days later, arrangements were made for me to go on a deep sea dive with Patty Ramirez at Splash Dive Shop.

That's when the fear really set in...

Below is the original story text. For the full experience, click on over to Destination Belize, complete with Demian's amazing photos and stories from many other writers, including the incomparable Joshua Berman (Belize's other JBBFF).

Virgin in the Dive Zone

Twenty feet down is hardly deep. First-time Scuba divers go twice that, and every day hundreds challenge depths of 120 feet or more at the Blue Hole, Belize’s best known dive site. So twenty feet down and barely a quarter mile offshore, with a full tank of air and a full day’s training, why is my heart kicking against my chest like a trapped jackrabbit?

It began professionally enough a few days ago when the editor of Destination Belize had asked me for a story. Though I’d seen and experienced much while researching three guidebooks in Belize, I’d never been Scuba diving owing to a longstanding fear of deep water. Confronting this fear, I suggested, might make for a good tale.

The editor agreed, and two days later I was at Splash Dive Center in Placencia, chatting with Patty Ramirez, a veteran dive instructor with 16 years of experience. Patty seemed sure that my fear could be transformed into passion, and, if I wanted, I could even go for my Open Water Certification. The process would necessitate an immediate confrontation of my life-long fear of homework.

I spent that night absorbing data: Equipment names and uses, basic dive terms (such as buoyancy, which comes in three varieties, positive, neutral & negative,,) an assortment of hand signals. And I learn some of scuba’s golden rules, the first of which is keep breathing. Air expands under atmospheric pressure, and a diver who holds their breath is risking lung rupture. I added Lung Rupture to my list of things to fear in the ocean, just after shark attack and drowning.

The following day Patty administered a few multiple-choice tests. Satisfied that I’d grasped the basics, we headed to a swimming pool for a series of exercises designed to put study into practice. Over the course of the afternoon Patty and I went through hand gestures - directional signals, wait, and two signs I hoped never to use: Low on air and out of air. Buoyancy control proved easier on paper than in practice, but eventually I got the hang of inflating and deflating my vest with just the right amount of air. Finally, Patty ran me through a series of simulated emergencies so I’d know how to cope should a real one arise. She had me knock my regulator out of my mouth and replace it, taught me how two divers could breathe together on one regulator, and as coup-de-grace, shut the valve on my air tank so I’d know what running out of air underwater felt like.

Confident after hours of pool exercise, I felt ready to tackle the ocean next day. On the drive back into town, we discussed details of the next morning’s first dive. We’d be going to Laughing Bird Caye, a small, protected spit of land about 20 miles off the coast, from which I’d have my first real dive, a controlled descent alongside a 40-foot rope attached to the boat. I felt I could deal with this. The rope would give me something to focus on, and in a worst-case scenario I figured I could just climb it with my last breath.

Exhausted and exhilarated, I arrived home to find a group of friends had arrived come up unexpectedly from Punta Gorda. Though too late for them to train towards certification, they wanted to come along the next day and do a shorter, less intensive Discovery Dive. This, I learned the next day, would necessitate a change in plans. Instead of heading down the rope, we’d begin on the shore and swim outward and downward fully geared. To make matters worse, Patty seemed confident enough in my training to divert her hand-holding to my friend Jackie, even more of a Scuba virgin than myself.

And it’s here - 20 feet beneath the waves - that decades of fear overwhelm a day's training.

Ditching my dive companions, I make for the surface, kicking my flippers and inflating my vest in a desperate attempt to reach a waterline that seems so very far above. Heart pounding, I break the surface, spit out my regulator and gasp for air. Laughing Bird Caye is barely a fifth of a mile away, and I feel stupid.

A moment later, Patty emerges from beneath the waves and asks me if I’m OK.

“I got the fear,” I tell her. “Let me swim back to shore.”

After making sure I’m up to the swim, Patty goes back down to continue the Discovery Dive with the others. Feeling like a disgraced sumo wrestler in my fully inflated vest, I kick my way back to Laughing Bird Caye and collapse on the sand.

Thirty minutes later, Patty returns and asks me if I’m ready to try again. “We’ll go down the rope this time,” she says.

As the boat carries us to the dive zone, I am in a state of catatonic hyperawareness, fully aware of my surroundings, but incapable of physical action other than following orders. I follow Patty into the water, and we bob like corks on the surface. Patty asks me if I am OK. I signal that I am indeed, “OK.”

She gives the go-down signal; I deflate my vest and we sink together slowly beneath the choppy waves.

Hand in hand we descend alongside the thick white rope. When we stop to equalize, I close my eyes, cross my legs and sit in neutral buoyancy, observing my breath, observing sensations in this strange and silent new world. I open my eyes to see Patty also sitting like a monk in underwater meditation. My instruments read 30 feet. It’s time to look around.

Sunlight shimmers on the waterline above, and below schools of fish the likes of which I’ve never seen swim around the coral landscapes. We descend to the end of the rope, 40 feet, and swim together, skimming silently above the coral beds. After a while I feel brave enough to venture briefly on my own, swimming towards a massive fish I recognize from a poster touting Belize’s marine life as a Jewfish. The behemoth watches me close in impassively as, turning and swimming away at the last moment.

I hear a dull clicking sound, and it takes me a moment to register that it’s Patty calling me back to her side. We’ve been down for 30 minutes; it’s time to begin the process of surfacing, allowing time for stops at intervals to allow the nitrogen in our blood to diminish safely. Surfacing after nearly 40 minutes beneath the waves, I feel as though I’m being reborn. I am calm and at peace, and eager to change out air tanks and head back down.

We wind up doing a second dive that day, bringing me one step closer to completing the certification process. Not bad for a first day; not bad for a guy who’s been afraid of the sea as long as he can remember. As the boat heads back to Placencia later in the day, I find myself reflecting on this small, beautiful nation in which I so often find myself. From north to south I’ve explored Belize, finding beauty and adventure from Sarteneja and Carazol to the remote villages of Toledo, and many places everything in between. It occurs to me that until now I’ve been skimming the surface, and seen at best only half the beauty Belize has to offer. Having broken the surface and overcome my fear, I’m looking forward to exploring the other half for many years to come.

Virgin in the Dive Zone ran originally in Destination Belize

Is Random Art Still Art?

2011-11-19T06:33:00.001+08:00

Back in Olympia after three weeks in LA. Sorting through thousands of images.

The ones below I took - or rather, my Contour Roam Helmet Cam took these photos - on a ride from my hotel in downtown LA to Chinatown two Sundays ago. As I wade through the photos I took on this trip - thousands, literally, both on the helmet camera and with my dSLR, I find myself asking if something that is basically the product of random luck can still be considered art. Looking through my dSLR photos, I find some I like and others I don't, posting a few of the former and deleting most of the latter. But all of the handheld photos share the same quality of being shots I consciously took, looked through a viewfinder to take (even if only for a second). The shots below are the best ones from a 20 minute ride @ one shot every three seconds. So @ 20 shots a minute, that's 400 shots, of which these 25 are the ones I find interesting enough to show.

Assuming that they are interesting, or pretty, or otherwise worth taking a few seconds to look at, it raises the question should I take pride in this work?

I didn't buy the Helmet Cam so much to take video - I did do some of that, there are a couple of those videos in the post below - as for the still photo capability. My idea was to shoot 1 still per second and stitch them together to create a flip-book effect. My first experience with this wasn't all that satisfying. Shots taken in low light were blurry, and though some were trippy I wasn't sure how interesting any of them were. I made this short film from a series I'd shot, so opine away.

Some of the shots taken during the day were fantastic, at least to the eyes of my friend Anna who studied photography and speaks of images using terms like "vanishing point" and "strong vertical lines." But again, I find myself asking myself can I take any real credit for taking them?

I mean, at no point did I stop and frame any of them, or if I did it was mostly an accident at having stopped and looked at something long enough for the helmet cam to do its job. Then again, I'm the guy who strapped a camera onto my helmet and rode through traffic. I'm also the guy wading through close to 2500 shots and deleting the blurry, crappy and merely meh. So I guess that counts for something, eh?

What I really want are Spider Jerusalem's Glasses, which shoot images in random bursts and upload them directly into Spider's skull. Spider Jerusalem is a real journalist. Spider Jerusalem is a made-up character. If not for this last fact, you would fear him.

(Spider Jerusalem's image and existence courtesy of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.)

By the end of the Getty Fellowship I'd pretty much decided not to keep the Contour Roam helmet Cam. I wasn't a fan of the fish-eye video effect, and found that the natural movement of my head while riding made watching videos shot from a helmet mounted cam uncomfortable for more than a minute at a time.

(Sound Quality also left much to be desired no matter how I set the thing.)

And while some of the images I shot using the still functions came out good, I didn't feel like I was going to use that feature all that much, and will probably opt for a handheld digital video recorder at some point in the near future.

But looking through the still photos, I keep finding ones that I think are good, bordering on excellent even. This is causing me a certain sense of...what would the opposite of Buyer's remorse be? Returner's remorse? Perhaps I'll buy me another Contour Roam when my fantastic screenplay wealth comes in...

Stay tuned. Opine on pics. Yes. Comments. More to come. Many, many new tales to tell.

~ S. Tofu

A Moving Experience (Day One)

2011-11-13T08:34:00.000+08:00

What I've been doing in LA the past week - the original can be seen along with other projects at
Engine 29

You see so much more from a bicycle seat. And this is why - despite
long standing rumors to the contrary – a bicycle is the best way to
explore Los Angeles. In LA, there’s just so much to see.

I’m here in LA as part of a group of three arts journalists, that is
myself, Michelle Seigel & Alissa Walker. Our group, dubbed A Moving Experience, is itself part of a larger group of journalists who’ve gathered to explore new methods of seeing journalism itself.

Each group has its own focus, and ours is the journalistic equivalent of the Slow Food movement. By exploring the art and culture of greater Los Angeles – a city arguably built as much to accommodate automobiles as people – without cars, we aim to take in a depth that wouldn’t be possible surrounded by the metal shells that are so much part and parcel of LA life.

What follows is a written and visual journal chronicling the first of three days doing arts journalism by bicycle in LA.

South LA: History, Community, Carnivals & Piñatas

Personal Goals:

Day:

To Explore the art, culture and history of South Los Angeles by taking an eight mile bike tour with a group of cyclists, seeing a segment of the community not often documented.

Night:

To bicycle to an 8pm showing of Roman Polanski’s CARNAGE in Hollywood and write a brief review by midnight.

We leave the hotel just after ten AM. It’s an unusually cold morning for Los Angeles, even in early November. Rubber hitting road, we ride south on Hill Street through light traffic.

Despite longstanding rumors to the contrary, Los Angles is an excllent city for cyclists, mostly flat with wide roads, at least this part of it. Three miles and fifteen minutes later, we reach the Mercado La Paloma, or “Dove Marketplace” on South Grand Street. The Mercado functions as a combination community center, small business incubator and food court. Today it serves as the starting point for Folk Art Everywhere, a semi-regular bicycle tour organized by Los Angeles’ Craft and Folk Art Museum exploring various parts of Los Angeles.

Today’s ride promises to mix an exploration of the art, history and unique community gathering spots of South LA.

With the full group yet to arrive, we explore the Mercado itself. There is an art exhibit going on, and though I’m reminded at first of a Singaporean food court by the Mercado’s dozen-plus food stalls, I have to admit that for color and style the Mercado wins hands-down.

After a brief chat about route given by the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s Heidi Zeller, the 30+ assembled cyclists down last shots of espresso, fill their water bottles and hit the streets. Our group is drawn from various areas of LA’s social and cultural tapestry. I find myself riding alongside JJ, a film producer, avid bicyclist and bicycle activist.

JJ tells me she goes by the moniker “The Navigatrix.”

Part of the group organizing this and other rides, and is responsible for making sure the group stays more or less together. This, she says, has earned her another nickname, “Mistress of the Path.” As we take up the rear of the ride together, I’m struck by JJ’s passion for her adopted home city.

"In the 20 plus years I have lived in Los Angeles, I may have experienced, anger, frustration and sadness.” She tells me. “but I have never had a moment of boredom."

Touring Los Angeles as part of a bicycle wolf-pack is an interactive activity. The group turns heads and elicits remarks from folks on the sidewalk, almost all positive. This is hardly surprising: With ringing bells and colorful clothes, our cycle-pack must seem like a quickly moving parade.

We ride through the piñata district, a colorful blur. The pack is in motion, and not wanting to lose them I am unable to stop and explore. I make mental note to return later, commenting that any city with a piñata district is one after my heart.

The reaction from motorists, even those whose way the group briefly impedes, is surprising. Instead of the expected honks comes verbal encouragement, and its not hard to imagine a certain level of playful envy from people stuck in traffic towards those seeming to transcend it.

We pass through the Jazz District and stop at the office of Community Development Technologies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting economic opportunities for low-income residents and communities throughout Greater Los Angeles. Dismounting, we pile into the ground floor office, where CD Tech’s Azusena Favela presents a mural created by local artists.

Leaving bicycles in office, the group takes a short walking tour of the neighborhood. Seduced by fragrances coming from a taco truck across the street, I lose the group to a plate of shrimp cevice. By the time I return to the CD Tech office the tour has left, and only Azusena is left. This turns out to be a good thing. Having grown up in the community she now serves, she proves as excellent a personal tour guide as a travel writer could hope for.

Now separated from the group, we ride through a neighborhood about which few words in guidebooks (to my knowledge, at least) have been written. Most of what I know about this area comes from half-recalled hip hop lyrics. From a bicycle the area is far more salubrious than the lyrics might lead one to believe. As we ride down streets lined with palm trees past classical southern California type residences, free from traffic except for the occasional ice cream truck I find myself asking out loud the question I inevitably ask when passing through someplace pleasant. “Could I live here?”

“You’d be fine,” Azusena tells me. “As long as you don’t mind Paletero music.”

We pedal together back towards the Mercado, where the rest of my group and most of the cyclists from the now-finished tour are hanging and replenishing burned calories.

On the way we cross Martin Luther King Boulevard, which has all the makings of a carnival save for one detail – it’s practically deserted. Azusena tells me that the carnival begins at sundown, and promises to offer an even deeper slice of local color. There and then I make the decision to scrap the night’s planned Hollywood film and excursion and return instead to South LA to make a film of my own.

...I think Polanski will approve.

---

Summation: This was the first of three days of journalistic exploration of LA by bicycle, from which I gathered not just the material above but also notes and photographs that will become part of a travel article promoting both bicycling in LA and the cultural and historical importance of South LA.

Each day presented its own set of goals (both met and blown) and generated content and stories, both expected and otherwise. Had I approached each day traditionally, that is, with set agenda, I believe my experiences - and that of the reader - would have been diminished.

More soon...

Night Carnival

2011-11-11T01:57:00.000+08:00

Music: Zoogz Rift

Images: Joshua Samuel Brown

Moving Violation

2011-11-09T05:48:00.001+08:00

It's just after 12pm, and I'm in the lab chugging through a ton of digital stills, thousands of images that will be stitched together in some way to encompass the theme of Moving. Outside, something is moving towards the hotel, marching and chanting down Seventh Street towards Olive. My comrades press against the fourth floor window and look down, and we make the same assumption at around the same time:

This must be part of the Occupy LA rally gone mobile.

For days we have been going to stories, and now a story has come to us. I grab my camera and run down the stairs. I need a break from my computer anyway.

There are perhaps 4 dozen protesters, by their signage part of a union representing people in the janitorial trade. Their signs, a mixture of English and Spanish, read "Justice for Janitors" and "ABM Unfair" - the latter referring to a company called American Building Maintenance, a national company that provides janitorial services to buildings around the country. Many of the marchers wear "Justice for Janitors" shirts, while others appear to have come from the nearby Occupy LA rally, currently camped in front of City Hall.

The marchers chant in Spanish, and are being lead by a short woman with long hair and a plaid shirt, a neckerchief hanging around her neck. She is playing a drum, and has the look and bearing of someone who could just as easily be fighting for indigenous rights in Chiapas as marching through Downtown LA. Not for the first time do I find myself wishing I'd been a more diligent student of Spanish.

The marchers are taking up the sidewalk, so I go into the street to try to get a shot that might better encompass the scene. I am no more than a car's width from the curb and taking the first of several shots when a police cruiser honks at me. I nod in acknowledgement and get back on the sidewalk. I realize quickly that by staying on the sidewalk I'm either impeding or joining the rally. As a journalist, to do either would be unprofessional, so I carefully head back onto the street (again no more than a car's width out) and run ahead to the head of the march, step back on the sidewalk and begin taking more photos while moving backwards.

A moment later there is another honk. It is the same police car. Two officers step out. I explain to Officer Keenan (Badge number 25975) that I'm a journalist, and that my job necessitates my neither joining nor impeding the march that I'm covering.

Officer Keenan is not swayed, and demands my driver's license. I am issued a citation that reads "21954(a) VC - After warning, 075 Viol run w/a in #2 lane for approximately 50 feet around parked vehicles." I am ordered me to appear on or before December 23rd to answer the charge.

There is no set fine at this point - it is a misdemeanor violation, and failure to answer it carries with it penalties approaching six months in jail and/or a thousand dollar fine, so unless I intend to go on the lam for jaywalking, I need to deal with it. I plan to contest it, of course, on the grounds that my duty as a journalist necessitates that I neither impede nor join the subject that I am covering. Let's hope the judge agrees.

Joshua Samuel Brown, Los Angeles - Nov 8, 2011

LA Night Ride Film

2011-11-08T15:10:00.004+08:00

Whenever the various machines in my hotel room cooperate and shift digital digital tonnage from motherboard to motherboard a film will appear below words that I'm too tired to write. A concept piece, if you like. A lone bicyclist, stranger in an unfamiliar city, rides six miles to dinner, helmet mounted camera set to shoot one second every five. There were several hundred shots, and I sifted through and picked out a few hundred and experimented with putting them together using Final Cut Pro, lengthening some shots and zooming in on others and setting the 3-minute result to a beautiful little piece by Zoogz Rift called Imaginary Numbers.

Truth be told, I am uncertain as to how I feel about the overall piece. Does it succeed in evoking a mood, in capturing moments in time? Or is it jarring, three minutes of your life that you could have found better use for? If a failure, I could say it's because the Contour Roam camera does not do it's best work at night, or that prior to three days ago I'd never used Final Cut Pro, and still barely know my way around the program. But that'd be a cop-out, wouldn't it?

It's a poor carpenter indeed who blames his tools.

Music Courtesy of the estate of Zoogz Rift - Check out more of Zoogz' amazing work by clicking here, and join his Facebook Page.

Lingerie Model Basketball and Ladyboy Poems

2011-11-05T15:12:00.004+08:00

It's a strange thing to be gathered in a stately hotel on the first evening of a prestigious program for arts journalists and suddenly come across several dozen beautiful, scantily clad near-Amazonian goddesses playing hardcore street ball in the hotel gymnasium. At first I thought I was hallucinating, but several of my fellows saw the lingerie models as well. One of these fellows - a respectable southern gentleman who knows lobster from crayfish - swam by in an Olympic-sized pool with a lovely hovering view of downtown and confirmed the sighting. True, we had eaten in the same restaurant for dinner, but I hadn't ordered the mushrooms. That was enough to settle it for me. There are many, many photos of these women at the lingerie basketball website.

It is evening one, pre-evening if you like of the 2011 USC Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism fellowship, and already we are off to a weird and beautiful start. Tomorrow I will begin creating a digital map of the city of Angels using a series of electronic gee-gaws that even now connected to my tiny netbook, dumping digitally and threatening to explode the motherboard into a useless magnetic gumbo of ones and zeros. The Netbook was not designed for this level of multimedia, which is why I spent the day yesterday in the USC Digital Lab, auditing a course given by the amazing Matthew Lahey, who over the span of 2.5 hours instilled in me the skills needed to use Final Cut to complete my anticipated project. A few hours of tutoring afterwards with a former USC student and I feel confident that I'll be able to do what needs to be done.

Now all I need is a Macbook.

To this end, I once again offer to my friend Richard Deming "The Deal" - he knows what I'm talking about. Oh, he knows.

Which is as good a segue as any I suppose, because Richard Deming - a poet, philosopher & art critic whose work has appeared in such places as Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and The Nation, The Boston Review and Artforum - is also the Featured Poet at Eyewear, a very cool poetry blog. And the poem featured is one inspired by a photo I took years ago and blogged on this very blog.

This very photo, in fact:

Rick (I call him Rick, but you must call him Richard) loves this photo, and was quite possibly looking at this photo on his macbook as he wrote the poem "The Picture of JB in a Prospect of Ladyboys"

The picture was taken in Central Thailand in 2007 while on an expedition to find an ancient civilization of a graceful trans-gender kingdom that mysteriously only lasted one generation. At least I think that's what I was looking for. It was a crazy time.

Whoops! I have strayed far from the point of this entry, and I still haven't located my spare 16 gig micro SD card. I suspect I may have inhaled it by mistake, or perhaps some doomed attempt at memory expansion. Big things tomorrow, big things.

I leave you then with the first stanza of Richard Deming's The Picture of JB in a Prospect of Ladyboys. Full Work here.

