Les Misbarack

This is pretty awesome.



Yeah, they get slaughtered at the barricades at the end - but history never repeats itself, right?

The Interventionist

Kristin Chenoweth does an intervention, in song ...

1947 - Weekend in Vallejo

I can't find much information on who these guys are. The YouTube tag only tells us that Harold T. O'Neal and a few friends make the trek to Vallejo for some fun at buddy Cal's riverside cabin.

It's so mundane, yet totally fascinates me. Maybe because it's video proof that a world which we were told is a recent invention has been, in fact, around for much longer. We get too much of the image of gay men and women cowering in fear and confusion before Stonewall, and we get it from the left (who will never let us forget our oppression) and the right (who denied we existed before 1969).

So it's nice for me to see that queens have always been having parties.

It's part of a series of films that the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco have been converting to digital and posting on their YouTube GLBT History page.

More Cats

This is where the path started that eventually led to G Minus G:



A few of the cartoons themselves:



And finally, a mud shot. Why We Run. More to come.

Charlie Bit Me

I hate cute. And yet ...

Dahab

This town is slightly more interesting than I thought. The guys at the hotel - which is more of a collection of rooms around a garden than a hotel per se - are all nice enough. I haven't met guys like this yet in Egypt. They're all young, and a lot came out here after hellacious experiences in the Egyptian army. I heard some pretty rough stories about spending two years on the border with Libya with poor food, few blankets, and lots of scorpions for company.

So now they're out here chasing European girls up and down the strip. The guys are handsome, and the girls don't seem to mind. They're hippy boyfriends might mind, but most seem too stoned to care.

I had planned to take off tomorrow into the mountains on camel. It's still cold as hell, so I had doubts about how I'd survive, but I really like camels.

That plan just got changed on me, as I've learned through the grapevine. The new plan: I'm heading on a jeep safari with three girls and a guy from Cairo. One had a guitar, and they stayed up late last night singing along to Alannis Morrisette songs. These aren't your normal Muslim girls. We'll sleep overnight in a Bedouin village, then head to St. Katherine's Monastery and Mount Sinai for a second night.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I wanted to see the Monastery and Mount Sinai. I had no interest in a jeep safari - that might be more boring than sitting here. I like camels. I asked the guy for camels. But I told the organizer I'd be up for others joining. It would bring down the cost (I thought). I didn't realize that the others could then over ride my original plan with one of their own.

So what? It's already 9:30 pm and we leave at dawn. I can hunt down the original guide and be a bitch about it, though for a plan I was only half-heartedly interested in anyways. Or go with the flow and see where this takes me. And of course I'll go with the flow. Fighting it in this country isn't worth the effort.

On the Red Sea

I couldn't switch my ticket, so flew to the Sinai as originally planned early this morning. Landed in Sharm just after dawn, and took an over-priced cab up the coast to Dahab, a "hippy enclave" on the Red Sea. It was a bumpy flight, the kind with lots of screaming passengers.

It's cloudy, cold, and windy - so I won't be going into the water any time soon. And without that there doesn't seem to be much else to do here. Or rather, much else that interests me. I already walked the coast top to bottom, and I'm already bored to tears.

Not that it's a bad place. Aside from the divers and families there are a lot of young kids on their round-the-world party tour. The locals have all adopted a pseudo-surfer "Hello My Brother" veneer of I'm Your Best Friend. The coast is pedestrian only, and every inch is lined with cafes and clubs. Tonight I could choose from Old Skool Night, Pulp Fiction Party Night (your favorite hits of the 50's and 60's!), and a half dozen places offering Awesome Fun with various British DJ's.

Bored to fucking tears, I tell you. I'll probably end up joining some desert trek tour for the next few days, as I don't know what else to do, and there's nothing here to do on your own. If I were still 24, or a cold-water diver, or here with a lover, or content to get high and sit on my ass all day, this place would be really cool. For the solo and restless? Not. Cool. At. All.

At least I made the most of my last day in Luxor. Walked to the tombs of the artisans that were found behind the old worker's village. These were the people who built the temples and monuments for the pharaohs. They weren't allowed to use royal iconography, and so the tombs were painted in a more free-form, easy to understand style. There were lots of scenes of families at play and at work in the fields. Even the gods were more homely - Isis in the form of a tree, Anubis holding hands with the departed to lead them into the afterlife, and ferocious cat-bunnies chopping up snakes with their swords (I couldn't tell if they were bunnies with fangs or cats with very long ears). Even after three thousand years the images were vivid and strangely familiar (except for the cat-bunny).