The Picture of JB in a Prospect of Ladyboys

(after John Ashbery after Andrew Marvell, for Joshua Brown)

I.
A hand holding a soda tremblesas some latent wish casts its lots.The generous arch of a penciled browbrings the gaze up close. Where else do
names choose their changeable places?And the one girl with an impossiblyslim waist faces the camera and smiles,while uneven skirts sway above the knees.
In this picture there’s no nearby gardenand everyone’s eyes are wide open.

Continue to Richard's poem at Eyewear

Lonely Planet's Best in Travel names Taiwan

2011-11-02T00:42:00.000+08:00

Just a quick shout out to my peeps at Lonely Planet for naming Taiwan one of their top 10 countries for 2012, and to my people in Taiwan for being named.

I was going to use the phrase "making the list," which in most cases would be more appropriate. However, for Taiwan, the idea of being named has special meaning.

I need to cut this entry short and explore LA by Bicycle. Many pictures to share soon. Please enjoy this video from Kou Chou Ching entitled "Your Name is Taiwan".

Spinning Karma

2011-10-31T00:08:00.000+08:00

This is the "Big News" I alluded to in the (now second-to) last post.

Two years ago, give or take, I found myself on a meditation retreat in Sri Lanka, at a place called Nilambe. If Vipassana meditation is a Buddhist Boot Camp, Nilambe was more like a Buddhist Summer Camp. One of the many memorable experiences - or low grade obsessions - concerned a monk who was there during my sit. He was a heavyset Sinhalese man. I don't know where he came from, and we never spoke, not least because the atmosphere at Nilambe was kept mostly silent, but I found myself observing this monk. Morning meditations began early, and the Monk (who I nicknamed Fat Buddha) almost always came late, and, taking his seat on the high spot of reverence, seemed to fall promptly asleep. Out of the corner of my eye (not being myself anything close to fully diligent) I would see him leaning against the wall. He seemed very happy.

During mealtimes his food was brought to him by the practitioners from the local community, who would bow and smile gracefully.

I remember thinking two things.

1) How do we even know if the fellow is really a monk?

and

2) Nice work if you can get it!

Keep in mind that all of the conclusions (if you want to call them that) of said observations are highly subjective, and may not be at all based in reality.

At some point in the ten day meditation I sat in my room and jotted by candlelight a story outline into a handmade paper journal. Then life got busy again - visits to make, a journalism fellowship, another guidebook, another and another and another, stories, relationships and so forth. The journal sat in the bottom of my backpack for a year or two.

In April of this year I spun the yarn off the top of my head to a filmmaker friend, who offered me great encouragement, even going as far as to suggest some principal actors who might fit several key roles. In May I got back to the states, and in June I got cracking on the script.

Last week I finished my first draft, and, shortly thereafter, registered it with the Writer's Guild of America under what has been for months the working title, Spinning Karma. This is the one sentence plot-line, what you'll see in some future edition of TV Guide:

Desperate to rescue his failing Buddhist sect from obscurity, a misguided monk engineers a phony repression scenario that quickly spins out of control.

At 150 pages, the first draft is far too long for a comedy screenplay. Which is why I the morning finds me in a hotel by LAX on the third day of a 3-day Screenwriting Course given by John Truby. Two thirds of the way through the course and I've already more than gotten my money's worth. Far more. But more about this later. I need to check out of this sterile & over air-conditioned room and make my way down to day three of the seminar.

So Time to clock in, spuds. Tonight I will ride to Santa Monica and park myself there fore a few days and get down to the nitty gritty.

Guest Post: An Occupy Wall Street Primer

2011-10-28T04:33:00.001+08:00

I promised big news with the next blog post, but the news is so big that I can't wrap my head around how to best make it public. So in lieu of said "big news post," a guest post by my big sister, Eve Brown-Waite, author of "First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria" (Not to mention a super cool boxed text on Traveling in Taiwan with Teenagers in Lonely Planet Taiwan 8 ).

So without further Adieu, here's Eve...and I'm off to Los Angeles!

An Occupy Wall Street Primer (for those who still can’t figure out why)

By Eve Brown-Waite

For those of you who still don’t understand what all the shouting is about, here is a primer on what the Occupy Wall Street folks might be so upset about.

1. Who got the bailout and who didn’t? Remember when the major banks got bailed out because they were deemed too big to fail? Well you and I, my friend, are not too big too fail. In fact, we are the perfect size to fail and there are plenty of banks waiting for us to do just that. Or at least to teeter on the brink of failure just enough so we need to take out loans and use credit cards. And guess who makes money when we take out loans and use credit cards? The banks! And guess who makes money on an economy that is set up to push us into debt? The banks! And guess who makes money when business is set up so that we have to use services such ATMs, debit cards, wire transfers? The banks! And guess who sets the fees on all of these services and can raise them at will? The banks! (Guess who lets them do this? The government!)

These are the very banks that were bailed out with OUR tax dollars. And at the end of that year – the very year when they were on the brink of failure but we bailed them out – they gave themselves astronomical bonuses for doing so well.

How big was your bonus last year?

2. Just how do they keep their prices so low? Wal-mart – the nation’ largest private employer, just announced that their part-time employees will lose their health insurance benefits and that all other employees will pay a sharp increase in health insurance costs. According to Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter, "Our country needs to find a way to reduce the cost of healthcare, particularly in this economy." Wal-Mart, which posted profits of over $400 BILLION (yes billion) last year, has decided to help in that effort by passing on the cost of healthcare to their employees. (Way to go Wal-Mart!)

I pick on Wal-Mart here because it is such an easy – and huge – target. But Wal-Mart is not alone in this model of fleecing its employees in order to boost the bottom line. I hate to break this to you, but big businesses don’t necessarily care about you and me. They pledge allegiance to their profits and their shareholders. So if they can boost their profits by laying off workers, forcing their suppliers to cut cost, or by cutting benefits to their employees, they will. And they will be rewarded for this behavior by their shareholders. So it’s a win/win for them. The only ones who lose are the workers, the consumers and the community. Oh wait … that’d be us.

3. We are paying through the nose while they are posting banner profits. Remember BP’s huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Remember how millions of gallons of oil polluted the ocean and created a disaster for the environment, the wildlife, the fishing and tourism industry and just about everyone who lived and worked in that area? Well you’ll be glad to know that BP just posted a third quarter profit of $5.14 Billion – that’s triple what it made for that same quarter last year! And with the help of government subsidies and lobbyists, their future is looking rosier than ever. Yup, the US government just approved BP’s plan to drill again – up to four more wells – off the coast of Louisiana! Rewarding them, I suppose, for how well they did it last time! So there is no need to worry about the wellbeing of good ol’ BP. In fact, there’s no need to worry about any of the oil industry because it’s one of the most heavily government-subsidized industries that exists. Yes, it’s OUR tax dollars at work, once again. And they get this government largesse, despite the fact that the oil industry uses all sorts of loopholes to avoid paying taxes. (For example, the Deepwater Horizon was registered in the Marshall Islands – to avoid paying US taxes – when it set off the worst oil spill in American history.) So we can all sleep well, knowing that the government will always look after the oil industry.

But how about the rest of us? Well, we’re still paying close to four dollars a gallon at the gas pump, with no sign of the government bailing us out of that one. And how about all the little people whose lives and livelihood were nearly wiped out by BP’s carelessness and hubris and the government’s willingness to look the other way? How are our tax dollars being used to help them? (Notice that I’m assuming here that most of us actually DO pay taxes, because well, the little people actually DO pay taxes.) Well thankfully, we always have the social safety net. You know, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, public funding of education … you know things like that. Oh wait a minute … we can’t really afford to keep funding those sorts of things now, can we? Not with our soaring deficit and the ever-expanding demands for national defense – billions of which are regularly funneled into the deep pockets of defense contractors for wars that probably never needed to be started in the first place. (Yes, Virginia, that was a corporate bailout of a different sort.)

These might be just a few of things that are fueling the Occupy Wall Street anger. In short: government-enabled corporate greed at the expense of the rest of us. This isn’t about class warfare and it isn’t about lazy people asking for handouts. It’s about the hard-working, tax-paying citizens of this country, who have played by the rules and are now demanding that everyone play by the same rules. It’s about telling our government to stop bailing out, subsidizing, and passing legislation that favors huge corporations while ignoring the needs of the rest of us. It’s about lending a hand, for a change, to the millions of Americans who – through no fault of their own (see points 1, 2, & 3 above) – are drowning in debt as prices rise but salaries and benefits do not. It’s about stopping the fleecing of ordinary Americans at the hands of the corporations who now practically own the government.

It’s not about those who don’t want to work pitted against those who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s about the very sad and twisted situation that America has come to today: a nation of people who are tired of watching their government raid the pantry and give all the goodies to well-connected and never-satisfied corporations, while the rest of us hang on by our bootstraps and try to catch the crumbs.

And oh yeah, we stocked the pantry.

EveBrown-Waite is the author of FIRST COMES LOVE, THEN COMES MALARIA (Random House, 2009) and numerous political, social and humorous commentaries. She lives with her family in western Massachusetts.

Death Metal, Vernacular And Tradition: The Music Scene In Taiwan

2011-10-13T08:58:00.002+08:00

Image: Kou Chou Ching Performing at Spring Scream Festival

Exhaustion...nearly at the end of my screenplay, heading to LA in two weeks as an Alumni for the 2011 Getty Fellowship (more about that in a future post. Anyone have strong opinions on the Go Pro vs. Contour Cameras?), been riding around Washington State dragging 55+ pounds of dog and carriage in the rain....

But none of this is why I'm writing today. The purpose of this blog entry is to tout today's episode of NPR's All Things Considered,

specifically a segment called Death Metal, Vernacular And Tradition: The Music Scene In Taiwan, in which I played a role. The interview features music and interviews with some of my favorite bands coming out of Taiwan, including Chthonic, A Moving Sound & Kou Chou Ching (pictured above).

-------------->;

Taiwan might be known to most Americans for its export economy, but it's also been importing musical styles — from avant garde jazz to hip-hop. I first learned about Taiwan's thriving music scene from Joshua Samuel Brown. He's a travel writer who authored the last two editions of Lonely Planet: Taiwan.

Click here for full interview

<-------------------
The next blog post will announce something awesome. I swear it.

Photos from Occupy Olympia, Friday Oct 7

2011-10-09T01:21:00.001+08:00

Send No Money Now!

2011-09-21T12:25:00.000+08:00

I was just reminded that today marks the 12th anniversary of the day Taiwanese refer to simply as "Jiǔ'èryī", or "9/21" - the day a major earthquake hit Taiwan, killing over 2000 people. I've been so focused on writing about Taiwan for travel (just finished two articles on Taiwan for Lonely Planet / BBC) and focusing on an upcoming interview with NPR (That's National Public Radio for readers outside of the USA...the interview concerns Taiwanese identity on the eve of another anniversary, arguably one whose relevance to Taiwan is, well, less arguable - the 100th anniversary of Sun Yat Sen (a man who'd never visited Taiwan) declaring the birth of the Republic of China as the Qing dynasty (which had handed Taiwan to Japan 30 years earlier) was collapsing.

Anyway, with all this going on - and the screenplay (which I am now close enough to done with a first draft to release the cat slightly from the bag and disclose that much of the action of the film takes place in Taiwan) - and the upcoming Getty Fellowship - and winterizing the cabin - and a potential romance in the air...

...Well, the anniversary of 9-21-99 slipped my mind. I was only reminded of it thanks to my friend & Taiwan comrade Tobie Openshaw, who posted the following on his Facebook page:

Today is the 11th anniversary of the 9/21 earthquake in Taiwan that killed over 2000 people. It seems like yesterday that I woke up to feel the bed swaying as if at sea, and heard the steel girders groaning in the walls...

The truth is that I wasn't in Taiwan for 9/21...I'd left earlier that year, and while I still had a lot of connections there (and wound up returning two years later and sticking around for several years), I was in Colorado when the earthquake hit. I remember watching the news, and feeling horribly guilty for not being able to do something for the country that I'd called home for at that point five years.

So I wound up writing the essay that you'll see below (if you've even stuck around this long). The article article originally ran on the website of the Conservative Magazine The American Spectator, which I thought was hilarious at the time - me, a lefty anarchist expatriate suddenly finding common ground with a publication that ran the works of such right-thinking luminaries as William Buckley and PJ O'Rourke.

The article ran shortly after the quake, one of my earliest forays into freelance journalism outside of Taiwan. It took the American Spectator nearly a year to pay me the agreed-upon $50, and they did so only after seven phone calls and at least three letters, the last of which had me pointing out that newspapers in "Communist China" not only paid better, but did so on time.

Needless to say, I did not write for the American Spectator again.

In any event, 12 years...I still love Taiwan now as much as I did then - more so, even. If I had to write it again the sentiment would be much the same, sans the crack about Taipei city being ugly. Back in 1999, the Taipei Metro, the riverside parks, Taipei 101...none of that was there yet.

Without Further Yakking...

Send No Money Now!

by Joshua Samuel Brown

I came home on September 20 to discover that Taiwan, my adopted homeland, had been hit by a major earthquake. I'd lived there for five years, and had just returned a few months ago. My first reaction was disbelief -- that seems a common first reaction. I tried to call my friends and almost in-laws on both ends of the island, only to discover "da bu tong" -- dead phone lines.

Then the shock kicked in. Taiwan is a country where every 7-Eleven has a fax machine, taxi drivers carry cell phones, and most kids can piece together the schematics for a PC motherboard by eighth grade. If the phone lines are down, something very serious is going on in Taiwan.

I moved to Taiwan in 1994, a naïve American whose grasp of the language consisted of two jerky greetings and a request for directions to the bathroom. I was invited to live on the fourth floor of the home of the Yeh family in Hsinchu, and spent the next two years basically being treated like a well-liked (but kind of slow on the uptake) special son. I later moved to Taipei, and lived there for three more years. I got by with a lot of love, encouragement, and the occasional use of minor career boosting guanxi ("pulling of strings") from well connected friends.

I should be in Taiwan right now, searching for the injured in the rubble of the Sungshan hotel. I should be repaying their kindness with more than words, but I cannot. Perhaps this disaster is, as disasters often are in Asian culture, a portent of political upheaval.

Taiwan is a strange place to claim kinship with once you've left, but let me try.

The uncomfortable state of official non-recognition doesn't always give Americans a clear picture of my adopted homeland. "That's in China, isn't it?" is a comment I've heard, to which I usually reply "No, um, well, officially yes but, um, not really. China is a one-party totalitarian state. Taiwan is a democracy. You know, government elected for the people by the people, the sort of thing you read about in college civics classes.

Taiwan is by no means a perfect democracy -- legislative sessions (as the Chinese Communists gleefully point out in the "why democracy doesn't work for Asians" section of the People's Daily) have been known to erupt in the occasional bench-clearing brawl. Those rumors that you may have heard about the KMT representative from Central Taiwan hurling a baby pig at a political opponent are true, but it should be noted that he apologized immediately -- to the pig.

Still, the Taiwanese people are free to gather peacefully, worship freely, live where they choose and say what they please. Their constitution is a lot like ours, only without the guns. Were it not for China's stubborn refusal to do business with anyone who doesn't adhere to its inflexible labeling of Taiwan as a "rogue province," Taiwan might be as well regarded in the world community as England, except it has better food, nicer weather, and a more efficient economy.

A Taiwanese scholar recently compared the relationship between Taiwan and China to "living in the same house as a 900-pound gorilla who thinks he's your older brother." Taiwan, looking to America for support, is becoming increasingly skeptical that help will come when the chips are down. My Taiwanese friends look at me incredulously when I talk about the American ideal of democracy. "We are a democracy, so why doesn't America recognize us officially?" is a common question.

But the Taiwanese are nothing if not business savvy, they understand the mathematical realities of Sino-American relationships. There are only around 21 million people on Taiwan, as opposed to the the 1.2 billion potential consumers on the Mainland. If you'd each just agree to drink 100 bottles of Pepsi a day," I tell my friends, "you'd stand a better chance at official recognition."

Others picture Taiwan as nothing more than a gigantic industrial complex populated by drones spewing out low quality goods. The epicenter of last week's earthquake was in Nantou, a rugged mountain county every bit as breathtaking as the Rockies west of Boulder. At that latitude it only snows at great altitudes, and when it does the roads are clogged with city dwellers hoping to see it before it melts. Taichung city, hardest hit by the quake, is only slightly less attractive than Denver, and with similarly toxic air. The east coast of Taiwan is sparsely populated by native peoples and the people who moved there hoping to push them out. The east coast highway is a two-lane road carved out of cliffs plunging into the sea, and is as beautiful and dangerous as any road you'd ever want to drive on.

The capital, Taipei is, to be fair, a rather ugly city. But it is also home to many fine people. Even in the gray architectural sameness of neighborhoods like Hsinchuang and Sanchung, little pockets of beauty could be found. An old temple, the meticulously carved wooden pillars depicting legends of dragon and fable freshly painted, here. Two old men drinking tea and playing "xiangqi" (Chinese chess) on an ornate marble table there.

The Taiwanese have made a whopping contribution to the current cyber-driven world economy, one which is rarely acknowledged. That computer that you probably couldn't live without at this point -- some, if not all of the hardware, was born in Taiwan. A thank you wouldn't kill anyone.

But don't go packing up blankets, first-aid kits, and cans of tuna for Taiwan quite yet. Send that to Turkey, where the need is far, far greater.

The Taiwanese have done pretty well for themselves over the last few decades, and should be able to pull through this disaster with the same quiet determination that pulled them through the "white terror," decades of brutal martial law inflicted on them by Chiang Kai-shek, another leader with a somewhat unrealistic world view.

What these people need most costs neither money nor time: recognition as a free, conscientious, and eminently integral part of the family of nations. Some sort of acknowledgment is past due.

Josh Brown lives in Boulder and Taipei City.

(Originally Published in the American Spectator Online, 9/28/99)

Bees: An Apology

2011-09-07T02:27:00.000+08:00

Yesterday evening while drinking a Kombucha, a delicious and - under normal circumstances healthful - beverage, I was stung by an insect that had, unbeknownst to me, flown into the bottle and drowned. The insect stung me on the inside of the upper lip, sending a sharp wave of pain throughout my entire face. I removed the stinger (which came out easily, which in itself should have tipped me off) and set about locating an antihistamine. My face swelling up, I erroneously set as my facebook status the following:

"Just stung on the inside of the lip by a dead bee floating in a bottle of kombucha."

After careful examination of the body of the bug I have determined that the bug in question was not, in fact, a bee, but a yellowjacket.

A yellowjacket looks like this:

a bee, on the other hand, looks like this:

The creature that stung me was most definitely shaped like the former, exhibiting none of the fuzziness, or rounded wing shape of it's more malicious cousin. Further, my friend Jen Moore, a Beekeeper, tells me that members of the wasp clan (such as the yellowjacket) have a taste for fermented, vinegary beverages, whereas bees do not. Finally, the fact that the stinger came out as easily as it did indicates that it did not come from a bee, whose stinger is barbed.

In conclusion, it was a yellowjacket, not a bee, whose greed for kombucha led to its death and my temporarily looking like the kid from MASK

I therefor offer, by way of apology to bees and bee-kind (who - despite the absolutely important role they play in providing the pollination without which we humans would quite possibly cease to exist as a species, often find themselves taking the blame for the actions of their more aggressive cousins) the following haiku:

Gracious and humble
Without bees, we starve quickly
Sting for fun? Never

Love Me, Love My Dog

2011-09-02T06:14:00.001+08:00

John and I had been traveling together for about ten days. We'd bussed it from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, spent a few days with some exceptionally beautiful women - Chinese-speaking granddaughters of KMT officers stranded after the revolution went south for the Nationalists - then headed out to Chiang Khong. We were heading into Laos, planning to do a river tour from north to south.

But the visa office had closed early that Friday for Songkran, the SE Asian water festival, so we were stranded for the weekend in Chiang Khong, a not unpleasant town on the Mekong river. We stayed at a bamboo guest house with a clear view across the river into Laos.

At some point during the long weekend I tried to swim across, but that's another story.

On Sunday evening we decided to hitchhike the road running along the river. We'd heard about a spot with an especially beautiful view of the Golden Triangle where locals went to barbecue and thought it was worth checking out. Traffic was sparse, so we had to walk for a long time, wearing pointed farmers hats to keep the worst of the sun off us, carrying bamboo poles to ward off vipers.

A small Hyundai approached and slowed down for us. We flagged it down. A couple, perhaps in their mid-twenties, asked us if we needed a ride. We said we did, and climbed into the back seat. We had to throw our poles into the bushes, as they were too long to fit in the small space of the car without trouble. The young couple were very friendly. They were from a medium sized city not far away, and had both been educated in Chiang Mai. Things were going well. Then they asked us to sing.

"My husband and I very like English songs," the woman said.

John, being new to Asia, smiled. I knew where this was going.

"That's nice," he said. "We do too."

There was some chatter in Thai from the front seat.

"Will you sing for us?"

John, naturally reserved, attempted to decline politely, saying something to the nature of ah, I can't sing or I have a lousy singing voice. Something like that.

More chatter in the front seat, this time more heated.
I couldn't understand any of it and could only imagine what they were saying.

"Why won't they sing? Aren't we giving them a ride!"
"They say they cannot!"
"They are very ungrateful! Let's murder them."

The woman turned around.

"Ah, my husband says, he would very much like to hear a song in English. Please."

I looked over at John. We're obligated, I whispered. Having jettisoned our sticks we were helpless.

"OK, we can sing one song."

The wife said something in Thai, and the husband said something back in a happy tone.

"Love me, Love my Dog." Said the husband
"What?" John replied.
"Love me, Love my Dog!"

John looked at me, confused. I shrugged.

"We don't know that song."
"But...how can that be?"

It was the wife.

"It is a popular song!"

Awkward silence.

"Maybe...you could start it for us," I finally suggested. "Then we could continue."

The woman said something in Thai to the man. Then they started singing.

"Love me, Love my Da-aw-awg...Love me, Love my Da-aw-awg!"

We both shrugged.

"Love me, Love my Da-aw-awg" We repeated without much enthusiasm "Love me, Love my Da-aw-awg!"

For the next several minutes we drove alongside the Mekong, all four of us singing

"Love me, Love my Da-aw-awg...Love me, Love my Da-aw-awg!"

No other lyrics. Just those. The Thai couple were ecstatic. After a few more minutes of this, we'd reached our destination. The car pulled over, and the couple let us out.

"Thank you for singing a song for us," the wife said.

"Welcome you both to Thailand!"

The car sped away, tires spitting gravel. John and I were unnerved, caught halfway between the two chief mantras of the seasoned traveler:

Buy the ticket, take the ride

&

You are a strangers in a strange land

We walked back to town that night. But that's another story.

Post for Sinead O'Connor

2011-08-31T08:59:00.004+08:00

Though I published something just yesterday I feel like I need to get current fast since it wouldn't do to have Sinead O'Connor (to whom I just wrote a letter of wooing) tune in only to find as first entry a confusing bit of semi-fiction from ages ago that really doesn't represent my life as it is now and current. So let's begin with a photo of my cottage here in the Pacific Northwest, seen here.

The cottage was gifted to me by one of my oldest and dearest friends. As a incurable gypsy I hardly know what to say except for thank you and Sinead, stop over for a visit!

In a break from traveling for the time being, 85% done with the screenplay I began this summer, a Buddhist comedy called Spinning Karma about which more I'm not at liberty to say. Being this close to done to a big project that isn't a guidebook is a wonderful, strangely tipsy feeling. Unlike the guidebook work, there's nobody on the other end waiting for it & no sure paycheck from it. Doing my best with the first draft, and trusting the universe for the rest.

In more Sinead O'Connor related news, there could be a part in SPINNING KARMA for Sinead O'Connor. There is definitely a part for my friend and writing mentor Nury Vittachi.

Though Lonely Planet Belize is long handed in, the fourth edition is still pending publishing (though I did get some lovely remarks on Facebook from someone who'd downloaded the PDF version). I've been doing a bit of travel writing from home however, having just finished four short articles about various street foods around the world. Part of that article called for me to actually replicate the dishes themselves, so I thought I'd double down and do a bit of how-to video on making DIY 臭豆腐 (stinky tofu), which came out very nicely, more a deep fried Cheddar than Camembert. Unfortunately, my flip cam seems to have given up the ghost somewhere in the recesses of my bag, and when I went to edit the videos I found they'd all been struck mute. I still may put one up with random subtitles if it seems worth the trouble.

Subtext: Sinead, I will cook strange and exotic foods for you, get naked and feed them to you.

Before leaving that subject, I've got a fifth article I'm doing for lonelyplanet.com called ASIAN STREET FOOD BRAWL. The story calls for a top five list, and while I've already got my first two slots filled (Singapore & Taipei, naturally) I'm taking a poll for the other three. So feel free to chime in on where you place various Asian cities vis-a-vis their street food scenes. Gotta be street food, and gotta be in Asia.

I have no idea which Asian city's street food Sinead most fancies. Maybe she's a Bangkok girl, because Bangkok is spicy and a bit wicked. Or perhaps she prefers Katmandu? I will travel with you to these and all other exotic lands, Sinead!

In more travel-related stuff, I just bought a trailer for my bicycle and am now training my dog Raja to ride in it in preparation for a potential bike trip down the West Coast. We went out for six miles on Sunday, and I plan to start bringing her into town. The trailer is amazing, 25 pounds & Raja's weight of 30 & I'm still pretty comfortable taking it up hills. Here' a picture:

Subtext: I have a very pretty dog, don't I?

Also travel-related - in the most basic sense - I have given into shoe-related compulsion and bought myself a pair of Vibram Five-Finger shoes. When you are flat-footed and walk upwards of ten miles a day when on a gig, all shoes suck. After reading up on the pros and cons, I have decided that the VFFs offer me some hope of strengthening the muscles in my feet. So far, so good. My feet seem to be straightening out, and I am picking up dandelions between my toes.

Subtext: Sinead, I am foot-aware. I will pamper you with erotic foot massage every day of your life.

That about sums it up, unless I've forgotten something which is entirely likely. Guests are coming over & cooking needs to be done.

Subtext: Ignore what I just wrote above about cooking dinner etc., Sinead.
I will drop everything - everything - for you. Seriously. Nothing Compares 2 U.

subtext: I enjoy swinging from trees in my underwear, and am not shy about showing off my package.

Farewell My Hello Kitty

2011-08-30T11:31:00.001+08:00

Warning: For hardcore Snarky Tofu Fans Only. Literature!

Farewell My Hello Kitty

You gonna finish that Samosa? If not, mind giving it here?

Once upon a time I had it all. A respected young journalist with not one, but two, weekly columns in the Taiwanese English language dailies, a fine home in the mountains of Taipei County, and the bilingual love of a good woman. Now I live in Terminal Two of Hong Kong’s Chep Lok airport, where I spend much of my time walking between the various airline counters and the security gates, stopping occasionally in one of the airport’s many fine eateries where tardy travelers often run off and leave half-eaten meals for me to finish. I like the samosas the best, though they taste more like egg-rolls to me. You wouldn’t believe how many people order four samosas, only to run off at the first boarding announcement, leaving one or even two perfectly good samosas sitting on the tray. Sometimes I want to run after them, to tell them that they could have just asked the counterperson to put the extra somosas in a Styrofoam clamshell, that they could finish them on the plane. But one man gathers what another man spills. Such is life in the airport.

Nobody believes me when I tell them that I choose to live this way, that I actually could have just turned around and gotten on a flight back to Taipei but instead ripped up both my return ticket and passport and flushed them both down the automatic toilet just behind the Fortress electronics shop in Terminal 1. But that’s pretty much the way it happened, eighteen months ago, when I was on another pointless trip to renew my Taiwan visa. I’d lived in Taiwan on a tourist visa for years, which meant that every sixty days, like clockwork, I was forced to drop whatever it was I was doing, head lemming-like to Chiang Kai-shek airport, where I would get on line to have my passport looked over by an unblinking immigration agent who would check that the day of my last entry came no more than sixty days ago before affixing his own blue exit stamp.

Then I’d get on a plane to somewhere – anywhere, it didn’t matter, reading every newspaper on the plane and eating only the salad and desert portion of my in-flight meal (that’s the secret to never getting ill on airplane food – never eat the main dish!) until the plane landed. At that point, I would usually get off the plane, go through customs at whichever country I was visiting this month, change exactly seven American dollars into the local currency (for snacks – I believe its important to experience something of the local culture, even if its only in the form of a processed treat in unreadable packaging) and wait in the airport for the next available flight back to Taiwan.

The return flights were always the worst. For one thing, I’d already read the day’s news, and would inevitably find myself fidgeting nervously in my seat, pressing the call attendant button at random intervals to test their response time. For another thing, No matter how many times I’d done it before, simply walked through the immigration counter with a tourist visa and a passport that clearly indicated that I’d lived in the country for a very long time, I always had a suspicion that one day my number would be up. My flights home were often filled with visions of the always-silent immigration officer suddenly looking up from my passport and asking me questions I would be unable to answer, questions like

“Do you really think that there’s so much in Taiwan to see that you can justify being a tourist here for seven years?”

“Who do you think your kidding? We know that you are working illegally.”

Even though I’d never heard of this happening to anyone, the possibility was more than I could bear. I wasn’t saving any money, and the only reason I was living in Taiwan was to live cheaply and to work on my writing. So it was only natural for the idea to occur to me eventually. I had my laptop with me, meaning I could pretty much set up shop anywhere that had a power supply. Why should I keep going back and forth when the only thing that was really important to me was my writing?

Ah, yes, my precious writing. I don’t mean the inane little travel stories, restaurant critiques, or the seemingly endless stream of CD reviews. No, that’s what I did for money. By “writing” I mean my life’s work – Adieu, Bonjour Chat (Which is French for “Farewell, Hello Kitty”), a sweeping historical epic about one man’s decades-long romance with the famed Japanese cartoon cat of the title, set in the backdrop of the Chinese revolution from the early years of the first KMT-CCP alliance all the way up to the bitter years of the Cultural Revolution, and eventual downfall of the dreaded Gang of Four.

I’d really been in a rut before I left Taiwan, with some real writers block. I was stuck somewhere around the six-hundred and third page mark of my manuscript (all great writers edit afterwards, don’t you think?), where my protagonist (who is really based on myself) finds himself in the unique position of being the only Caucasian to be following Chairman Mao’s ragtag group of soldiers in their desperate long march across China, where he finds himself falling ever more deeply in love with Hello Kitty, who at this time was both lover and advisor to the charismatic future leader of China. A love triangle ensues, filled with political intrigue, human drama, and designer handbags. But you’ll have to read the book (which now, free of distractions, I’m sure to finish in no time) to find out what happens next. Suffice to say, it’ll be Hello Kitty-liscious.

And when I’m done, It’s a cinch that I’ll be able to meet the right people to help me get it published. Everybody who’s anybody passes through this airport. I also need to get some sort of waiver from the Sanrio toy company, because they hold the copyright to Hello Kitty. But I’m sure that they’ll be happy to give it to me, once they read the manuscript. Maybe you know some big-shot publishers, or maybe even a film producer? If you do, could you please ask them to look me up? Tell them they can find me any afternoon in the men’s room on level five. I’ll be the one sitting on the sink by the 220 volt shaver-only outlet, fingering a set of wooden prayer beads, waiting for my laptop to recharge.

~ Published 2002, somewhere I think ~ Snarky Tofu. Now back to work on screenplay, which is exactly and nothing like this short story.

Thank you for your large ass

2011-08-20T09:07:00.000+08:00

So I'm holding onto my bicycle at a place called Bikes&Bikes, a seldom opened gender-flexible-friendly bicycle co-op in Olympia. It's the third time this week I've shown up in hopes of finding a trailer so I can take a long trip with my dog, Raja.

The inner door is still closed, but the outer door is being held for me by a woman, 25 maybe with dress and mannerisms suggesting that she could be a punk rock anarchist, a queer girl, both, or something in between. (How does one gauge these things? Once I married a punk rock anarchist queer girl, so I am apparently the wrong man to ask.)

I ask her about the hours. She tells me she doesn't work there, and has also just dropped by for information. We've been chatting for about thirty seconds when a guy comes over from the second hand clothing store that shares a hallway with Bike & Bike and starts giving us both the lowdown on what a cool place Bike & Bike is. He tells us we should stick around until 5:00 (it's just turned 4:00) because they'll open up then. The cool looking woman is still holding the door for me, and I realize that she probably can't get by me because of the position of my bicycle. The fact that she's kind of cute, but could be potentially mean, makes me slightly nervous...

"I um, don't want to take advantage of your largess any longer"

It's a geeky thing to say, since largess really means generous bestowal of gifts and not something small like holding open a door for 120 seconds. But there you have it.

"Well fuck you," she says.

This surprises me. I think I say "huh?" or "what?" Maybe I say "come again?"

"Why did you say I had a large ass?"

I hadn't seen her ass. She was facing me.

"Largess...kindness...for holding the door for me. Why...why would I say you had a large ass?"

Newly-met women do not like being told that they have large asses.
Most women do not like being told they have large asses. Even I know this.

"I'm sorry...yeah, why would you say that?"

"I guess it wasn't the best choice of words...whew, we almost just had a misunderstanding right out of Shakespeare. Sir, do you bite your thumb at me? I do bite my thumb at you!"

The ice broken, she laughs a sort of half-laugh.

"So...yeah. I'm Joshua."

I stick out my hand. She shakes it and introduces herself as "Y" or "Wai". I think of the comic series "Y: The Last Man," which is about the death of every male on the planet except for one, and am slightly unnerved.

"Well, maybe I'll see you around when Bike & Bike opens. So....see you around."

She's still holding the door for me. I cut my losses and ride home.

I have been here one week, and still Olympia Washington continues to mystify me.

on the road again

2011-08-15T06:34:00.000+08:00

hitting the road again, after a summer in one time zone. packing, unpacking, tossing things unneeded aside, packing again. tomorrow is airplane day. three time zone shift.

there is a spirit inside of me that goes to sleep when my body stays in one place too long. when he sleeps, disquiet comes. i can meditate it, shake it, calm it, speak to it, alleviate it for a time. but the disquiet is always there. the spirit awakens when I am packing to leave, following a short burst of frenzy. I am again myself.

let's go, it says. let's go. let it go and let's go!

leaving New England tomorrow for the Pacific Northwest, good bicycle boxed and ready for the tender mercies of Southwest Airlines. Perhaps a trip down the coast is in order? Anybody interested in coming along, bringing their own travel spirits? drop me a line

One Norrin Among Many,

JSB aka Snarky Tofu

My new Religion: Norrinism

2011-08-05T13:08:00.002+08:00

I’d like to announce the birth of a new religion. It's called “Norrinism,” after the true name of Marvel Comic's Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd (Raddism sounds kind of childish, don't you think?)

The Silver Surfer, as everyone knows, travels the cosmos on a Silver Surfboard. This religion has nothing to do with either the Silver Surfer, who is in no way a figurehead, or with Marvel Comics.

The cornerstone of Norrinism is the notion that certain human beings may, upon death, will be chosen to travel the cosmos and eventually reincarnate on other worlds. As the law of karma teaches that actions taken in one life will have consequences in the next, so will actions taken by a Norrin in this life affect their likelihood of sacred migration in the next.

Does this sort of thing interest you? Read On:

Of all the theories postulated on matters post-mortem, that of reincarnation seems, to a fair chunk of the Earth's population, most likely. The idea of some afterlife heaven and hell as put forth by the monotheistic faiths seems too cut and dry to deep thinkers. As for some merciful eternal sleep, anyone who's experienced the ironic nature of the workings of the world should find the prospect that we'll somehow be let off the hook that easy unlikely at best.

So it seems like the endless cycle of life and death it is, broken only by those diligent enough to achieve enlightenment through sustained renouncement of craving and aversion.

(Are you one of these? I'm not.)

So, reincarnation!

One argument made in the past against the theory of reincarnation is mathematical.

“Given that there are far more people alive today than there were in the past,” The argument goes “where did all the additional souls come from?”

This has been answered in a number of ways.

Among the theories proposed to answer this question are that upon death the soul can split into two or more beings. Another is that some of these souls may come from elsewhere, perhaps from other worlds entirely.

It is this second theory that lies at the heart of Norrinism, because, if correct, it stands to reason that it should work both ways. That is, there will be some of us who, in the bardo (the space in between lives), will be given the choice (or not, as the case might be) of leaving Terra entirely and being reborn on some other world. Perhaps it will be the responsibility of these souls to actually explore the cosmos, freed of the physical restraints of corporal shells and thus (we hope) the restraints of physics itself with regards to time and space.

(This is us a question to be answered at a later date, perhaps providing reason for Norrinism's first great schism.)

Given the rate at which our species seems to be fouling the nest and the unlikelihood of any mechanical breakthrough that’ll allow for physical migration (a la Star Trek), it seems sensible that the spiritual consciousness of the planet would wish to hedge its bets by looking elsewhere.

Which souls will be chosen to make the leap? How many would even wish to go?

To answer the second question first: Probably not that many. It means leaving the earth forever, severing all ties with the planet save for vague memories and half remembered dreams in some future alien incarnation.

As to the first question, it seems that the most likely candidates will come from the souls of those who through choice, circumstance or both have spent one or more lifetimes wandering, unable or unwilling to settle down in one place. These souls have exchanged the comfort and nurturing of deep roots for a breadth of experience of wide swaths of the planet Earth itself.

The reason for this selection criteria is simple: Recalling the Earth, and sharing these remembrances with the friends, family and acquaintances of our next otherworldly incarnations are a major part of a Norrin's duties.

I consider myself in the running for a post-mortem gig as an interstellar spirit ambassador of Planet Earth. As the Founder and Head Rinpoche of Norrinism, my participation in the plan is pretty much a given. (Such are the benefits of starting your own religion.)

I can already hear you saying “Oh ho, Josh. You’re just trying to justify your inability to settle in one place by starting a religion”

It’s a fair cop.

In any event, isn't justifying aspects of ourselves we’re unwilling or unable to change a large part of any religion?

Norrinism has no fixed dogma, commandments or rules. Not yet, at least.

However, I’m working on a series of guidelines, that is, actions and lifestyles that will increase a Norrins’ chances of making the stellar leap.

First off, you have to want to be a Norrin (actual belief in Norrinism is not necessary, though it does show an extra level of seriousness). Norrinism does not abide forced conversions.

Second, it helps if you’re not overly-fixated on the idea of home, or permanent attachment in general. Being well traveled and otherwise multi-cultural is especially helpful. You have to love the Earth enough to remember it vividly and often in dreams and waking memories through many future incarnations, but not be so attached to t that being separated from it forever will leave you permanently paralyzed or in a state of semi-permanent isolation.

Third, having a good sense of humor will probably help when it comes time to tell your future friends and soul-mates that you're originally from a small blue planet called Earth. They may laugh at you. You'll need to be able to laugh at yourself.

Finally, suicide is verboten. If you can’t deal with whatever pain / boredom / loneliness / unsuitable partner/ what have you that this life is presenting you with, the potential endless void of space is probably not going to be a great environment for spiritual growth. Suicide forces the Norrin-soul another incarnation on earth to get their shit together.

Other details to be worked out. It’s a new faith, after all, thus far sacred-text-less. I am open to suggestions. Please feel free to contact me through this blog or elsewhere.

Readying the Inner Spaceships,

J Samuel Brown

‘One Norrin Among Many’

Skinny Asses

2011-07-21T01:29:00.003+08:00

A couple of weeks back I met up with an internet friend of mine, a woman I'll call Alice. Alice, like myself, spent several years in Taiwan. We'd never quite wound up meeting in Taiwan, which was odd because we ran around in similar circles. We were both in New York, and there was a party going on for some other folks with connections to Taiwan, more people I'd never met but might have if only I'd been more social. The conversation turned to the dating scene in Taiwan. Alice told me that one of the issues she'd had with her life in Taiwan was that she felt that, as a western woman, her dating options had been limited at best. It's a common complaint among western women living in Taiwan, common enough to have been the theme of one of the stories from my first book, Vignettes of Taiwan. Although the events described in the story occurred 15 years ago (note the Clinton-Lewinsky reference), it seems like dating dynamics haven't changed all that much.

Without further exposition...

Skinny Asses

"Look at this," Said Joanne, wagging her ample derrière in my direction. "How can I compete with all the skinny asses with this thing sticking out of me?"

Jo's ass was big, but beautifully shaped. She had curves up front to match too; with her figure, shed have had men falling at her feet from Moscow to Lisbon, New York to Compton. But in Taiwan, Jo's statuesque physique was just another strike against her in the local dating market.

"I havent had a date in almost a year," Joanne continued. "Your average Taiwanese guy is either totally turned off by the size of my ass..."

"...Or totally turned on, but too much of a mamma's boy to do anything about it."

"I was getting to that. Or they're married. And you western men..."

"Don't get me involved in this..."

"......are all like slobs at a smorgasbord, with all those hot Taiwanese chicks fawning over you everywhere you go. Hot commodities, you all are, and you know it. So you pick and choose, pick and choose! Its disgusting."

"You mean, like attractive women back in the West," I asked tentatively.

"Exactly!" Jo shot back. "The way it ought to be."

Jo's complaint was common among expatriate women living in Taiwan. A dearth of Taiwanese men who were interested or able to act on any interest they might have in Western women effectively shrunk the dating pool by 98%. As for the other two percent, she wasnt wrong foreign men were a hot commodity. This created a palpable frustration among single foreign women living in Taiwan, which they often vented in the presence of their western male friends.

"Its like a wet-dream come true for you guys...all these fawning, obedient Asian babes hanging all over you."

"Where did you hear this," I asked, raising an eyebrow.

Jo gave an eyebrow raise of her own.

"Oh, come on. Everybody knows that Asian women are all like, OK hon-ee, whatever you want, everything up to boy-friend!"

She put one hand on her hip and another behind her head, making a mincing gesture.

"Look Jo, I hate to burst your self-pity bubble, but that stereotype just isnt true. I've only been with two Taiwanese women, and both were long term things and neither one was anything but an equal partner in the relationship. Have you considered that maybe the reason that so many Western men come to Taiwan and wind up hitched is that Taiwanese women are looking for meaningful partnerships, while Western women set their standards incredibly high and play too many damned games?"

Joanne snorted loudly.

"So you mean that Western women are just into game playing, huh?"