In the afternoon I met up with Vicky, the Aussie town planner, and we went to the Valley of the Kings. These tombs were more awesome, and more formal. Entire caverns were covered with the texts from the Various Books - the Book of the Hours, which describes the descent into the subconscious), the Book of the Cavern, the Book of Day, the Book of Night. Afterwards we hiked up over the mountains, coming down above Hatshepsut's massive temple in the back of a natural ampitheater.

That night I mostly listened as the village's resident ecentrics exchanged stories. There were a handful of artists, a scattering of amateur Egyptologists who return year after year, some professors, and some archaeologists waiting for their digs to start. They were awesome company.

So - Egypt so far: Hated Cairo, Aswan was an interesting interlude, Luxor was beyond incredible, and so far Dahab looks tiring. Usually I don't want to return after a vacation, I just want to keep on moving and see where the road takes me. This might be the first time where I'm really just ready to go home. Realistically, my perfect track record of awesome trips had to end at some point. I know this, so I'm not that disappointed or bummed.

This should cure my travel lust for a bit, at least. Maybe I'll actually save some money now.

Paradise Found

I took the train to Luxor early yesterday morning, and crossed immediately to Hotel Sheikh Aly in one of the small villages on the West Bank - and finally found an Egypt I could relax in. The West Bank is the perfect storm of beauty and wonder. The hotel is set around a small garden where we eat. Small irrigated gardens stretch from the outer walls for 3 km down to the Nile. On the other side the red Theban Hills rise out of the mist. The ruins of tombs and massive temples line the dusty country roads. There are tens of thousands of tourists on the other side of the river, but most only cross to the west side in hermetically-sealed buses that shuttle them between the main sites - Tutankanem's tomb and Hatshepsut's temple. Otherwise it's just local farmers, French artists, international teams of archaeologists, and a small scattering of random travelers.

I visited Medinet Habu yesterday afternoon, an almost intact temple complex built on an epic scale. It's the first time I've been in awe of a place in Egypt. Now I get it. Finally.

Six days to find my groove, and nine days to finally be filled with wonder - it certainly did take awhile.

I crossed to the East Bank this morning to hit the bank (none on the other side) and visit Karnak with an Aussie Town Planner I met in the hotel's garden. Karnak was mobbed with tour groups, but it's monumentality dwarfed everyone. The main hall - 100 meters by 50 meters - was designed to mimic a Nile garden, and was filled with hundreds of massive stone 'papyrus' stalks stretching up to the sky, and each carved with reliefs over every inch. It was too much for the eye to take in. In a bit I'll hop the ferry back to the villages. Tomorrow I'll explore the Valley of the Kings.

I want to extend my stay a day, but I have a flight in two days & the line was 60 deep at Egypt Air. I'd lose a day to gain a day.

As for my final night in Aswan - it was a bit insane. Dinner was a let down. The 'good' restaurant was only average, and I was the only one in it. In retrospect, I think meet me for a beer at my favorite bar meant let's go now so you can pay. Live and learn. I ate, and watched the felucca sail off into the dark waters. I could have joined in, of course, and it would have sounded romantic - sailing into a Nile sunset with your Nubian lover. Knowing that I'd by buying it took some of the romance out of it. I'm not that jaded to confuse a purchase with love, something some of these old English ladies taking Egyptian boys will have to learn the hard way.

Trudging back to my hotel I gave in & agreed to go home with one of the caleche drivers. I made it clear that it wouldn't be about money, and he made it clear that that wasn't what he was after. We hopped in a cab, and took off for the hinterlands of the City. I tried to keep track of all the turns, but when we crossed the railroad tracks into a world where donkeys and horses outnumbered cars (not too hard, given that we were the only motorized vehicle in the suburb) I lost track. We zipped in and out of potholed side streets.

The word ghetto flittered through my mind before I kicked it out. I was too much into it to turn around, and the only way out was forward.

His house was up an open flight of concrete steps. I took my shoes off, and went into the living room. The walls were unfinished cement, but they and the couches along each wall were lined with gold tapestries. Shabby chic, African style.

I heard women talking in the other room. There were no doors. The guy wanted to get it on. He assured me the women didn't come into this room - all of ten feet down the hall. We proceeded to be interrupted by crying babies, shouts from the street, and knocks on the door. This is not happening, I told him. Relax, he told me. A child walked into the room. My son, he said, picking him up and putting him on the couch opposite.

I wanted to be down with the culture. Silly me. One day I'll learn, if not in this life then the next.

Anyways, no way was I going to mess around with a kid sitting there watching. All doubt was removed when even more kids came in to check out the stranger. We drank tea instead. I wrestled with the kids, and they showed me all their World Wrestling moves. Later the other horsemen arrived, and the whole neighborhood gathered in his living room to smoke bhanga and gossip. This is what we do at night, the host said. Smoke and gossip.