"Hey, you admitted it already. Back home if a woman is hot, she thinks she can play with one guys affection until she gets bored, then drop him when someone she thinks is better comes along. In my experience, most Taiwanese women arent like this. They're more loyal, less.superficial."

"Yeah, right..."

Joanne's voice was bitter.

"I think you're just like all the rest of the foreign guys living here. You all have yellow fever."

Yellow fever is a derogatory description for a man who only goes for Asian women. As far as Im concerned, its a conversation ender.

"Look Joanne, thats just racist. Sorry you can't get laid in Taiwan. I have to prepare for class."

I left Jo to stew in her estrogen and went off to teach. Later that week I ran into her, and the incident was forgotten. We had a cup of coffee and made small talk about the news of the day. The Clinton / Lewinsky scandal was making headlines, even in Taiwan.

"At least Monica's getting laid," Jo commented.

I told Jo that I wasn't sure that counted as getting laid and dropped the subject.

A couple of months later, the school got a new teacher, Phil, a Canadian guy. Short, in his mid thirties, Phil was a bit older than your average adult conversation school teacher. But he had all his hair and was an amiable enough guy. Most importantly to Jo, he was new in Taiwan, seemingly heterosexual, and unattached. Predictably, Jo was on him the week he arrived. They wound up going out for a little while, and the girls behind the counter at the school were already making jokes about the two being a couple.

Their relationship didnt last more than a couple of months. At first I assumed that Phil, realizing that he was a far hotter property on the dating scene than he'd been back in Canada, had broken it off. But as it turns out, Joanne had dumped Phil.

"So why did you break it off with Phil?" I asked her a few weeks after it had ended. "He seemed like a decent guy."

"Eh..." replied Joanne. "I like taller guys."

Skinny Asses published originally in Vignettes of Taiwan. Order your copy today at www.amazon.com or http://thingsasian.com/goto_store/item_detail.1705.html

Bus to Babylon

2011-07-15T01:34:00.001+08:00

Summer 1985 (or thereabouts)

My friend Jim, AKA Action Boy and I had hitched along with a group of young political activists on a bus caravan from NYC to Washington DC. It was a rally of some sort, protesting Reagan or whatever else was going on back then. In retrospect it all seems quaintly benign. I was hitching along to prove my political bona-fides to a particular high school girl who, for very good reasons, wanted very little to do with me, an unsavory character at the time. I remember little about the rally itself. Jim and I spent most of it very, very high, probably annoying the people who were there for purposes of social change. Our only contribution was adding to the number of people on the mall.

On the ride back we were stuck on a horrible, broken down school bus with bad shocks and no air conditioning. Jim and I looked at each other with the shared glance of stoners about to do something stupid, and without verbalizing anything, the two of us got off the bus. The bus took off. We were stranded in DC, five dollars between us, a few cassette tapes, and the last bud fro the 1/4 oz bag we'd brought for the trip.

We went into a park and rolled the last bud up with one Club rolling paper into a carrot-shaped spliff. We got very, very high, and the thought must have occurred to us simultaneously ~ what now?

Back in the parking lot a lone bus remained. From the outside we could tell it was luxurious, something that had been chartered for the occasion. We approached it and knocked on the door just as it was pulling out of the lot. The door opened with a clean whoosh, blowing cool air out on us both.

"Hi." I said. "We were part of the rally but missed our bus. You guys heading back towards New York?"

"You're in luck," the driver told us. "We are, and have two empty seats. Hop on."

We got on, and sat in the two plush, empty seats right behind the driver. They were soft as any couch.

"You guys got any tunes?" The driver asked us, and Jim handed him a mixed tape on which was scrawled "Babylon by Bus"

The driver plugged it in. From a perfect sound system came the joyous cry that opens Draw Your Brakes

"Forward and Fiaca! Menacle and den gosaca..."

The sun set and we rode comfortably through the night. When the bus let us off in front of the Port Authority we were still in a state of chemical bliss. .

Night Ride Collage

2011-07-11T23:22:00.000+08:00

I spent the last two weeks in New York City. I had a gig taking care of a pair of parrots called Lokeeta and Alberto. Parrots are sort of like autistic children with scissors attached to their heads. As long as things went according to schedule, all was well. Diverge from routine, however, and squawking ensued, along with potential digit loss.

It was something of a melancholy trip for me, the city having been transformed into a strange corporate ghost shell, almost a parody of the place I grew up in. Chase bank-branches and Starbucks on nearly every corner, including ten feet down from the glossy shell of CBGB's. New York City feels is as much a tourist attraction as any other tourist attraction I've visited, so I did what any good traveler would do. I ate and spent money.

I rode my bicycle. A lot in fact. Probably the only thing that made me feel like I was home was riding my bicycle through traffic. I have gotten older, and the chaos of the streets seems to have sharply diminished, but still, every now and again, flashes.

It was stormy on my last night, and I probably should have just taken the subway, but it was one of those things where, at the moment I left the apartment on East 6th street it was only barely raining, and I convinced myself that maybe the storm was at its end. By the time I hit 34th street it was pissing down, but I felt strangely elated nonetheless. I headed up to visit a friend on 116th street, leaving sometime around one AM. The streets were still wet, but the rain had, for the most part, stopped.

Traffic was light, so I put Tangerine Dream in my ears and took out my camera and began shooting. For the next 90 minutes or so I rode downtown, on the west side of Central Park, then past Columbus Circle, then down through Times Square (now a pedestrian mall), cutting east on 34th street and south to the East Village. All the while I kept my camera in my hand, shooting without looking through the viewfinder as I rode. At lights I stopped (when necessary) and changed the camera settings to get a variety of effects. Some of these produced interesting shots, others just came out as color blurs. The shooting itself was tricky, as I basically rode one-handed through traffic. A Go-Pro helmet mounted Camera is definitely on my wish list.

On the bus ride out of NYC I played with the 800 or so shots a bit, keeping them mostly in order, deleting a few that made the flow seem too jarring. My ASUS netbook, excellent for word processing, is not exactly a powerhouse when it comes to doing anything other than basic photo editing, and adding to the limitations is the program I'm using - Picasa - all others having vanished into digital ether. (There may have been some jealousy issues - I am convinced that my programs fight with each other when I'm not looking. Does anyone else ever suspect this).

Anyway, I may futz around with it more when I'm re-united with my slightly more oomph-y computer in a month or so, but for the time being this is as much as I can do. The title and the soundtrack both come from the Tangerine Dream song that was playing on the journey (by all means, click through here after watching the video to purchase the work of this amazing band).

Bicycling in New York City

2011-07-08T00:38:00.001+08:00

*blog snippet*

On Saturday in some futile effort to re-adjust temporarily to my birth city I found myself on Hester Street. It was to this street on Manhattan’s lower east side that my ancestors came when they first fled Europe, Cossacks hot on their heels and in at least a few likely cases, on other body parts (hence my blond hair and love of borscht and horses). There was a street fair going on, and I had a longish chat with a woman named Vanessa, who was working for Transportation Alternatives. She was there with some other folks from TA to promote the new bicycle lanes that have been grafted onto the streets of NYC in attempt to turn chaos into order.

I am interested in this Bike Lane scheme, as Among the projects on my to-do list for the summer is to assess whether bicycling in New York City is more or less insane than it was when I last lived here and was, more or less, insane. Perhaps there might be a series of articles in it, maybe more. To this end, I have been riding around the city on my folding bike, which was ideal for Taipei but somewhat less so here in NYC. Shitty streets + 20" wheels = pain. Also, riding with an 8 pound chain around my waist to lock the thing up - my old Kryptonite got left in Colorado, and isn't NYC worthy anyway - adds an extra element of machismo to the ride.

My experience with the bike lanes has been mixed. On long rides I appreciate the buffer zone they provide between me and the cars (mostly). But for shorter rides, the sort that compose a day of errands or messenger work, they become sort of a strange and unwelcome appendage, like flippers grafted onto a dumpster in hopes of promoting buoyancy...

***end blog snippet***

Unbelizable - The Best of Belize!

2011-06-29T10:54:00.000+08:00

Fresh at Lonely Planet Digital, UnBelizable! Where to find the best of Belize

Words are mine, images not - so before clicking over to http://www.lonelyplanet.com/belize/travel-tips-and-articles/76706 have a quick gander at the moving picture show below, images I shot on the last trip

A Journey of Unspeakable Horror through Quaintest Vermont

2011-06-22T00:12:00.006+08:00

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting the charming town of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Looking back, it's difficult to pinpoint which of Brattleboro's many features most bear writing about. Perhaps it's the picturesque main street, filled with shops and cafes offering all manner of healthy, organic (and largely locally produced) items. Maybe it's the kindness of the people, one of whom helped me find my way around when I became disoriented. Or it could be the massive pile of human skulls in Brattleboro's geographic center - a hideous, unearthly structure dwarfing the town's shops and homes, bathing the surrounding valley in an unholy, malevolent glow.

The Pyramid (as it's known locally) is focal point for the townspeople, who worship with their every breath and action an extra-dimensional entity of pure evil whose name must never be mentioned. Brattleboro residents are proud of their pyramid, and boast that on a clear day it's eldritch radiance causes livestock to burst into flames as far away as Keene, New Hampshire.

"We're honest, sincere folk." Suzanne, a Brattleboro native told me during my recent visit. "We work hard and don't put on airs. And of course, we praise with each breath a nameless dark lord of unfathomable terror."

Offering me a hunk of locally-produced cheese (an aged white cheddar - delicious!) Suzanne told me that the origin of the Brattleboro Skull Pyramid was unknowable, save to say that it has "always been here," and "transcends all known laws of time and space."

"But to really experience the Pyramid's glory it's best to visit in mid-Autumn."

Like most Vermonters, Brattleboro residents do their best to draw from local resources, so its no surprise that most of the skulls that make up the Brattleboro pyramid come from local residents, either those who dare speak the dark lord's true name, or, volunteers who are specially chosen in a joyous ceremony that takes place each spring, drawing visitors from miles around.

But the people of Brattleboro aren't overly dogmatic, and there are quite a few non-local skulls in the pile as well. Close to the pyramid's apex I spied a familiar face, off which the flesh and an unruly lock of auburn hair had yet to rot. Upon closer inspection I recognized the skull as belonging to famed political humorist PJ O'Rourke.

"He came from New Hampshire for a book signing last winter," Said Suzanne.

Brattleboro isn't the only Vermont town boasting attractions of unspeakable evil. The town's friendly rivalry with Bennington is well known, and some Vermonter's say that the latter town's famous Skeleton Wall (a thousand-foot high circular wall made of bones that actually blocks out the sun) is "artistically derivative". Bennington residents, of course, disagree, or would if the Wall didn't stop all forms of communication between the quaint town of 16,000 and the outside world.

Certainly most well-known of The Green Mountain State's unspeakably evil attractions is the famous Moat of the Damned, a ten-foot wide chasm of infinite depth running through downtown Burlington, splitting Vermont's largest city in twain. Filled with what locals say are an unknowable number of lost souls stripped of physical form and doomed to wail forever in unfathomable torment, the moat runs parallel to the Church Street Marketplace, has its own gift shop, and regularly competes with the nearby Ben & Jerry's factory for the title of Vermont's Most Evil Tourist Attraction.

Still, locals claim that many of the souls doomed to wail eternally from the moat's infernal depths aren't Vermonters at all.

"A lot of the voices you hear wailing from the Moat of the Damned are college kids from Boston and New York," one crusty old-timer told me during a recent visit. "If you want to experience the real Vermont Terror, you've got to visit the Pit of the Damned out in Winooski. That there's the genuine article."

Golfing through the Dynasties

2011-06-15T01:59:00.000+08:00

Busy at work on the Buddhist Comedy. Here's one from a couple years back, originally published in SLICE magazine in Shanghai. Still waiting on Payment (or even a copy of the mag), Slice ~ JSB

Golfing through the Dynasties

（a vaguely accurate history)

Last month’s exhibition of Ming-era painting “The Autumn Banquet” raised hackles from Stranraer to the Shetlands. Depicting two Chinese nobleman hitting the links in the Middle kingdom, the painting is being touted by China as proof that golf’s origins lie in Chinese, not Scottish, soil.

“The great game o’ golf invented by the Chinese?” Cried indignant Scottish golfers. “Away an bile yer heid!”

But if the ramifications of Autumn Banquet were a sting Scotland’s collective pride, further golf-related discoveries coming out of the Middle Kingdom are likely to be felt as a hard slap to the haggis.

“Autumn Banquet is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Hou Lin-wan, head of China’s newly established Golfing Research Ministry. “The more we research the subject, the farther back in Chinese history we are able to place the development of the game of Chiuwan…or, as westerners call it, golf.”

According to Hou, golf was developed far earlier than initially thought, and that new discoveries push the origins of the game as far back as 1500 years, when it was a popular pastime with legendary figures who lived during China’s Spring and Autumn Period.

“We suspect that when he wasn’t winning battles for the King of Wu or writing treatises that would one day pilfered by western motivational speakers, Sun Tzu must have played a lot of golf.”

According to Hou, the famed General’s most oft-quoted line - all warfare is based on deception – was, in its original form, meant as advice to golfers looking to cheat during tournaments.

“We checked out a really early version of Art of War, and found that the line originally read ‘when kicking one’s own ball out of a rough spot, look straight ahead and squint. If your opponent catches you looking down, pretend you’ve dropped something.’ We figure one of the later translators wasn’t a golfer and changed it.”

China’s claim to be the birthplace of golf, according to Hou, is given further credence by the recent unearthing of a manuscript said to have been penned by China’s most famous thinker. If it is genuine, the recently discovered Congzi chuiwan zibao (Golf Diary of Confucius) suggests that the young Confucius traveled from state to state offering not merely advice on morality and statecraft to local regents (as is commonly accepted) but also golfing tips. This advice was not always welcome, as demonstrated from this typical entry:

Late Spring and Autumn Period, June: Advised Prince of Chou he’d get less backspin if he tightens his arc; Advice ill received, must leave Chou at once!

This and similarly-themed fragments lends fresh meaning to that most well known piece of advice given the young Confucius by his famous contemporary, philosopher and elder statesmen Lao Tzu:

“A man who is well learned often endangers himself by revealing the flaws of others. Don’t do this."

By the time of the Jin dynasty (A.D. 1115-1234), according to Professor Hou, golf’s popularity had spread beyond the Middle Kingdom’s borders, often with unforeseen consequences as barbarians to the north altered the game to suit their own restive nature.

“A nomadic people, the Mongols needed increasingly large golf courses to suit their roaming style of play.” Says Hou “As much of their own lands was basically a massive sand trap, it was only natural that Mongol eyes would turn southward.”

Early translations of a key part of one document left by emperor Qin Shiwang (under whose edict construction of the Great Wall of China began) is usually rendered as ‘Without this fortification, nothing can stop the Northern barbarians from going through China!’ However this translation may not be entirely accurate.

“Knowing what we now know, it is likely that Qin built the Great Wall to keep barbarian golfers from playing through,” says Hou.

In a side note, the building of the Great Wall may inadvertently be responsible for another of golf history’s great ironies, miniature golf.

“The wall did not stop the barbarians in their fanatical quest for greener courses, but it did slow them down.” Says Hou. “Apparently some of the barbarians found it enjoyable to knock small holes into the base of the wall, often at odd angles, through which they’d take turns making their shots.”

According to Hou, the majority of Mongol golfers probably considered this a cheapening of the sport, though they might have played it from time to time to with their children to keep their wives from nagging them about spending so much time away from home golfing with the horde.

Back in Scotland, meanwhile, these latest claims are being met with tempered skepticism.

“Playing through holes knocked in the great wall of China?!” Says Angus Macdougal, President of Golfing Glaswegians Associated. “That’s the most radge thing I’ve ever heard. Besides, everyone knows we Scots were already doing tha’ through Hadrian’s Wall, way back when there was nowt but bloody Romans on the other side!”

~ Originally published in 2007
Special thanks to the great Dr. John Wedderburn for Scottish Linguistic Assistance.

Gray Noodle Gate (Incheon Chinatown)

2011-06-09T20:47:00.000+08:00

Busy at work on the Buddhist Comedy. Travel article fans, please enjoy this one from the vaults, circa 2008 (hence the references to wife). Second person perspective is unpopular. Now I know why.
Originally written for Thingsasian.com

Gray Noodle Gate (Incheon Chinatown)

At the tail end of a long weekend out you and your wife ride the train from Downtown Seoul to Incheon, planning to check out Korea's only Chinatown. You haven't heard all that much to attract you to Incheon Chinatown; being bi-coastal Americans with roots in both New York City and San Francisco, it takes more than a spectacular gate, stalls selling trinkets and a few noodleshops for a Chinatown to impress. And Seoul, not a city known for either it's beauty or ethnic diversity, strikes neither of you as particularly fertile grounds from which a world-class Chinatown might spring.

But one attraction does compel, if only mildly: Your wife has heard tale of a museum dedicated to Jajang-myeon, a noodle and soybean paste specialty. How many people can boast of having visited a noodle museum? Besides, your flight from Incheon leaves on the early side of the next morning, so you figure sleeping in Incheon might offer a head start.

Getting off at the terminal stop after ninety minutes on the metro, the dense crowds of Seoul have thinned considerably. The woman behind the desk of the tourist information booth is of great assistance assuring you both that rumors of a noodle museum had been released prematurely.

"Yes, there will be a museum devoted to Jajang-myeon. But not yet. Perhaps it will open later this year?"

She is equally helpful in deflating the idea that sleeping in Incheon will buy you any extra sleep; for reasons known only to cityplanners, even the train from the Incheon-Airport junction (where you've booked a reasonably priced hotel) takes about the same amount of time as the bus from the airport to downtown Seoul. But she does point you in the direction of Chinatown, which lay just up the hill from the station and information booth.

So you wander up the hill away from the station, and soon find yourself milling around along with a hundred or more similarly-milling families out from Seoul looking to suck up a bit of Sunday culture on a warm March afternoon. The air is heavily scented with burning pine incense and cooking smells, and the neighborhood feels pleasant enough.

The signs of a well tended Chinatown are all here. There are street stalls selling medicine balls and kung fu trinkets, and restaurants with names in Chinese and Korean (hardly unusual anywhere in Korea, or at least on this side of the DMZ). Still, it's all a bit plastic, and the overall vibe of Incheon Chinatown is one of a movie set kept around to make low-budget period pieces every few years. Missing among the restaurants and kung-fu balls and colorful roofs is anything approaching actual Chinese vibrancy. At one point you spot a woman in a Mao cap selling Beijing style yang rou chua'r on the street, so you buy a stick. The woman selling the meat is Korean, through and through, and answers your cheerful greeting of tongzhi hao (hello comrade) with a puzzled stare.

You do get your noodles, however, at a place owned by a Chinese immigrant (not all that common in this Chinatown). His Chinese is fine,and his Jajang-myeon excellent. Even so, you stop short of calling him comrade. After lunch you wander into Jayu Park and lock eyes with the statue of General Douglas Macarthur (whose famous invasion / liberation march began not too far from here). Not far from here is the 11-metre high blue, pink and yellow gate for which the neighborhood is famous. But it seems strangely alien, out of place.

More in line with the overall vibe of the city is the gray and somewhat plain gate that stands watch over the entrance just across from the train station. It's hardly Chinese at all, save for the inscription, yet it feels more at home in this homogenous city. It's this gate that you head under before crossing the street back towards the metro, feeling just a little down. But forget it, you tell yourself as you board the train. It's Chinatown.

Peace through Face-sitting

2011-05-31T10:52:00.003+08:00

Roman Shusterman in Union Square

I didn't know what to make of this guy I met a couple of weeks ago, walking around Union Square on a Friday Afternoon holding a sign reading "Peace through Face-sitting". Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked him what his deal was. His name is Roman Shusterman, and apparently he wanders New York City promoting world peace by getting women to sit on his face. You might think the link between these two things is tenuous, if indeed there is one at all, but no, Roman has it all spelled out at his blog, Humanitarian Socialist Party : http://nopolicestatecoalition.blogspot.com/

Roman Is Face-Sat

The blog also contains scores of essays, ranging on far- reaching subjects such as the role of gender roles in society, Socialism, Pacifism, Conspiracy, Terrorism Plots, Obama, the Middle East, speculations on the 2012 election, and Shusterman's own 2007 candidacy for the position of "King of the World".

Also, there are films and photos of Shusterman as he travels promoting his Peace through Face-Sitting agenda. On this day,Shusterman was having little luck, but finally managed to coax the young lady pictured above onto his face for a fleeting squat.

Even if public Queening isn't your thing, Humanitarian Socialist Party makes for hours of interesting reading.

mandatory blackmail post

2011-05-25T23:05:00.000+08:00

At my friend R.'s place in New Haven, Connecticut, where the plan was that he would drive me up to Western Massachusetts in the Afternoon. Yesterday, however, R. informed me that my ride was contingent upon my producing a column of some sort. Due to an unfortunate incident involving Craigslist some years back, R.is legally prohibited from using the computer for activities not contributing directly to his thousand+ hour community service sentence. However, through a bizarre deal cut with the authorities, he is also able to access once daily, for a period not to exceed five minutes, Snarky Tofu. It is for this reason that R. has become my most loyal reader.

The topic of Today's column: The 2003 film Daredevil, starring Ben Affleck, deserves re-evaluation.

(To avoid potential dismantlement, readers of Snarky Tofu expecting the usual tale of daring-do, or the increasingly almost as usual semi-snarky on social observation, or even the slightly less usual somewhat serious news-type article may wish to steer clear of this one.)

In the long line of comic-to-film adaptations that have failed to live up to the expectations of comic fans, 2003's Daredevil starring Ben Affleck often tops the list. Indeed, it is often maligned as being one of the worst comic-to-screen adaptations this side of Rogerman’s camp and decidedly crap-tacular 1994 Fantastic Four, a clip of which I've placed here to waste 2 minutes of R., legally alloted internet time.

Like many comic fans, I saw Daredevil when it first came out in 2003, and like many my reaction was largely negative. My complaints with the film were similar to that of most other viewers. Ben Affleck's acting, cheesy action scenes, a Daredevil costume that looked like it’d been cobbled together from naugihide scraps, a two-dimensional script, and also Ben Affleck's acting.

Like most comic book fans, I promptly expunged the film from my memory, whipping it out only as a reference point for other movies (“Thor wasn’t Iron man good, but it wasn’t Daredevil-level suck either”)

A couple of hours ago I was flipping through the channels at my mom’s house – TV is kind of an odd thing to me, living most of my time without one – and the movie had just started. I figured I’d flip past it after a couple of minutes, but wound up watching the whole thing.

After a second viewing, I have decided that the film, far from sucking, is actually one of the most true to source material comic book films out there. Affleck's portrayal of Matt Murdock, the blind Justice-obsessed lawyer, was in line with my memory of the original comics. The films pacing was tight, the action scenes taken directly from the better issues of Daredevil, and the romance between Affleck and J. Garner's rich-girl-turned-assassin Elektra was done in a way that was tasteful and not overbearing. The choice of African American actor Michael Clark Duncan as crime-lord The Kingpin (who in the original series was white), while widely panned in 2003, turned out to be forward thinking. Duncan's admirable portrayal of Wilson Fisk (AKA the Kingpin) gave license to studios to break the color barrier in future comic book movies, a genre typically offering fewer roles for actors of color than to their white counterparts.

Colin Farrell's portrayal of psychotic assassin Bullseye was an excellent choice as well, and scenes such as this (the middle one which seems to have not made final edit) and others with Farrell alone made the movie worth watching

A well written story arc, characters more intriguing than those in many later comic movies, and a satisfying conclusion (one promising potential sequel that alas, never materialized) places 2003's Daredevil, in this writer's opinion, well in the upper echelon of comic book movies.

Thank you for your time. Can we leave now?

Something like an Air Raid

2011-05-17T23:37:00.003+08:00

So I’m in this coffee shop in Lewes, little beach-side town in Delaware close to where my mom lives, having a coffee. It’s raining outside, and I’m wondering if the woman who’d been working here last week when I first dropped by has a shift today because she seemed to be flirting with me.

I’m having an espresso con pana, trying to edit a story for Destination Belize down to word count when this elderly couple walks in and sits at the table next to me. The man starts reading a newspaper, and the woman, she starts blowing her nose into a napkin. This goes on for a minute, then another, then another. She’s blowing, aggressively, like she’s trying to dislodge a marble that’s been up there for decades. Every few blasts she looks into the napkin and says something like, “Jesus” or “I’m really clogged up today” to her husband (who pays her no mind) before continuing with her honking.

The woman is maybe three feet away from me, and listening to the thin, shrill blast of her continuing struggle with whatever’s crawled up her left nostril to die is getting to me. I’m thinking

Lady, couldn't you go into the bathroom to do that?

And

Can I lend you an icepick?

But I don't say anything. The cream on top of my con panna has clotted, I don’t feel like touching it. The sun is coming out, and anyway, my editing is going nowhere. I take off to explore Greater Lewes, leaving the man still reading his paper, the woman still trying to expunge the contents of her sinuses into the same paper napkin.

New York City Walking Meditation: Buildings and Sky

2011-05-09T00:58:00.001+08:00

Photos taken during 2-day walking meditation of New York City

Air Travel in a Post Bin Laden World

2011-05-05T20:21:00.002+08:00

Air Travel in a Post-Bin Laden World

or:

Ding-Dong the Beast is Dead!

I was in Playa Del Carmen when the news broke. Osama Bin Laden had been assassinated in Pakistan, shot in the head by Navy Seals during what must have been a daring raid. America’s long national nightmare of fear and paranoia could now come to an end.

The next morning I headed to Cancun Airport on the 6 AM shuttle, allowing plenty of time to clear security. I was unprepared for the brave new world that awaited.

The first thing I noticed was that life-size cardboard cutouts featuring stern faced uniformed guards warning passengers to dispose of all liquids and gels had been replaced with hand-made signs reading “Water? Toothpaste? Sunscreen? Bring it on!”

A few passengers at the security counter were chatting happily with the guards. I started unlacing my boots.

“No need, Amigo.” One guard yelled cheerfully. “Didn’t you hear the news? El Diablo es Muerte! The world is safe again.”

Another guard waved me through the powered-down X-ray machine and offered me a shot of tequila. A recorded voice came over the loudspeaker:

“In the interest of airline security...”

but was cut off by Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing “Relax! Don’t Do it!”

At the boarding gate was a hand-written note taped to the counter that read “Take off at ten. Seat yourselves.”

I boarded, along with a few dozen other passengers, and we were soon airborne. When we'd reached cruising altitude a drink cart rolled down the aisle. With no flight attendant in sight, passengers began helping themselves to free liquor. Laughter came from the cockpit, the door of which swung open lazily. Despite the increasingly wobbly motion of the plane, everyone seemed to be in a fine mood.

Halfway across the gulf, we hit some turbulence. The pilot, singing a karaoke duet of Margaritaville with a stewardesses, didn’t seem to notice. A few minutes later the PA crackled to life.

“Hello folks, this is your co-pilot speaking. Call me Larry. Everything is fine, and the weather in Detroit is…um…hold on. Dude. What’s the weather in…(laughter)…Steve? Mandy? Jesus, get a room! Uh, hello again, folks. The weather in Detroit is nipples.”

The plane continued over the gulf with occasional squeals and sounds of bottles clinking coming over the still-open PA system for about half an hour until someone shut it off.

Somewhere over Atlanta the PA came back on.

“Uh, hi again folks, this is Larry again. Any of you ever land a plane? Steve passed out, and I uh, probably shouldn’t try to land this thing in my condition.”

A stewardess stumbled from the cockpit, lipstick smeared and blouse hastily mis-buttoned.

“Land a plane? Anyone?” She asked hopefully.

From row eight a man with a dark complexion raised his hand.

“I flew with the Egyptian Air Force for sixteen years.”

“Tag, you’re it,” said the stewardess, dragging the Egyptian towards the cockpit. “You’re the soberest person on the plane.”

“In my faith, alcohol is forbidden.”

“Super! Because Steve and Larry are both just blotto. The last thing either of them should be doing is flying a plane, let alone trying to land one!”

The two entered the cockpit, and within a moment the plane straightened out. An hour later after a textbook-perfect landing in Detroit I disembarked and collected my bag from the luggage carousel.

Inside the customs hall pandemonium reined. The hall had been turned into a makeshift disco by several hundred uniformed soldiers who were dancing, drinking openly and shouting USA! USA!

I ask a red-head lieutenant what the hell was going on.

“Didn’t you hear?” He screamed. “It’s over! We won! Yesterday I was on patrol in Kandahar with my squad, and bam, this morning they put us all on planes coming home.”

Before I knew what was happening, the lieutenant had thrown an arm around my neck and pressed his lips against mine. His uniform was still dusty, and his body warm. Nobody seemed to notice us. There was a lot of that sort of thing going on in the customs hall. After a minute, he broke off the embrace.

“Don’t tell my boyfriend,” he said before melting into the uniformed crowd.

In the ecstatic mayhem drunken customs officials had given up the notion of orderly repatriation.

“Go through, go through,” one shouted over the noise of fifty boom-boxes. “And no illegally sneaking in if you aren’t from here. America is the land of opportunity! Fuck yeah!”

With 20 minutes to spare I hit the TSA line for my connecting flight. The security table was lined with cardboard boxes stuffed with all manner of confiscated items now being hawked back to the public by soon-to-be unemployed security agents.

“Swiss Army Knife, eight blades, toothpick and corkscrew! First five dollars gets it!”

“12-ounce tube of icy-hot sex lube! Two dollars! Sex Lube only two dollars!”

In the center of the security area two TSA guards were handing out some popcorn they’d just microwaved inside a nearly-new full-body scanner.

“Six-freaking-minutes was all it took,” one said. “Jesus, can you believe we were actually sticking people inside those things?”

The flight to New York was brief and steady, the pilots having sobered up after the initial wave of euphoria. As we approached the city of my birth I scanned the Manhattan skyline. I still haven’t gotten used to the Twin Towers’ absence.

But now, after nearly ten years, two (or is it three?) wars which have extinguished and otherwise shattered millions of lives on all sides and have driven the United States into a state of economic collapse from which recovery is mathematically impossible…now, finally, with the biblically-righteous eye for an eye death of the one single individual human being responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001 and all ensuing suffering around the globe…now at last, America and the world can return to peace, harmony and prosperity.

On this first evening of newfound peace I exited the airport and hailed a taxi. The driver was a gaunt man, unusually tall with a white turban and long gray beard. He turned the radio to a rock and roll station, and I heard the unmistakable opening drumbeat and scream of Sympathy for the Devil. As we drove along the highway facing the New York Skyline, I could hear him singing along in heavily accented English under his breath

“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste…”

© Joshua Samuel Brown
New York City, May 2, 2011

Avoiding Adventure

2011-04-29T00:49:00.000+08:00

Sitting in an air conditioned room sipping horchata. Not trekking through the jungle and climbing the mighty pyramid at Xunantunich. Sometimes the secret to a long life is knowing when it's time to stay. It's 90 degrees out, and my body just said fuck it. Yesterday's mountain bike ramble through the jungle at Black Rock followed by disc golf at Trek Stop, the previous day's jungle hike and extended river swim, the trek from Dangriga to Cayo the day before that...time to start acting your age, old man, at least until a reason for exertion presents itself. For I have already climbed said mighty pyramid, declared my love for it, and returned with hard copy.

I am traveling with my friend Dave, 17 years younger, who does not yet wish to acknowledge that energy is finite. Why should he? He is also a better disc golf player than me. He is climbing the pyramid now as I type in this cool, cool room. My headache is finally gone, and I am happy.

Busy but relaxing weekend, spent on Sittee River, kayaking and swimming and helping to socialize my friend Dave's (a different Dave) dog, who almost got eaten by a crocodile for his efforts. The doctor flies were fierce, and the water as warm as peed-in bathwater.

I have to belt out a story for Destination Belize at some point, continue with the Buddhist Comedy, and whittle away at my bicycle proposal. Pyramids are old hat. Until I learn how to forget all ambition, I need to stay focused on the new. And with that, spuds, back to work. Until we meet in cooler climes, Snar-T out.

Easter Weekend in Belize

2011-04-22T12:37:00.001+08:00

Image from www.stanncreek.com

It is Ten PM in Dangriga and the streets are alive with drumming and music. Down the street Garifuna men are drumming not too far from the Drums of our Fathers statue. This is Dangriga's best known Non-Human landmark, and I say this because Dangriga is not a town of statues and museums (although there are some) but of characters, human landmarks.

Some are well known: Pen Cayetano, perhaps Belize's best known graphic artist, who runs a shop and gallery with his wife Ingrid in the western part of town. Austin Rodriguez, the venerable drum maker who carves traditional Garifuna drums under a slanted thatched palapa on the seashore just east of the traditional market. Others are known only locally, like Charlie, a laconic older gentleman who spends much of his time by the waterfront keeping an eye on things.

We had a chat early on, Charlie and I. Ill had been written about Dangriga in a guidebook, and Charlie thought I was the author. But it was another writer, another guidebook. I brought the last Lonely Planet to Charlie and let him read what I'd written, and he nodded approvingly. We've gotten on well ever since.

Placencia, which I wrote about unfavorably on my first LP Belize gig, is another story. I've since grown to appreciate the town, and in addition to amending my write-up in the latest edition, I've also awkwardly explained myself to at least a dozen Placencia-ites, including most notably the guy whose house I was living in for 40 days, people who'd taken umbrage with my slagging their town. But as I was saying to a fellow Ex-Texan I met in Placencia the other day, Placencia is to Belize what Austin is to Texas: A cool spot, but hardly indicative of the social norms of the political entity to which it belongs.

Anyway, Dangriga. I like this town more and more every time I come here.

Belmopan is another Belizean town that's grown on me. We drove out there today with two missions: to pick up a dog my friend Dave had adopted from a local privately run humane society. (The dog is named Riley, and he is now lying by my feet), and to get my new passport from the embassy before it closes for the four day easter break. Every guidebook written chides Belmopan a bit as being something of a town waiting to happen, but the place seems to be more happening every time I go there. In the next edition I may have to put in a Belmopan nightlife section. Good food, too.

Tomorrow we're off for the weekend to Sittee River & Hopkins, after which begins my last week in Belize before heading home - wherever that winds up being.

Notes of a grumpy Travel Writer

2011-04-18T23:41:00.000+08:00

So I'm sitting at Above Grounds Coffee in Placencia, eight AM or so, having a morning coffee with my friend Dave. Ice Lattes, five Belize. Two-fifty US, no big deal (as Tommy would say).

I like Above Grounds, not just because Keith makes the best coffee in town, but also because he listens to streaming radio from Alberta Canada. CKUA. It's a good station, playing an eclectic variety of music. Also, It makes me feel good to know that it's 2 degrees Celsius in Medicine Hat.

Two women, backpacker types, mid-twenties, are sitting in the cafe. I make a joke about the DJ's weather prediction: Mild flurries. One of them chuckles politely, but doesn't make eye contact. It seems the ladies do not wish to strike up conversation.

Keith hands Dave and I our beverages, making a comment about my work. Keith does this occasionally.

"When does the guidebook come out?"

"eh, I turned the copy in about a month ago. Figure this summer sometime."

"Lonely Planet Belize..." he says, letting the words hang in the air pregnant with wonder.

The girls look up from their coffees. No surprise. Suddenly, I am "interesting".

"Oh, you write for Lonely Planet...that's my dream job." The one with blonde hair says. "How can I get a job like that?"

"er..."

"There must be a lot of competition, all those backpackers."

"Well, there is a writing component involved."

She seems slightly deflated. A bit more chatter occurs between us, nothing of substance. Together we learn the chance of snow in Medicine Hat has risen.

Postscript: Far be it from me to leave you, dear reader, with a bitter taste in your mouth. Please enjoy this photo collage from last week's enforced relaxation trip to Thatch Caye. This was the closest thing to work I allowed myself to do in four days. A record for me.

Battling Neptune to a draw

2011-04-17T10:40:00.002+08:00

Oh yes, I know. Lazy, lazy travel writer I am, with over a week between posts and the last one was actually something I wrote up months ago. I have a good excuse, friends and 80 Snarky Tofu followers (I suspect there is some overlap here). You see, like Caligula before me, I can now lay claim to having battled NEPTUNE himself. And not once but twice.

The second battle was epic; Sir Robin would have been proud (...Gallantly he chickened out....but I got back in). End result: I am now now an experienced scuba diver, if we can stretch the term "experienced" to encompass "one hour and change underwater in 3 dives". Also, I spent an hour training in the pool with my awesome and beautiful dive instructor, Ms. Patty (the PADI instructor) of Splash Dive Center Belize, my instructor and guide the next day in the big blue. Despite my first-dive chicken, Patty swears I have potential, and is encouraging me to go for my PADI certificate. I'm not sure if I will do this. My relationship with the ocean is at best tenuous. From my perspective this is reasonable. The ocean has been trying to kill me for years.

You could say the sea and I have an historical enmity.

Anyway, the diving story is on the way (thinking "Virgin in the Dive Zone" as a title. What do you think? Too cliché? Been done?), but you'll have to read it as Destination Belize as they've commissioned the story in advance.

However, I'll be writing up the story of my first bout with Neptune, a kayak through rough seas to see a rare bird sanctuary in the Belizean Cayes the next couple of days. This was part of last weeekend's Thatch Caye extreme relaxation tour.

But now I'm going to sleep, because everything seems to be swaying back and forth.

King Neptune has let me live, but not before knocking me around. I imagine it would have been much worse if not for the call for mercy I made to Matsu before heading in. She's generally much kinder to me.

The Turtle Midwife of Perhentian Kecil

2011-04-08T05:41:00.001+08:00

(In August of last year I spent ten days traveling through Malaysia for Lonely Planet Magazine, having a series of adventures which would eventually be incorporated into the article Perfect Trip: Singapore & Malaysia. Though the Turtle Midwife only figures in briefly in my Best for Islands Adventures, I felt that his story might be good for a blog post.

The magazine looks great; excellent travel stories by myself and other writers, not to mention some amazing photographs by some top photographers.

Without Further Adieu, Snarky Tofu presents a bit of travel levity after the last post (which was heavy by necessity):

The Turtle Midwife of Perhentian Kecil

Perhentian Kecil native Ismail Bin Yakonb, called Pakdin by locals, has seen something few people can lay claim to – the sight of newly hatched Greenback turtles taking their first tentative steps towards the ocean. The old man points to a sign reading please stay off the beach between 3pm and 7am.

“Sometimes I have to remind people. They are very curious to see the baby turtles. Most guests to the island call this place Turtle Beach.”

The sign is posted just before a patch of sand containing numbered wooden markers, perhaps 80 all told. The numbers represent the eggs of specific turtles, dug up by the Terenganu department of fisheries and brought to and reburied on this particular beach, where they will have their best chance of survival.

Most of the turtles will hatch at night, dig through the sand and make their way to the sea unseen, leaving behind only barely discernable trails in the sand as evidence of their new existences. Sometimes, however, a turtle will emerge in Pakdin’s presence. When this occurs, Pakdin takes his job as caretaker to the next level.

“It’s difficult for a newborn turtle to survive, so when I see one as it emerges I’ll take it and put it into an incubator to grow a bit larger before releasing it into the sea. It gives the baby turtles a better chance at long term survival.”

Pakdan couldn’t even guess how many turtles he’s mid-wifed. “I’ve witnessed more turtles hatching than I can count. This year alone we are up to 247 clutches of between 80-100 eggs on this beach alone. So it’s been a good year for the turtles.”

"The Perfect Trip: Singapore & Malaysia" is online at http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20110329-the-perfect-trip-singapore-and-malaysia

In Belize, the Chinese are on Strike

2011-04-06T09:20:00.003+08:00

This is a profoundly difficult entry to write. The topic is hardly the stuff of a sunny travel blog, and the possibility that some may take umbrage is real. But as news from Belize has a way of not making it out of this beautiful if largely ignored nation of 300,000 souls, I need to risk offending a few friends for the benefit of telling a larger story affecting many others.

For those unfamiliar with Belize, some background is in order.

Belize is a multicultural nation. A variety of ethnicities - Garifuna, Maya, Mestizo, Creole, Mennonite, East Indian, North American, Chinese - form the county’s unique cultural quilt. The latter group, Han Chinese, are the smallest percentage-wise, yet they operate (by a very large margin) the majority of Belize’s grocery stores, as well as an inordinate percentage of the country’s restaurants and fast-food outlets.

Some Belizeans express feelings that Chinese domination of this industry comes at the expense of other ethnic groups. Others say that the business success of the Chinese is well deserved. Speaking with Belizeans, I’ve variations of the following sentiment many times.

“They get up early in the morning, work all day, an don’t close until way after dark. No wonder they rich!”

If there’s any one racial stereotype that nearly everyone in Belize agrees on, it’s that the Chinese work long hours.

Knowing this will help readers unfamiliar with Belizean society understand how stark the following sight was:

At ten AM on Monday morning, each and every Chinese-owned business in the village of Placencia was shuttered and closed. My first thought was that it might be a Chinese holiday, before realizing that in Belize, Chinese people almost never take holidays. Certainly not during the tail-end of tourism’s high season.

I headed to a café to get online. Through a Facebook contact I’ve never met personally but (Facebook) befriended, I learned that a general strike had been called among the Chinese community in Belize.

His post read as follows

“The Chinese community nationwide is on "strike." They have closed their businesses in protest of increased crime against them. Two Chinese businesswomen were murdered over the weekend, and a 16 year old Chinese boy from Dangriga remains hospitalized at the KHMH (a hospital in Belize city ~ ed.) after his parent’s establishment was robbed at gunpoint two weeks ago. All Chinese owned and operated businesses are shuttered up.”

The situation in Placencia mirrored that of nearly every town in the country. From Punta Gorda to Corozal, Caye Caulker to Cayo, nearly every Chinese-owned business had closed down. Average Belizeans, many of whom shop daily or every few days for food and beverages, had no choice but to sit up and take notice. Here in Placencia, the choice of shops to buy food, beer & smokes had gone from around ten to just one.

It was, I later learned, the second such strike in twelve months. A year ago, following a particularly brutal murder of a Chinese youth, Chinese owned businesses had closed for a day. It was widely assumed that this strike would last longer.

The people running the shops weren’t going to using their unexpected free time to hit the beaches. They were gathering in Belize City, illegally and en-masse, to make their collective voice heard.