I have friends just like that in Hawai`i. I passed on the bhanga (tobacco mixed with hashish oil and pot), as I really was disoriented enough & really wanted the full use of every single brain cell.

The party finally ended at 1am. We tried to take a horse back, but it bolted and refused to cooperate. Instead we hiked out of the ghetto (I can't get away from that word) back to the mainstreet, and I caught a cab back to the hotel.

Yessir, we have no bananas

I told myself that I wasn't going to just do the usual tour of Pharoanic Egypt. I would see a few monuments, to be sure, but would spend more time getting to know the land and the people of today.

This morning I decided to nix that completely. I was ready to throw in the towel and join the masses of tourists being cosseted on cruise ships and fancy hotels on private islands, and who only left the safety of their nest in the company of guides who handled all bribes. I'd take photos of the great monuments, and then spend the afternoons sunning by the pool. This land is hostile territory for the independent traveler, and it was actually costing me more to do things on my own than if I had caved and joined an official Thomas Cook tour. The frustrations of solo travel just weren't worth it.

My plans were foiled again, because once you are outside the mainstream the mainstream will not let you back in.

I couldn't get on a last-minute tour to Abu Simbel, so hired a taxi through the hotel to get to the Temple of Isis at Philae, an island a few dozen km south of here. I was hoping I could find some other travelers to split the cab with, but I appear to be the only one in my hotel. The only other guests I've seen were women in full hijab, & I didn't even bother to ask them.

I got to the dock, thinking I could at least find someone to split the boat ride with. Again, no luck. Tour groups all clung together tightly. I saw zero solo travelers. I saw a few small groups without guides, and tried to approach them. I couldn't even get a hello - they'd coalesce into a tight pack on my approach, and whatever gnu ended up on the outside of the herd would shoo me away and go no no no.

It was the same approach they took with the multitude of carpet, papyrus, postcard, and trinket salesmen who swarmed around us. I tried not to take it personal.

But still. I guarantee that I've been under more stress than they, and yet I'm still smiling, still making eye contact, and still making small talk with all the touts. I started to think, maybe I'm not doing so bad after all.

I'm almost feeling like I can relax. It's hard to drop the hard wall I've put up after Cairo. You still have to stay alert here, but some of the salesmen - once they've failed to make a sale - will tell me what bar of coffee shop to head to at night. They seem like honest offers, that we can actually have a beer and just hang out once the business day is done.

That, or they think I'll be an easier lay when drunk. There were times today when I thought all of Nubia must be gay, as claimed by the Tyrolean. With the waiter at breakfast it was coffee, tea, or me. Nescafe is hard enough to enjoy without having a wayward teen standing over you rubbing his crotch and saying, yes? ok, you like? good? I took a 20" nap after getting back from Philae, but was woken twice by knocks on the door from 'room service' checking to see if I needed anything. And, as usual, my walk along the corniche was sprinkled with a dozen offers for "special" felucca and taxi rides.

I know not to get too cocky, and that most of these boys would flirt with anything with a wallet.

(and in the back of my mind, I think: they still mutilate the genitals of women here. And if women have been desexualized en masse like that, then of course all the men would be turning to other men.)

I'll hit one of the floating bars/restaurants later tonight. It'll be my first real night out in Egypt. This is the first time I've been remotely in the mood, or had the feeling that it might be enjoyable rather than stressful.

As for the Temple of Isis - it was pretty. I only had an hour at the site, so it was hard to relax and truly enjoy it. It was the last outhold of the old religion, and the last hieroglyph was carved here in the 4th century. Or rather, near here. The original island was inundated after the building of the Aswan Dam, along with the entire homeland of the 5000-year old Nubian civilization. UNESCO removed a few temples and placed them on higher ground. And though they did an excellent job it still felt a bit stage-like and empty of the mana it should have held. I'll put up more temple info when I post pictures.

Aswan Daze

It didn't take long in this town to finally have a proper adventure. It's been quite a day.

Aswan is much bigger than I pictured - it sprawls for a couple miles along the Nile, although here the desert presses tight against the town. And though it's chaotic and confusing & every other Egyptian that says hello is running a con and I rarely know what's going on, it's also all a bit more manageable. Just not having that nightmare traffic to deal with makes everything else seem almost easy.