Being a Chinese speaker living in Belize, I find myself personally affected by this. During my many visits here, I’ve became acquainted with Chinese and Taiwanese workers and business owners throughout the country. One of the most common complaints I’ve heard from these friends and acquaintances is of not feeling safe, of feeling as if they are being specifically targeted by criminals. There is also a strongly held belief that the police are either unable – or unwilling – to provide adequate protection.

The spiraling crime rate in Belize, brought on in part by unemployment, inflation, and substance abuse, is a regular topic of conversation in all levels of society. For members of Belize’s Chinese community, inordinately victims of crime, particularly armed robbery, the growing crime rate is especially troublesome.

Further exacerbating a common perception of law enforcement as being lax is a perceived low rate of prosecution for violent crime, leading many in the country to believe that the judiciary needs to take a more direct role. This sentiment was repeated by a spokesperson from Taiwan who took part in the rally held in Belize city, who called for stronger penalties for all violent crime. In Belize city, the mood was ugly as Chinese merchants and non-Chinese supporters marched through the streets carrying pictures of the murdered women and empty coffins, demanding that those responsible be brought to justice.

Their sentiments are by no means limited to the Chinese community. Later in the day, I walked around Placencia and spoke to some people working in the village, some of who live in the nearby village of Seine Bight (a small Garifuna village a few miles out of town). Nearly to a person, I heard were the same opinion, that crime needs to be dealt with, and that the actions of the Chinese community, though an inconvenience to many who have come to depend on them, are both justified and righteous. Many people also expressed and admiration at the unity of the Chinese as a group, and their willingness to sacrifice revenue to make themselves heard.

The only grocery store in Placencia not owned by Chinese is Wallens, and business was booming. But there was no gloating from behind the counter, no Schadenfreude at the financial boon brought on by the self-imposed closing of all competitors. Quite the opposite, in fact

“Everyone in Belize has the right to do business without having to fear for their lives!” The woman who runs the store said. “We need to re-introduce hanging for the crime of murder.”

Other people I spoke with echoed the sentiment. One Garifuna woman half-jokingly suggested that some kind of Islamic law would be a good thing to combat crime.

"But not the part against drinking beer and fooling around outside of marriage," she added. "I don't think we Belizeans could ever go for that, man!"

The newspapers would not come out for another day, so I had no way of knowing what the official line might be. I returned to the coffee shop and went online, both to try to find news and to take the pulse of public opinion from Facebook comments.

There was little in the way of hard news (which travels at the same laid back pace as everything else in Belize), but there was quite a bit of online chatter.

Some commentary was disparaging, with one person expressing the opinion that the Chinese strike would allow “Belizean-owned” shops to finally make some money. Another stated that were it Black citizens engaged in an illegal protest, the police would be using rubber bullets and tear gas, not stern language, to break the gathering up.

But such voices were in the distinct minority. By and large, those commenting on the issue expressed sympathy with the Chinese cause, and were especially vocal about the toll that a rising crime rate was taking on Belizeans of all races, colors and creeds. Reading such comments, I was reminded again that despite growing economic disparity (something hardly unique to any nation), Belize remains a nation with deeply rooted egalitarian sentiment.

Hours later I passed by one of the shops in Placencia I frequent. The workers there speak Mandarin well (a rarity; most shops in Belize are run by Cantonese immigrants). One of the workers also speaks decent Spanish, and his English is laced with distinctly Belizean slang and patois.

This particular shop has established a good rapport with other members of the community. It’s wide front stoop is a popular hang-out spot for local men to come and have a beer and a cigarette in the afternoon and evening. Far from expressing disdain for these men (a sentiment I’ve heard enough from Chinese working in Belize), the workers in this shop sometimes join them for a smoke, exchanging jokes in a mixture of English, Spanish & Creole.

This night, of course, the shop was closed. But the workers were outside, unloading goods from their pickup truck. They’d just returned from Belize City – a grueling three hour drive each way – and were exhausted. Normally loquacious with me, their newly-made odd white friend who speaks with them in Mandarin about old familiar places back home in the Pearl River Delta, tonight they were quiet. I asked how things had gone in Belize City, and Xiaomeng (the newest arrival, who has been in Belize less than 6 months) sighed.

“I don’t know,” She said. “I’m just tired. I’m so tired. I didn’t eat today. I just want to go to sleep.”

I got the feeling that she’d spent much of the drive reconsidering her decision to move to Belize.

I asked Jiaming, the polyglot and most senior of the workers, if there would be another strike tomorrow.

“Let’s talk tomorrow,” he said. “I’m just really tired now.”

For over a month I’ve interacted with this group of people, watching them as they work 14 hour days, seven days a week, keeping their store open 10, 20 minutes after closing time because there are still customers dithering over a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter. I have never once heard them complain, even knowing that, were they to share such a complaint with in Chinese nobody would understand. But tonight was different. Tonight they were genuinely tired. More than this, they seemed worried.

As I rode home in the darkness, it occurred to me just how significant their actions were. Belize’s Chinese community aren’t merely a minority, they are a tiny, easily identified minority. Furthermore, the Chinese are not, as an ethnic group, generally prone to staging demonstrations that might draw attention to themselves. Growing up as a Jew in New York, we held yearly marches on behalf of our brethren in then-Soviet Russia. I can recall many other instances of similar gathering of ethnicities in America – American Irish supporting their cause in Northern Ireland, African Americans protesting any number of cases of police brutality over the decades.

But for the Chinese in Belize to gather in a show of force – and what’s more, one of which they are bearing the full economic cost – indicates that something is very troubling indeed.

On Tuesday the strike entered its second day, and shops in the village (and presumably the rest of the country) were again shuttered. I met my friends in front of their closed shop, and together with their Belizean workers, we went swimming for several hours. Xiaomeng told me it was the first time since arriving in Belize that she’d found the time to swim in the ocean. Jiaming didn’t know whether or not the strike would continue a third day.

“I am waiting for a call from the other members of the committee. When they decide, we will re-open our shop.”

Just before sundown, a few of the Chinese owned businesses in the village had re-opened.

Some resources pertaining to this story:

http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=19357
News 7 Belize report on the initial murders and ensuing protest in Belize City, as well as an interview with Edmund Quan, president of the Belize Chinese Association.

http://www.amandala.com.bz/index.php?id=11081
Article from Amandala Newspaper dealing with both the protest and government response.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ofY_tJZHZ4
You Tube video of Monday’s protest in Belize City

Cinema-imitating-nature observation again

2011-04-04T02:16:00.001+08:00

I've been spending time with the iguanas lately; there are a few of them, at least three that I've seen so far. They prefer papaya to pineapple. Iggy is the one with the stumpy tail, and by far the largest. Lucille is the skinny one. I don't know why I call her Lucille. I've just decided on the name. And the third one stays downstairs, but I believe he comes up on the porch when I'm not looking. I'm enjoying observing them, trying to figure out what goes on their minds. In the mornings when I wake up Stumpy is usually waiting for me on the railing, and Lucille will scamper down from the roof gutter when she hears me open the door. The sound of the door must mean breakfast for them.

They don't flee when I approach, but they don't let me get closer than two arm's length. Lucille likes to hang out on the railing. I lay a trail of fruit chunks on it for her. Iggy, far larger than Lucille, is often on the floor of the porch, so I toss chunks in his direction. He has yet to catch one in mid-air, or even make the attempt. Iguanas are not dogs.

While researching Belize 3, I wrote an essay called Night of the Living Howler Monkeys, speculating that George Romero used the sounds of Howler Monkeys - either as inspiration, or even perhaps, directly - for the groaning of the zombie hordes in his early Dead films.

I think the sight of an eating iguana may have guided the visions of another George - Lucas, this time - in his bringing to life the mastication techniques of one of his most visually iconic creations, Jabba the Hut.

When Iggy eats his fruit chunk (Lucille is more ladylike, smaller, taking smaller chunks), he turns it around in his mouth, until it's lengthwise. I'd imagine if he had some sort of prehensile tail like Jabba he'd use that. When the geometry is correct, he swallows it down, the sides of his mouth expanding in a wide grin that makes him look downright enraptured.

Maybe I'll film it tomorrow and post it. I've been disinclined to record things recently, more interested in experiencing without the buffer.

Off to the Russians.

My BBC Article out at last

2011-04-01T01:31:00.003+08:00

The perfect trip: Singapore and Malaysia
...An article that I researched in August of last year and spent the first half of September writing and tweaking, has been published. The print version in Lonely Planet Magazine, is available in finer bookstores and magazine stands near you, and by "you" I mean probably people not in Belize, which is where I am, because Belize seems to have a shortage of finer bookstores and magazine stands ("where can I get a copy of Lonely Planet Belize" being a common question Belize people ask me, to which I generally just shrug, the actual answer being "not in Belize"). However, the article itself, without all the tediously colorful and extraordinarily dramatic photographs beautifully done by famed photographer Pete Seaward (Charles Emerson Winchester III to my Hawkeye Pierce; take that however you like) is online here

I have two stories from that trip that didn't make it into the magazine - "The Turtle Midwife of Perhentian Kecil" and "The Choosing of Hawker Centers is a Serious Matter" which will make an appearance somewhere, shortly.

For now, enjoy the original story. Buy the magazine to check it out in all it's technicolor glory.

Relaxing is not something I'm good at.

2011-03-30T02:51:00.000+08:00

Lonely Planet Belize (fourth edition) now turned in, I am doing something called "relaxing".
Having turned in all major files on Thursday, and cleaned up the minor front-end matter by Saturday, I found myself waking up on Sunday with the question "what now" hanging over my head.

A line from the song "Feeling Groovy" (AKA the 59th Street Bridge Song) comes to mind.

...I got no deeds to do
no promises to keep...

I've developed a ritual of sorts. After putting the coffee on (addiction creates its own hierarchy of ritual) I cut up some fruit and go on the porch, where my iguana friend is waiting. Not the iguana pictured below, whose name is Iggy, but another one. I think it is Iggy's girlfriend. Iggy will eat food I put out for him, but he won't let me get close enough to feed him. His girlfriend seems to have gotten used to me, and I can get close enough to her to slide over a mango slice or two. I enjoy watching her eat. She, in return, is helping me to slow down my brain. Develop a more reptilian mind, if you like.

Reptilian is a loaded term, denoting cold, sadistic even. This I believe to be false. If anyone has never heard of a reptile behaving in an intentionally cruel fashion, feel free to set me straight. I once had a pet corn snake called Ozrick, and watched him eat many mice. His method was always methodical, designed to get the job done as efficiently as possible.

I have watched many a cat kill; geckos, mice, bugs, their method often designed to prolong the suffering of their prey. Yet the term "mammalian" or "feline" is not interchangeable with cruel.

How did I get on this subject anyway? Relaxing. Morning ritual. Yes.

Following my morning silent discourse with my Iguana friend, I have coffee and then try to relax. Yesterday I relaxed by crafting a 1500 word proposal for a documentary film. Today I will relax by reading, cleaning the house, finding out about renewing my passport, and perhaps sending out a few story queries prior to doing some light adventuring in Belize.

Like I said.Relaxing is not something I'm good at. But all is Groovy.

Four Beasts in Belize

2011-03-29T05:21:00.001+08:00

Readers,
Short break from writing, book all done. Enjoy the pix, more soon.
JSB

Iggy, who lives on my roof and eats fruit I set out for him.

A Coatamundi who rides the shoulders of a Placencia local. (both name unknown)

A bird on a wire.

A Butterfly, also name unknown.

I bought Zoogz Rift a falafel...

2011-03-24T05:41:00.002+08:00

I just got word from my friend Howard Enis that Zoogz Rift has passed away. Complications from diabetes, from which he suffered for at least a decade.

You may not be aware of Zoogz Rift, but if you'e a fan of music, weirdness, or - strangely enough - pro wrestling, you should be.

I was introduced to Rift's insanely cool music - the term Zappa-esque is often thrown out there, and I don't think Zoogz minded the comparison much - while in College at SUNY Brockport. His music was a regular feature on my radio show, Sonic Attack with L. Ron Cretin.

From the moment I found his albums, half the song titles scratched out with a black sharpie, the words DO NOT PLAY scrawled in small but authoritative letters next to song titles like ISLAND OF LIVING PUKE (which begins with the words oh fuck, not another zoogz rift album,) YOU FUCKED UP, and about a hundred more, I knew I'd found a kindred soul.

Funny thing about Zoogz was that he also did some incredibly sweet songs, and these inevitably stood out among the other tracks like a Mormon couple at a CBGBs matinée. Check out his version of Annie's Song ("You fill up my senses..."), done completely without sarcasm, or Macarthur Park, one of the finest versions of that strange seventies standard about cakes being left out in the rain I've yet to hear.

At some point the station manager told me to stop playing Zoogz Rift on the air all together.
Sensing that the records would soon vanish, I acted preemptively and took them myself.

Actually, I'd probably been exposed to Zoogz years before, in childhood (though I've only became
aware of this recently, thanks to the miracle of the interwebs, when somebody posted this truly ancient video clip of Zoogz and his band playing on The Uncle Floyd Show. (There's some sort of issue with legal technicalities and what not, but the youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE8d6yUpDG0 might get you there). Thing is, Uncle Floyd was a UHF program out of New Jersey that made it about as far as Staten Island that I watched pretty much every day when I was a kid. So the chances that I saw this particular broadcast on a grainy black&white TV with a coat-hanger antenna before I was old enough to understand it are better than average.

Years later. Like, lots of years later, I somehow got in contact with Zoogz Rift through a Frank Zappa newsgroup that my friend Cliff Heller used to post on. This was in the days when the internet was still mostly text, and I wound up writing Zoogz some bizarre tale about my life in Taiwan and how I used his music to frighten kindergarten students into submission. Pork was somehow involved, but pork is often involved in Taiwan. This led to a series of correspondences culminating in my brother Seth ad I driving out to his house on my next trip to LA. We went out to lunch. I bought him a falafel and a diet soda, because he was suffering from diabetes. Or maybe he just liked Nutrasweet. I don't know.

Still years later, I mail-ordered two computer disks containing basically everything he'd ever done, nearly a gigabyte of music that I still haven't fully gone through. I'm listening to it right now on random shuffle, which I think is how Zoogz would have wanted it. There are about 300 songs in my Zoogz folder, a 1-in-300 chance of any given song coming up first.

Coincidence, then, that the first track to come up was "I Cheated Death"?

Here's the first verse:

I cheated death
(nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah)I took another breath
(nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah) I poked the grim reaper
Right in his peepers
And now I'm never gonna die

Fuckin'-A, Zoogz!

Zoogz Rift may have been among the earliest to introduce me to the notion that being a mutant was beautiful. He stands alone as the king-daddy, Mutatis Mutandis, and indeed, he will never die.

Flow like water and not like sand my friend. Give the grim reaper another poke for me, will ya?

"Flow Like Water, Not Like Sand"

~Zoogz Rift, the Liquid Moamo

1953-2011

Every Traveler’s Nightmare…

2011-03-23T10:49:00.000+08:00

T-3 days until deadline.

This is a boxed text I wrote up on a most unusual POI (that's Point of Interest to non-guidebook writers) that I wonder if the editors will let through. I call it

Every Traveler’s Nightmare…

It’s ten in the morning, the bus to Guatemala leaves in 20 minutes, and you have to make a desperate choice: Cup of coffee or sexy lingerie? It’s every traveler’s nightmare. But if the folks at Peek-A-Boo (2nd floor 13 Burns Ave; Coffee Drinks from BZ$3, Smoothies from Belize $5, underwear in all price ranges; [h]7am-6pm Mon-Sat) have their way, it’s one no one passing through San Ignaciao need face again. Because Peek-a-Boo is the only combination coffee shop / lingerie store in Belize (maybe even the world). Here, customers can enjoy strong espresso based drinks (and smoothies) and shop for sexy undergarments (and bathing suits, handcrafted jewelry and more ) simultaneously.
Come for a latte. Leave with a thong.

Stuck in the mud

2011-03-18T02:36:00.003+08:00

Stuck in the Mud

This photo of our pickup truck stuck in the mud has nothing to do with this entry, which is more or less an anguished cry from the pre-deadline moments of a man watching the world end on a 10" screen as he types about places like the road from Yaxha to Nakum (where this photo was taken; it took 20 minutes and 6 people to get the truck out), other doomed civilizations, and so forth.

Fun fact: If the Maya had abandoned the cities of Tikal, Caracol, Yaxha and Nakum due to a nuclear meltdown rather than famine, breakdown of social order caused by overpopulation, poor resource allocation and overall shitty choices imposed by an entrenched leadership on the populace, my trip to those cities would not have been nearly as pleasant.

As I walked through these and other ruins, the New York, Vatican City, Las Vegas and Los Angeles of their day, my only worries were snakes and falling off temples. In two thousand years, whoever is left to walk around the ruins of cities abandoned after nuclear accidents will have different concerns all together if they have the misfortune to be carbon-based life forms. First aid kit, check. Geiger counter, check.

I will write up the adventure after deadline. It was amazing. But now back to work. Editing. Marie Sharp has done her interview and it looks GREAT! Marie Sharp makes the best hot sauce in THE WORLD!

I must run. There is a dog waiting for me. I don't know how these things happen.

No One is Sleeping

2011-03-15T16:08:00.000+08:00

Crickets and Geckos are competing chirps, and the moon is squeezing through narrow metal slats. I could close them, but why bother? No One is Sleeping, not in the village, not on the Peninsula, maybe not in the world, great parts of which are preparing for the cutting room floor. Why should I sleep? Dogs are grumbling, and people with them. This is not a quiet night, even though the wind refuses to howl.

Here's a scene for you: Godzilla pops out of Tokyo Bay, surveys the scene and thinks "No way are you people pinning this on me." Heads back out towards the sea. "Thanks, but no thanks."

Too cynical? Not cynical enough? Fuck it, I'm barely lucid. You'll get your travel copy soon enough. Wait for it. Be patient.

Editing a guidebook while a vast swath of the world with which I feel a kinship seems to be crumbling. Kind of feels like...jerking off while the city I love burns outside my window. What was Nero Doing again? Surely fiddling was just a metaphor.

Shot off a few letters earlier, seeing if there was anything I can do to help. It struck me that at this point writers and non-speakers of Japanese are not going to be much help. Diggers need to be fed. Corpse-carriers need to be fed. Heard from a friend of mine in Tokyo that the shelves are running dry. In Tokyo.
I can't even picture it. Maybe in a few months. But not now. Anyway, I have a deadline.

Speaking Chinese comforts me. Speaking to Chinese people makes me feel like I belong to a tribe, or the closest thing I've ever found. Does that sound funny, coming from a white boy? I worked hard to insert myself into this tribe (biggest on the planet, last time I checked, even if my acceptance is only honorary and half imagined. I have lost so much of my tribe this past year, watched so many illusions crumble. More than ever, I appreciate the reality of Chinese culture. It has never let me down, never disappointed me. It is the closest thing to permanence and consistent truth as I have yet to find.

Down at the grocery store buying soy milk a few hours ago, nice bunch of people running it, young Cantonese who do that thing with their Mandarin where it comes out a bit too round, ah's turning into oi's and so forth. We were talking about Japan, and 2012 (both the film and in relation to the end of the Maya calendar), and the coming transition, and alignment of the stars. It was a good conversation, animated, and I stalled for a long time before leaving the shop.

At some point an Asian couple walked. The woman was carrying a baby in a home-made sling. I didn't recognize them. You need to understand that this is a fairly rare thing in Placencia, Belize, because the only Asian people in town I already know, and this couple looked more like tourists. But tired. We kept talking, and at some point my friends the grocery clerks told me that the couple were Japanese. They'd seen them the day before, so they knew.

I felt the need to talk to them, so I went over and asked them where they were from. They didn't have much English, but between them and I we managed to communicate a bit. They were from Osaka. There families were fine. They appreciated my concern, and felt that while things seemed terrible, everything would be OK eventually. I didn't know what else to say, so I bowed. I always feel weird doing stuff like that, but sometimes it seems like the best thing to do. They smiled, and continued their shopping. I did the same, and went back to talking with my friends in Chinese. I felt better. Like I'd done something minor
and stupid but at the same time, something.

Writing about Tikal and editing copy about hotels at the present time seems...petty.

No-one is sleeping tonight. Even the air feels tense and haggard. I don't have more to add at the moment. I have seventy followers on this blog. I find this gratifying. If you like what you read, leave more comments. It keeps me motivated. I get the feeling we may be in for a bumpy ride in the months ahead.

An Easy Edit

2011-03-13T02:47:00.000+08:00

In the final two weeks of write-up for Belize 4. At this stage in the game its almost entirely about editing and reduction. The writing is almost totally done (Where are you, Marie Sharp? Lonely Planet readers desire your wisdom), and now I need to chop bits out to keep the chapters at word count. I generally go a few thousand words over per chapter and then scale back, usually by first combining that which can be combined, then by scaling back on reviews I may have let drag on overlong, and then by deleting whole reviews.

The last option is a last resort, since it basically means admitting that I wasted time and funds doing the review in the first place. This morning, one restaurant made my job easier through a quality I like to call staff dickishness. (Not to be confused with staph infection.)

I'd gone to find breakfast in the town in which I'm doing my write up (a great place about which I've gone way over word count and need to trim the chapter to make room for other stuff). The town has maybe a dozen places to get breakfast, ranging from perfectly acceptable to excellent, and I was checking out a few before deciding where to eat. I stopped by this one - won't mention it by name - and propped my bike against the gate to check out the menu. Hadn't even gotten through the gate before one of the staff told me to move my bike - not particularly harshly, but not particularly nicely either. More or less a "you can't put your bike there, move it out front," sort of thing.

OK, strike one. I moved the bike and went in, still gregarious, and asked the lovely Garifuna woman at the counter what the breakfast specials were.

"Menu's over there..." she said, and pointed to a stack of menus within arms reach. Didn't hand me one. Her voice had about the same welcoming quality as the guy who'd told me to move my bike. Fine, strike two.

Finally, breakfast was overpriced. Strike three. I split and ate at a place down the beach, one small editing decision made for me.

Lesson to be learned, if you happen to be in an industry in which guidebook write-ups are important to you: People walking in off the street are potential customers. Instruct your staff to refrain from giving off the vibe that customers are an imposition. Smiling occasionally isn't a bad idea.

Finally, this is Belize. Lots of petty crime, sorry to say. People like to keep an eye on their bicycles. If you've got a beach-front restaurant with a big picket fence, it really isn't going to hurt business to let customers lean their bikes against it. It only adds to the charmingly ramshackle appearance of your (and every other) place, and anyway, the chances of The Queen making a surprise visit for Gibnut stew is slim at best.

OK, back to editing.

Terra's Design

2011-03-12T00:08:00.000+08:00

Last night was troubling even here in Belize, thunder and lightning and wind that left no doubt that even though they're made of concrete, the house I'm dwelling in still stands on stilts. Woke up, put on the coffee and had a stretch. Logged in for my morning information shower, and noticed immediately a series of stress flutters from back east. My ex in Korea...many friends in Taiwan....strangers from all over, all taking about the earthquake last night in Japan's. 8.9 and Hawaii on alert. Chile, Christchurch, Japan...next up: San Francisco? Los Angeles?

The mantle is shifting, as it does periodically, adjusting course if you like, as it has countless times over billions of years. It's Terra's Design, folks. We're just along for the ride.

This is a fitting counterpoint to the work I am currently doing, writing about Maya ruins I explored last month with the most excellent Ramon Puga, an extraordinary archeologist who nearly destroyed his vehicle bringing us out to the ruins of Nakum, earning himself not just a write-up as a Guatemalan Indiana Jones but also my undying gratitude for introducing me to his world. For the better part of a day we walked among the ruins of cities that were to the Mayans what New York, Beijing, Vatican City and Las Vegas are to the modern world. Seemingly eternal, transitory in actuality.

Story forthcoming, with many photos. OK. I need to get food, slog through my notes, finish editing the Tikal~Flores~El Remate chapter. T-14 days until deadline.

Where Serial Killers go for Breakfast

2011-03-10T23:33:00.003+08:00

(Random Short Story Snippet)

‘That’s the place where serial killers go for breakfast,’ she said as we drove past some greasy spoon dive on Euclid. I’d never eaten there, but I was new to town. As we passed the place she sank down into the passenger side seat of her own car and pulled the brim of her forest green schoolboy cap down over her eyes.

I kept my eyes on the road.

‘You got enemies there?’ I asked

‘I have enemies everywhere. I’m the Mata Hari of Brockland Falls.’

It was the sort of thing Eleanor said a lot, and I would have paid it no mind if it weren’t for how often something she came up with turned out spot on. Once on a clear blue day she’d predicted it’d rain frogs around nightfall. Just after dusk panic struck when storm drains on a stretch of Geneses for half a mile started overflowing toads. Big ones too. Fire department didn’t know what to do, chased them into the reservoir so the bufotoxins leeched into the water supply. It was before my time, but I’d seen it on TV.

‘Food must be good. Serial killers are notoriously culinary. Hannibal Lecter. Ted Bundy.’

‘Don’t mock me.’ Her eyes glaring from under the duck-bill cap near burned me. ‘Ted Bundy was a pedophile, and Hannibal Lecter a fiction. Turn left up by the Sonic. And keep to one lane.’

I’d gotten used to her bossing me around like that. I drove her around a lot.

If you were Eleanor Ready’s friend you understood that you were also her chauffer. She had no license. Lost it years ago after a string of accidents that she only got out of thanks to a clever lawyer who’d convinced the judge she had the mind of a child. But she owned several cars, all well maintained. Her favorite was the 71 Thunderbird with suicide doors. I liked driving that one. Nobody knew where she got the money for the cars, or anything else for that matter. There was a rumor that her father had invented the Styrofoam packing peanut, but no proof. Still, she always had plenty of money.

‘Where are we going again?’ I asked.

‘Hobby plaza. Yarn for Grandma. Same as every Monday.’

I was curious about the serial killer comment, and asked her how she knew. At first she was all quiet, and I could tell I’d hit a sore spot. She licked her lips, tongue darting out of her mouth quick like a lizard.

‘Guy I dated. Brought me there. Three, maybe four times. All the big ones were there, eating eggs with white toast, hash browns. Drinking coffee.’

‘All the big ones…?”

She snorted through her nose imperiously.

‘Arthur Shawcross. Robert Charles Browne. Henry Lee Lewis. Arthur Fish. All the big ones.’

We pulled into the parking lot.

‘Sounds unbelievable. Clientele not murder each other out of professional courtesy?’

She shook her head sadly.

‘You don’t shit where you live.’

Eleanor was unusually quiet as we shopped. We shopped quickly, filling a whole cart with balls of yarn, all one color, black, for her mad grandmother who lived in the attic and knit constantly. The house was filled with sweaters, scarves, ski pants, mittens. All black. It was another thing you got used to, being friends with Eleanor Ready.

We drove back in silence. I felt like I was seeing a side of Eleanor I’d never seen. It was almost like she was being purposefully vulnerable.

‘You want I should take another street back and avoid Euclid all together?’

‘No, that’s all right. I’ll just close my eyes again.’

‘What happened to the guy you dated? The one who took you there?’

‘He joined the Marines,’ she sighed. Made Captain, last I heard.’

Eleanor sunk back down in the seat, and covered her eyes with a black mitten as we drove back past the greasy spoon.

‘What good’s that do you? Keep out Bad Memories?’

‘Self Protection,’ she spoke from a distance, as if waking from a dream. ‘Serial killers are smart, but every one of them is reverse-blind. If you can’t see them, they can’t see you either.’

I shot a glance at the restaurant’s window through the rear view, but didn’t see anyone inside.

‘I’ve never heard of this reverse blindness.’ I said as we pulled into her driveway.

‘Better look it up then. Serial killer's only weakness,’

‘Is that so?’

‘It's a fact.’ She answered. 'Once you see them, you're done for.'

~back to writing about El Remate.

...Quaint and beautiful, the village of El Remate wraps lazily around the northeastern corner of Lago de Pete\'n Itza\'. Eighteen miles south of Tikal, the village is ideally located for those looking to explore Guatemala’s most famous Maya site. It’s also close enough to other ruin sites to make it a viable base for exploration of the area’s wealth of treasures, both natural and historic....

Pecks of a Random Woodpecker

2011-03-07T23:18:00.000+08:00

What's that tap-tap-tapping on my wooden home? Lasts for 2 minutes, never more, then stops. I hear you.

Things to do today: Finish coffee. No, I don't mean "finish coffee," as in "finish the cup presently in front of me" or perhaps "Finish the pot currently on the stove." I mean, "Finish Coffee", as in ...All of it. All the coffee in the world. From Nearby Guatemalan blends to the rare and elusive Taiwan cold press, and everything in between. All of it must be finished. By Me. Today. It will be a Herculean task, and I must be up for it. I need a cup of coffee.

Two: Finish my Southern Belize Chapter, the biggest chapter in my section of the book, covering Toledo and Stann Creek. Edited, proofread, formatted, finished except for minor tweaking.

If only Marie Sharp would call me back...

Three: Soften Contemplation of Kali, destroyer of worlds.

So there's my day, spuds.

Iggy lives here in the house I'm subletting, not so much in as on and around. Iggy is a two-foot long iguana, though he'll be longer when his tail grows back in (it's presently more or less a pink stub). Right now he is skittering across the metal roof, I can hear his claws scraping tin. If I didn't know it was him by the signature patter it would be even more disturbing.

Iggy is good. I ate armadillo in Guatemala last month. It was a disappointment.

OK. Time to work. I have Tiger Blood and Adonis DNA. Also, I am Bi-Winning.

The Serious Travelers

2011-03-04T03:47:00.000+08:00

Earlier today I was breakfasting at The Snack Shack in Punta Gorda (good food, loudest blender in Belize) when two ladies on fully loaded bicycles came by. Jules & Megan, of Perth, Australian, were roughly at the halfway point on their Alaska – Argentina Journey. Their bikes had wide (not quite mountain bike, but almost) tires, front and rear panniers, bags and camping gear. We chatted cycling and traveling in general for a bit, not to mention the excellent 2004 film Perth (I bring this cinematic gem, Singapore's homage to Taxi Driver, every time I meet someone from that city despite the fact that the film neither takes place in nor has anything to do with - except in a most incidental way - Perth itself).

Then they had to motor to catch a boat to another country. I plan to follow their blog.

For the second time in 12 hours, me, the travel writer, felt like a fraud in the presence of real travelers.

The night before I'd seen a van with a sticker reading ALASKA TO ARGENTINA in front of a Chinese Restaurant. Inside the eatery (not worth mentioning, but few and far between are the Chinese joints in Belize worth mentioning) I ran into the owners of the vehicle. Tom & Janet (this is them: www.adventurouspirits.com) were - no surprise here - also driving and camping their way from Alaska to Argentina.

But the cool thing was that this wasn't some trip of a lifetime for either pair, but just another segment in a lifetime of global travel (Tom & Janet were considering China as a next destination, an idea I endorsed wholeheartedly).

Anyway, it occurred to me (and not for the first time) that after all this guidebook travel, I need a vacation.

OK, off to spy on the interns from Maya Mountain Research Farm, currently enjoying a meal at Marian's Bayview Restaurant in Punta Gorda.

Interns on a bender...

Images from Southern Belize

2011-02-25T04:22:00.000+08:00

Taken in Dangriga; only shot in the bunch that isn't from Toledo.

Jorge Coc, the Boatman.

Bird on Rock Reflection

Kitchen at Night

Kitchen, Day.

Jungle Notes

2011-02-24T23:57:00.000+08:00

Busy few days here at Maya Mountain Research Farm, google it if you like, I am too itchy to link. Dispatched five scorpions this morning, sent off a test-file to make sure I grok the formatting changes for the upcoming guide and swept out the yoga room (or what will be the yoga room once the remaining scorpions are gone).

There will be images soon, but bandwidth is limited. So short update, and let's switch tracks, shall we, from the jungles of southern Belize to the inside of Taiwan's finest Jade Museum, with this article, just published at Lonely Planet Online, written half a year ago and half a world away (but just published).

more later...

Heading South with Botfly Boy

2011-02-20T00:02:00.000+08:00

It's been a week between posts, and a long one at that, long on travel, long on strange drama. The last week of research before the sit down, stay still, write and edit to be done (partially, at least) in the jungles of the Toledo district, where there is little outside of farm chores and the occasional interaction with scorpions to distract me from the work at hand. My friend Dave is traveling with me, heading to the farm to begin an extended stint as an intern. Getting into the mood, he has already become infected with a botfly and is determined to carry it to term. On a completely unrelated note, last night we ate at Dawn's Grill and Go, and the soundtrack was oldies. Paul Anka's Having my Baby was in rotation. There is something strangely innocent and slightly grotesque about the lyrics to that song. Google having my baby and have a listen. Decide for yourself.

Botfly boy and I are at Above Grounds Coffee in Placencia. Excellent coffee. This is a well deserved plug.

Last blog post concerned heavy vertigo, which has long since passed, replaced by strange and for the most part negative memories of my narcoleptic former assistant's abrupt and unfortunate firing for conduct unbecoming on an island paradise far away from the mainland. There are still many notes to be sorted through mentally, and I am determined to make a full inventory of my own accountability of a sad affair that turned ugly. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, though in reality sometimes we are doomed in any event, which is why my belief in free will is shaky at best. But at this point, I need to work, the grind that will turn into my half of Lonely Planet Belize (4th and Best Edition) is going to call the shots on my time for the next 3 weeks or so. After that, yes, this story will be written, along with others that are baying like dogs on the periphery of my skull.

Dr. Benway, please report to surgery. Dr. Benway...

In the meantime, I will try to upload some photos from along the way - I have many of these on my Facebook page, being easier to load them en masse via Picasa to FB than to Blogger. I still don't know whether or not dragging along the fat lens was worth it.

All right. As usual, I have reached a bottleneck of having so much to write about that I can barely get out a few coherent paragraphs. Best to close this thing before rambling sets in. Greetings to my new readers, and my many readers in Scandinavia. Scandinavians, I am a big fan of your culture, and wish to congratulate you on your many centuries of abstinence from pillaging. It must have been hard to put that habit down, and I wish to visit your shores one day. Please contact me with any opportunities!

Saturday is Vertigo in Hopkins

2011-02-13T13:19:00.002+08:00

Hopkins is one of my favorite spots in Belize. A Garifuna town extending along the beach, a mile and half from north to south. Children walk around selling cookies and buns their moms have baked from baskets, dub reggae and punta rock plays from King Cassava, waves on the beach. I jogged a mile today to visit a Swedish / Spanish woman called Emma who rents motorcycles, my excuse was to borrow a pencil or something but really I just wanted to chat. I'd met her yesterday, and she seemed interesting, vital, alive, simultaneously mirthful yet not without a hint of Scandinavian stoicism. I am peeling back cultural layers within myself and finding the adopted Scandinavian within. For several years I lived in a county called Sweden in upstate New York, and was adopted by a family of Scandinavian women. Shortly after this, I dated briefly an insanely tall Norwegian woman who worked as child caretaker for an Iranian gynecologist. She did not love me, but I had a motorcycle and could rescue her on the weekend. We may have eaten Lutefisk before the relationship dissolved in acrimony. It was a long time ago.

Emma fed me fruit and coffee, and I was happy for that and the company. An hour later I ate something on the street and immediately after fell victim to nausea-free vertigo, forcing me to lie down for the next several hours. When I woke up I consumed a half a box of all-bran before deciding that my physical problem had passed. It was unusually cold all day, and bed was not a bad thing. Tomorrow morning I shall go to Glover's Reef and spend four days breathing in coral colored air.

Two good things. I finally finished the Wedding and Funeral Story, which has helpful tidbits like this one:

In Mandarin the words for ‘raw’ and ‘birth’ (shen and sheng, respectively) have similar enough sounds to make the consumption of raw dishes auspicious. Close to the ocean, expect sashimi to flow abundantly. In the inland regions, smiling hosts may present you with small dishes of raw meat as a way to encourage the celestial spirits to bless the womb of the new bride with child. Generally the meat of choice is something of the bovine variety, and in rural areas (where meat tends to wander into the abattoir itself) such dishes are usually prepared with the greatest of care, as poisoning an entire wedding party is considered inauspicious.

You can read the rest here at the Lonely Planet Site:

Also, my friend Carrie at My Several Worlds has included two of my stories in her Valentines Day roundup.

So there you are. Enough Irony to choke a horse then, three stories revolving around love written by a doomed and failed romantic.

Tomorrow the reef, and then a long period of write up down south. Vertigo and wind permitting.

Mahalo, shalom & all that.

~ Josambro

coffee and globalization

2011-02-07T00:41:00.000+08:00

I like coffee. No, scratch that, I need coffee, as anyone with a physical / psychological addiction can be said to need anything. Coffee is the first order of business of the day, every day, after perhaps other bodily functions. So I should be happier in Guatemala than I am, at least on the coffee front, but find myself disappointed time and again when the answer to my mangled Spanish question "usted tiene café guatemalte?" turns out to be "No, cafe Americano" or even "No, Nescafe".

The other morning in El Remate I was served a cup of hot water and a jar of off brand instant coffee. This morning, at a place that was otherwise cool (posters on the wall depicting local pride, scenes of Maya splendor, entireties for tourists to not use plastic bottles) the coffee was Maxwell House, vino de every 12-step meeting you or anyone you know has ever attended. From there point of view it probably made economic sense - the economy of scale, of globalization, probably dictates that it is cheaper to serve Maxwell House, likely mass produced elsewhere, packaged and shipped from a great distance, than to serve locally grown coffee produced by friends of friends and neighbors of neighbors.

Something about this system leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Tikal: Visual Journey

2011-02-04T11:16:00.000+08:00

I believe in reincarnation because I want to be able to visit Hong Kong, Taipei and New York City two thousand years in the future when they all look like Tikal.

Mumblings from El Remate

2011-02-02T06:22:00.000+08:00

I cannot even write about past events at this point, even when paid to do so. This is a Bad Thing for the professional writer who relies on remembrances for lucre. Perhaps I should clarify. By past I mean anything beyond last month; I have many, many people and events fighting for my limited writing time, in between the endless travel and bread and butter writing of The Dream Job, memories with shelf life like flowers, or like fruit. In short order, the colors all fade unless I capture them in time.

So when I say that I am having a difficult time relating a tale spread out in amusing snippets over several years, tentative title four weddings and a Taiwanese funeral, you’ll understand why I can’t blame it on writer’s block. I am writing now, aren’t I? Or perhaps I am just thinking this in Times New Roman typeface. In the future there will be no difference. But the wedding story needs to be done, as I am past deadline, and will offset the cost of this journey, and pay for the chicken dinners My Assistant and I have just consumed.

We are in El Remate, Guatemala. Howler monkeys are calling from the trees around the lake, and there are horses everywhere. This is a good town, and I like it here. We are in Guatemala a day late as a result of a sad misunderstanding at the Western Border Crossing between My Assistant and the Law, a misunderstanding which I relate because in it readers will find the quotient of travel wisdom which allows me to continue calling myself a travel writer and thus useful.

She had come over the northern border 32 days before and forgotten about the extra 2 days. This itself enough was to cause a hassle. But all hope was lost when the guard pointed out that her visa from the north had been inexplicably stamped for a week instead of the usual month. This was a Bad Thing in anyone’s estimation, and when the border guard pointed out that immediate detention could result, my assistant – who, among other things, fears confined spaces – began to lose it, and made desultory insulting comments regarding the general state of the nation, and of the border guard profession specifically.

This sort of tactic never works.

Luckily, it was Sunday, and the guards, sensing my assistant’s comments were brought on by stress, suggested in as kindly a way as possible for people in their profession that we both go back to Belmopan, Belize’s capital, and deal with it first thing in the morning. It was a tense situation, and there was nothing to be done but bring her into the jungle for several hours e among bats, rivers and coatamundi.

The river trip is a tale in and of itself, but whoops, time is fleeting and some idiot is burning plastic 20 feet away from the only WIFI hot spot in El Remate. Tomorrow I will go to Tikal, and perhaps relate the story of the trip to Belmopan, which is bound to be more instructive than interesting.

I must finish Four Weddings. Because my name is Yahuda Bangs, and I am a Professional.

All Night Sino-Indian Intestinal Battle

2011-01-31T00:34:00.000+08:00

File this under useful information if you like - India and China are not friends, not on the geopolitical stage and not in my guts. In San Ignaciao, and presumably going to leave for Guatemala in an hour, despite having spent the night violently ejecting a bad mixture of Palak Paneer and Vegetable Chop Suey, consumed in too-rapid succession at two different eateries in town. Won't name the eateries, since I can't be sure which of 'em started the fight, but I will use my travel writer pulpit to say that the Indian restaurant wasn't Serendip (which is excellent - had an amazing fish curry there three nights ago - and Sri Lankan anyway) and the Chinese wasn't Tai Shan (a family run joint where I've twice had a fine vegetable soup and they speak Mandarin).

There was also a slice of lemon meringue pie involved, but I vouch for its innocence.

Earlier in the day I'd headed out to Belmopan to meet a driver from Crystal Motors to return the Research Armadillo. The truck had served us well - been invaluable even - but was no longer needed for this, the last leg of the trip. After calculating fuel, insurance & rental costs, I figured I'd paid just under 50 dollars a day for the Armadillo's services, a reasonable price to drive from one end of the country to the other, over bad roads and worse. By the time I reached Belmopan the Armadillo was more a rolling trash can, filled with a month's worth of empty bottles, bits of food and research detritus, but some kids just outside of town took care of that for me, cleaning the beast inside and out for a mere ten Belize. They were a student group, church based I suspect, and they did a fine job. It gave me hope for the next generation, made me proud to want to be Belizean even. Some of them were Taiwanese transplants, far more vivacious then
they likely would have been had their parents not migrated to Belize for whatever reason. Chatting them up I learned that they weren't Han Chinese at all, but from the Ami tribe, from Hualien.

Whoops! I was about to go off on a tangent, and we must pack and head to the bus station soon for the trip to the border. We were talking about Sino-Indian relations, tense in the best of times. I know this through personal experience, having recently attempted to bridge that divide, failing utterly.

Back to last night; I'd been invited out to a club Where I'd been told the Belikin calendar girls of 2010 would be having a wet t-shirt contest or something of that nature. There would be music, Punta Rock, and likely much grinding. But my intestines said otherwise, and I returned to the Western Guest House to lie down and watch Return of the Jedi on TV. It was a Guatemalan station, Spanish dialogue giving a new twist to a much-beloved story. Jabba still spoke Hutt, of course. I felt bad for Boba Fett, as I always do, his death through wardrobe failure seeming vaguely anticlimactic. And it was around this time that the Paneer and Suey really started fucking with my guts.

I'll spare readers the ugly details, suffice to say there was little sleep and much vomiting. I will say that the difference between a comfortable guest-house and one that's merely mediocre are never more clear when you are throwing up in the bathroom, and in this San Ignaciao's Western Guest House gets my seal of approval and eternal gratitude.

I need to consume something light, canned peaches perhaps before heading out to the border.
So did I learn anything? Perhaps only that Dragon and Tiger DNA simply do not comfortably mix. The Panda and Elephant may forever remain estranged.

Conan the Travel Writer

2011-01-28T23:46:00.000+08:00

Just a little film from a rough patch of road. CROM!!!!!

Monkey Extraction

2011-01-28T08:57:00.000+08:00

Deep in the heart of Belize's Cayo District, just outside of Barton Creek Cave lovely assistant Misty had a run in with a Spider monkey. How much suffering has been caused by failure to let go, to release? A rhetorical question, pertaining more to the Buddha's noble truth than to this instance in the jungle. Still, Misty nearly lost an earring and an irreplaceable ear-chunk. The bewitching braid will never be the same.

After the monkey incident we went to a tiny spot and came across a hotel run by a woman and her husband from upstate New York. The woman had graduated from my University. Small world indeed, now listening to seventies rock music courtesy of the internet which may go off at any moment because of the rain, which threatens to go on all night, making the road to Caracol impassible.

The jungle is wired. I am tired. Many stories to tell but no time in which to tell them. May my editor at Lonelyplanet.com forgive me.

Vandalism and another birthday in Belize

2011-01-25T02:22:00.000+08:00

The Answer is 42. To the big question, the meaning of life, at least according to the late Douglas Adams, and also the number of times the Earth has gone around the Sun since the day I was born, 42 years ago today. I am sitting in a tire shop in Spanish Lookout, a place so well ordered (it's a Mennonite town, you see) that it sticks out in Belize like a pyramid of human skulls in downtown Manitoba. Why Spanish Lookout, and why a tires shop? The research armadillo became the victim of horrible vandalism on Friday night, along with three other vehicles in San Ignaciao. On Saturday morning I was awoken by the hotel maid to tell me the police had to talk to me about my rental vehicle.

When I got down to the street I saw there were two cops standing over another vehicle, a jeep. "That isn't mine," I told them. They shook their heads and said I should come down. At street level I could see several vehicles leaning strangely to one side, sidewalk facing tires slashed. The Armadillo was the lucky Pierre I suppose (go ahead, look that one up if you like) with only one tire gone, a horrible
machete gash in the sidewall. I filed a police report and felt sad, because I am paid to write about these things, to tell travelers what they might expect, and don't want to be held responsible for being the harbinger of bad tidings. In the end I decided that I'd be remiss to not mention it in the guidebook. Apparently this hadn't been the first time tires had been slashed on Burns Ave, but the second. Businesses on the street had chipped in to hire a guard, an older man who would sit on the street and play flute through the night. He was out that night, apparently.

There will be a film soon, as my new lovely assistant misty is a whiz with both a Macintosh and a tire iron.

Forty Two. I am slightly down. Sometimes I have a notion to set torch to the tools of my trade and become a baker.

Assistant Misty has pointed out a touch of grey sprouting out of my head. I want them to all turn grey. Time to deal with the tire and head down the road.

Squatter in Jungle Luxury

2011-01-19T23:08:00.000+08:00

For reasons which I am too tired to even try to fathom I find myself a squatter in a luxurious mansion in the middle of the jungle, alone in a fully furnished two story three bedroom house in which nobody lives. Except for an armed guard who speaks no English called Jose and two Mayan Potlicker dogs, there is nobody around for at least a mile down a potholed road.

Events of this weekend created a tremendous gravity, a dire need of telling that I’m putting off until such a time as I have the energy to do the story justice. The story to come? Drummer for the Dead meets Creole Hero. It will be all that and a bag of chips, which is how I describe the lovely young tattoo artist I’d met in Dangriga two days ago, who could be with me this very night enjoying an empty mansion with me, two dogs and a truck full of oranges. “You’re all that and a bag of Chips,” I wanted to tell her, and perhaps I will should we meet down the road. This story and more to come, as soon as I can stop moving for just 72 hours. Perhaps in Guatemala? Back to the here and now.

The moon is full, it’s well past dark and quiet as it gets. I have sucked the bones of many dinosaurs today, driving from Dangriga to Marie Sharp’s Hot Sauce Factory for a tour in which I faced some strange questioning from a white woman on her first trip to Belize who was concerned that my writing anything less than a positive assessment of Dangriga might be harmful to both the town itself and her fledgling business concerns. I have written extensively about Dangriga, Belize’s second city and home to the Garifuna people, and consider myself a friend of the town. However, I’d be remiss in my duties as an honest broker if I didn’t speak squarely to the reader and address certain truths about the town’s seeming downturn since the last major write-up of 2008.

The North American woman – whose business apparently had something to do with bringing Our North American Compatriots to experience the real Belize – had caught whiff of a conversation I’d had with some others in her tour group in which I was questioning them about the quality of their hotel and lamenting the fact that Dangriga had lost 3 mid-price hotels since my last write up, and seemed to feel that I’d bummed them out somehow, soured them on the idea of spending more than a couple of days in town. I tried to explain to her the importance of making judgment calls in my line of work, and what will happen if I refuse to write up the warts, but after a few minutes it became clear that we weren’t on the same wavelength. I went back into the Hot Sauce Factory and continued my heart attack attraction program with a bag of locally made pork rinds.

Later, my friend the Baker came along, and we drove together to Gales Point Manatee, another town in the region that has had a rough go of it in the past couple of years, losing trees and buildings to hurricanes and key locals to the lure of places with regular bus service. The landscape was still spectacular, a thin spit of land surrounded on two sides by water beyond which lay lagoons to the east and mountains to the west. But there was little there to hold us more than an hour or two, and when we went to the lodge we were greeted by a dozen or so friendly dogs with not a guest or employee in sight.

The rest of the day was spent driving along the Hummingbird, which could easily compete in any Highway Beauty Pageant, if such a thing exists. Somewhere not far from where The Baker and I parted ways I drove behind two citrus trucks that had been overfilled. On each, a man sat throwing oranges into the road. I rolled down the window as I passed the first truck and motioned for the man to throw a few into the cab, which he did, hurling several of the softball sized fruit in rapid succession. Three landed into the front seat, and one hit me in the arm leaving a bruise. A fifth exploded against the side of the Armadillo, leaving a strange dripping color pattern.

At mile 16 ½ I came across a strange house that looked like a cross between a Valentine and a Swiss ski Chalet, which turned out to be the café opened by a woman I’d met 3 years back, a German Chef, and her new husband, a Garifuna architect, builder and modern day renaissance man. The Valentine shape was more pronounced on the inside, and I sub-dubbed the place The house that Love Built in the review I wrote for the guide. Best burger I’ve had in Belize.

The Hummingbird is a beautiful stretch of road, dangerous at points because while the temptation for the causal traveler is to drive slowly and admire the scenery, to most Belizeans it’s a the main artery from Belmopan to the Southern Highway and best taken at top speed. Our goals - mine, to search for small, good things along the Hummingbird to write about (Croft’s, a charming bakery run by Mennonites, for example), and theirs, to get through the Hummingbird as quickly as possible – were at fundamental odds.

Sometime around 4 I got to Ian Anderson’s Cave Branch, and if I’d been smarter I’d have taken a bed in the bunkhouse and settled for the night. But it was still a bit too early, and I felt the need to make it to Belmopan for some stupid reason. And this brings it full circle, because while I’ll be back in Belmopan tomorrow to do my research, so uncompelling was the idea of spending a Tuesday night in Belize’s capital that I instead lit east to spend the night squatting like a 5-star hobo in a model home in the middle of the jungle.

All I need is a lovely assistant and I’d be set.

Tattoo Artist from Seattle, if you’re reading this, I took your advice and avoided snorkeling. And I do think you’re all that and a bag of chips.

The moon is full, and I need sleep. Tomorrow, Belmopan, Caffeine then Cayo.

Balmy Placencia Morning

2011-01-14T23:09:00.000+08:00

I've gravitated to Placencia once again following some instinct I can't quite place. It's Friday morning, meaning that the Sunday is lurking closely somewhere, not meaningful except that Sunday is a bad day to try to get anything done in Belize and is best spent sitting on the beach writing or in deep contemplation. Since my last entry I've been all over southern Belize, visiting the full spectrum of places that you yourself might wish to go. From expensive eco-lodges offering guests full-spectrum showers with 180 degree jungle views (I'll post a photo of this one later) to small border villages at the end of road literally and figuratively, the Research Armadillo and I have covered miles, beaten track, eaten Mennonite cheese and sucked massive amounts of expensive petrol (the Armadillo is a gas fiend).

Monday and Tuesday were spent in Punta Gorda, a town I've got increasing affection for. There may be a reason for me to stay there in the near future, but Placencia has better seafood opportunities.

I have just created a photo collage; lets see how this thing works. The eco lodge shower should be somewhere in here....

From Drop Box

The whole idea of photo collage reflects pretty well my current cut-up state of mind. I may turn in my whole manuscript William Burroughs Style. Scramble the whole thing like a stir fry. No, mustn't talk like that. But there is too much distraction to write here, Spanish music competing with the teevee competing with dogs roaming in and out and thoughts of visiting rock stars. I need to head to Hopkins anyway, keep moving. Placencia is only a pitstop on the way back up. Will write up the research trip to Jalacte at some point....

Welcome to the Jungle

2011-01-09T10:42:00.001+08:00

Driving along the southern highway, deeper into what they call the deep south. Somewhere close to a town called Independence the check engine soon light starts flashing. Is it possible that the Research Armadillo has been mechanically compromised this early in the trip? I've been good this far, feeding it Esso fuel and avoiding the coastal highway. I call Crystal motors and was told it was fine. Everything would be under control.

Leaving Dangriga days earlier I'd stopped off at a place called Mama Noots, but Mama Noots was no more, the backpackeresque eco resort having gone under sometime last year. I wound up picking up an young American couple who had been staying there as ad-hoc caretakers. They'd been trying to bike it all the way to Hopkins on cheap beach cruisers when they saw me, and when they found out I was going south they decided to hop a ride. I had already decided to hit Hopkins on the way back up, mostly for psychological reasons. Placencia is a major destination, one I could research and write simultaneously, and I thought if I did a major destination right off the bat I'd have a leg up on my research. Plus, I wanted to eat shrimp at Omar's.

My first trip to Placencia had left a strange taste in my mouth, but on my second trip I sort of found myself in a more humble groove regarding the place. This time I spent four days in the town and on the peninsula, including one morning spent getting a new tattoo. Placencia is all right in my book. Plenty of new stuff to write about, and a few old venues now gone thanks to a combination of bad economics and one firebug with a thing for thatched roofs.

Left Placencia early this morning, driving up the peninsula to hit a few venues I'd spotted the day before but not checked out properly. The sky was beautifully clear, not a cloud to be seen from the sea to the Cockscomb mountains in the west. At the Southern Highway Junction I picked up an old man who was hitchhiking south. He was Guatemalan, spoke no English, and thought to repay the favor by cleaning out the Armadillo, throwing the accumulated garbage of nearly a week onto the road. "No Bueno," I told him, and he stopped. But it harmed the relationship. I left him off by the Red Bank turnoff and went out in search of the famous scarlet macaws. It was too late to see them, but I got a good interview with a Kechi Mayan guide, and took a long walk in the jungle before being sent off with many oranges.

As I drove further south everything thinned out except the jungle itself, which only got thicker. Other cars were minimal. Long periods of time went by in which I saw nothing but trees on either side, orange groves banana plantations, jungle on all sides. Close to Golden Stream I slowed down for what I thought was a rope painted green, laid across the road to act as a speed bump only to see it move...it turned out to be a massive iguana, which scurried across the road before I could get my camera out.

Further down the road I saw a sign reading Ya’axche conservation trust, where I learned about the Ranger for a Day program, and further still a small shop belonging to the Indian Creek Ixchel Women’s Group, a Mayan collective selling bracelets and suchlike. By the time I got to the ruins of Lubuntum it was getting late, so I drove through a series of small towns before finding myself in San Pedro Colombia, from whose outskirts I now write. Off to crawl into a bunkhouse with William S. Burroughs before sleeping. With three Mayan ruins to see tomorrow promises to be a long day.

Belize Shots South of the Hummingbird Highway 1

2011-01-08T22:27:00.001+08:00

Corozal to Dangriga, Accidental Run

2011-01-04T11:03:00.000+08:00

At Chalenor's hotel in Dangriga, inside a 22 BZD per night room with a clean bed and paper thin walls, having just driven further than I’d planned.

Today's journey started well. The trip to Belize City was quicker than I’d anticipated, thanks to a combination of a ride to Orange Walk in Gwyn’s ultra efficient Mercedez Benz and a fast bus from there to the five mile mark outside of Belize City where I got my own rental vehicle from the very cool Crystal Rentals, a nearly new white pickup truck that I will give some sort of appropriate nickname to tomorrow.

Once at the rental office I found out that I’d left my driver’s license in Corozal, in the back pocket of a pair of blue jeans that were just too heavy to schlep on the journey. Luckily I had my international driver’s permit, and the owner of Crystal was OK about letting the car go with just that, most likely on strength of my stellar reputation if not my clearly less than meticulous packing skills. Still, the problem remained: should I get pulled over by the cops, would they accept just the international driver’s permit, which bears large black letters reading this document only valid when presented with a state-issued driver’s license?

Maybe. With fifty bucks, probably. But I didn’t want to chance it. The owner of Crystal suggested a solution, one which you can file under cool tips for minimizing tragedy in Belize or some such category. Apparently, Tropics Air, one of Belize’s two local airlines (the other is Maya Air, and they probably offer the same service) also does cargo runs, charging by weight. Having located my card exactly where I thought it would be, Gwyn delivered it to the Tropics Air office at the Corozal Airstrip, where a plane was scheduled to head south to Dangriga via Ambergris and Belize City, getting in at five. This random accident pretty much sealed my itinerary, which I’d been vacillating on, making my route south then west instead of the other way around. I made good time, stopping in Belmopan at the Perk-up Café for an Americano before hitting the amazing Hummingbird Highway all the way into ‘Griga. Time was tight, so I didn’t stop to take any photos, so instead you’ll have to make due with yet another useful travel tip, the sort for which this blog will one day be famous.

In Belize, when turning off a busy road onto a driveway or parking lot located on the other side of the road on which you’re driving, the driver does not signal, stop and turn as one would do in America, Instead, the driver is meant to pull off the road on the right side, signal left, and wait until traffic has cleared before then turning from the shoulder.

Thank you. I shall sleep now.

Day One: Cancun to Corozal

2011-01-03T11:43:00.001+08:00

High above the clouds over the Gulf of Mexico the banana moon shone bright, and I was tired but couldn’t sleep, being too excited by the prospect of leaving the cold and snow and small life I’d only begun to build behind. Also there was free television. Announcing its master the sun’s herald pushed out the night sky, and for just a few moments both moon and sun shared the stage before the latter all but obscured the former. It was almost time to land.

The imaginary readers who I imagine in my head (most often on long bus rides when I think these posts up but don’t have the space to write them) have been writing me imaginary emails again, most recently on the subject of travel tips. “Stop writing about your inner life, of your dreams and dogs,” one such imaginary writer wrote recently (or so I imagine). “We want travel advice. Tips we can use.”

Cancun is a saccharine enema, a place entirely without soul.

How does that strike you, my barefoot armchair literary critic of the head?

For the rest of you, there’s more.

Belize is an expensive place to fly into. There’s only one international airport (unless Placencia has been completed, which I’ll know soon enough), and for various reasons ticket prices from any American city into said airport can range around seven hundred bucks round trip. For the budget traveler, there’s Cancun, a regional hub into which you can fly from nearly any American City for about half that price.
There’s a catch, of course, but isn’t there always? In this case, distance and small, annoying and probably illegal fees levied on the traveler. Cancun Airport itself isn’t unpleasant as these things go, but flying into Cancun airport can sometimes necessitate a brief visit or potential stopover in Cancun itself, which is as banal and generic in a vaguely Mexican way as your local Taco Bell (if you don’t have a local taco bell, consider yourself better off). You can avoid going into Cancun by catching a bus directly to Playa Del Carmen, but at 7am on New Years Day there weren’t any of these.

No busses to Cancun either, but a cab to Cancun set me back fifteen American. To Playa Del Carmen would have been double.

(My driver’s name was Jesus. He was a little man with a kind face, and he drove like Racer X in the old Speed Racer Cartoon. The fact that Racer X became Racer X after being horribly disfigured in a racing accident did not comfort me. Still, we made it safe and sound, as the sanguine tone of this entry should indicate.)

Once in Cancun, I caught a first class bus for 25 dollars to Chetumal. The ride took six hours. Since it was still New Years, there were no busses to the Belizean Border, so I split a cab with two other travelers for 20 bucks total. The border guard on the Mexican side insisted I pay a 20 dollar tourist fee, which everyone including the Lonely Planet guide entry I wrote says they aren’t supposed to but often do. After 20 minutes of gentle argument with the guard (I spoke through an interpreter while he seemed to fall asleep) it was clear that if I wanted to leave Mexico, which I very much did, I would be paying the fee. He put a stamp in my passport that seems to indicate that I will not be charged the same fee should I come back through Mexico.

Having not booked a return ticket yet, the question remains open. Financially it makes sense, as even with all the bus time and fees a one way back will still be at least 200 cheaper or more (one way tickets from Belize usually being more than half of a full return). Plus, having over packed horribly for the gig I’ll have to come back anyway, since I’ll be leaving 20 pounds of stuff in the storeroom of the very magnanimous Gwyn, hotelier par excellence at Corozal’s fabulous Seabreeze Inn, from where I currently write.

Tomorrow, a four hour bus ride to Belize City to pick up the rental pickup. Thanks to National Bus Service’s (or Novelo's – who can keep up?) going belly-up there are no more express busses, and since a flight from Corozal to BC (via Ambergris) would set me back around a hundred dollars, it looks as if a slow tour through Northern Belize is what's for breakfast tomorrow. Lets hope the neighbors (yeah, it's these people again) run out of firecrackers before midnight.

You Can't Go Home Again, But You Can Leave It Many Times

2011-01-01T15:41:00.001+08:00

It’s close to midnight on New Years Eve, and I am in the Denver airport waiting for my flight to Mexico, which is already delayed by 90 minutes. The changing of the year will pass by unnoticed. The airport is warm, quiet and about as busy as the Omaha bus station on any given midnight. I must keep myself awake, resist the urge to wrap myself in this five-dollar thrift store jacket I bought for the express purpose of throwing away in Mexico and lie down on the carpeted floor for some shut-eye.

This has been a day spent in deep time lapse - the sheer amount of shit accomplished between the time my eyes opened at 8am (following another strange, harrowing dream involving plummeting dogs) and this moment, now, apparently midnight if the shouting is anything to go by, has forced me into a kind of robotic trance, an endless day of do-or-die moments. I awoke in a a house, my house, surrounded by things, my things. By the end of the day, the house would no longer be mine, and the things would be stored, given away or shipped to other corners of the continent. It was also brutally cold, my rental car covered in ice. Last coffee at the Coffee Tree, Post Office, Bank, Goodwill store, lunch, borrowed vacuum cleaner and finally back to the cottage for a last frenetic burst of cleaning, full and total scrubdown in the hopes that my landlady will return some of my deposit despite the residual yellow foam stuck to all of the windows. This was my bad, as I explained in the cheerful note I left her along with a hopeful deposit slip (see BANK above).

So now it’s down to Central America, where a rental truck and a series of Points of Interest await.If all goes as it should, tomorrow night I will watch the sun set from the balcony of the Sea Breeze Inn.

It has been a good and instructive 4 months trying to settle down once more in Jesus country, but ultimately a failure for reasons of once again wanting that which I cannot have. This, and an occasional reluctance to acknowledge the transitory nature of each and every facet of reality, are my only two major character defects. Perhaps this is why I always find myself transitory, or at least transiting to lands more suited to transients.

Pulling into Johnson’s Corner, a diner just outside Loveland famous for its cinnamon buns, on the way to the airport. I felt my sense of self return. I texted my friend Jennifer, who responded that I was again in my element. It is New Years Eve, and I am in a diner surrounded by truckers and the indigent. You are traveling, she replied. You are writing. That is your element.

I would write more, more about the triumphantly beautiful but ultimately failed courtship, about an autumn ripe with hope transformed prematurely into a cold, sterile winter, perhaps even about the dog in my dreams, continually leaping into the unknown from dangerously high places. But I literally cannot keep my eyes open. I am going to pass out right in front of the boarding gate and hope some kind Frontier employee drags me onto the plane when the time comes.