I was killing time before I left the city, and went in for a haircut - my first since March, and only the second time I've been to a barber in a year and a half. I loved Middle Eastern barbers in other countries, and was looking forward to an old-fashioned haircut. Cairo, however, was not going to let me off the hook that easily. This guy spent more time blowing and teasing my hair than actually cutting it. I had to avoid looking in the mirror, it was that scary. He started off by giving me a bouffant. I growled and motioned that I do not wear my hair up. Next stage: Flock of Seagulls. I shook my head no. Finally act: David Bowie in all his Ziggy Stardust glory. I gave up.

I was so embarrassed walking down the street that I ducked behind a corner and dumped a bottle of water on my head.

Turns out that it's a pretty good haircut. I like it when it's not all poofed out.

And that was it for Cairo. I shelled out a hundred bucks to change my ticket so that I can fly out of Sharm el Sheikh on the Red Sea rather than return. I'm not alone, either. I read that Naguib Mahfouz quit holding court in his favorite coffee shop because the commute had grown so unpleasant.

I checked into my hotel in Aswan around 9pm, and decided to take a walk along the Nile. I didn't make it more than twenty steps when a dust-covered caleche driver in a gelebiya approached, took my hand, and offered a ride in his buggy. I turned it down. Grass? He offered. No. Hashish? Thanks, but no. Banana? Uh, no thanks.

He gave a rough sigh. Sir. Banana means sex.

Yeah, country boy, I understood your silly metaphor. I gave my best Cherry Blossom Princess smile (something I learned from the Japanese) and just said, oh, thank you, good night.

The Cherry Blossom routine grew less effective the further north I walked, as each succeeding caleche driver - and it was non-stop - grew more assertive and blunt. I finally turned around when one squeezed the outline of his hard-on through his robes to show me what he had.

It wasn't even that impressive of a banana. I was really expecting a higher quality of harassment.

This morning I took the local ferry across the river to visit some tombs cut in the hillside. And by ferry, I mean a small leaky wooden boat crammed with Nubians. Finally, I thought - I'm having a real Egyptian experience.

Most of the tombs were locked, but I did manage to get in a few. These were for nobles and priests, not royalty, so they were on a more human scale. I was brave enough to scurry down one hole into the darkness - and realized that I could never do this as a career. I like sunshine too much, and I scurried back up just as quick.

Out across the desert, 3 km and a few hills over, I could see the ruins of a 7th Century monastery that I'd read about. I sat at the edge of the Sahara and pondered whether it was a good idea to try and get there. I decided it wasn't, and then headed out anyways. It wasn't a bad walk, and it was great to be out in the open. I spent a few hours exploring the fortress-like monastery, then started what seemed like a much longer walk back to the Nile.

I used Qubbet Heba, the Hill of Wind, as my navigation point. Once I reached the top I met a telepathic Tyrolean who invited me to his place on Elephantine Island for tea. Sure, that sounded good. We walked south along the dune crest, and then down to where he had hidden a rowboat in the reeds.

I spent the rest of the day at his place in the mud-brick Nubian village on the island. It was a great inside look into how people live here.

Next up? Dunno. I got back too late to arrange a tour to Abu Simbel as I had planned. I might spend more time exploring the islands here, or I just might wake up at a brutal hour and see if I can hop on a tour. Abu Simbel is on the Sudanese border, and so there's no choice but to go with a military convoy - at 4am.

Cairo: Final Hours

They need to stop oppressing gays in this country and let us run things for a few years instead. Egypt needs our help, and bad.


I head to the airport in a few hours, and don't know if I've ever been so glad to be leaving a city. It's not that anything outright bad has happened, so much as I've never been to a place so desperately in need of a revolution. It's a city ruled by cars, where people live like rats in the margins.

But I don't know what I would have skipped. I spent the day yesterday with two American archaeologists at Giza, and it was great. They were pretty amazing, actually - they kept digging through the dirt exclaiming at every pottery shard. They could actually look at a fragment and tell without pause how it was fired and cooled, and what period it came from. Saqqara and Dahshur were worth a day. Old Cairo was worth a day, easily. I had to see Islamic Cairo after reading all the history, even though all it's monuments were shockingly run down compared to other places in the middle east.

Today I went to the museum, which was the tipping point for me - what should have rivaled the Louvre instead had all the grace of a warehouse. I woke up early, coughed up all the gunk that had collected in my lungs the day before, packed, ate, and hit the road. The toxic cloud that had settled over the city the night before was blocking the sun, but it was Friday and at least the traffic was a bit lighter than normal. I walked along the Corniche, the road that runs along the Nile. I only had to shake off two hustlers, which wasn't bad.

I thought that I'd beat the crowds, but there were thousands already lined up outside the gates of the museum - tourists of every conceivable stereotype, the worst being the transvestite hookers. I mean, Russians - God's gift to misanthropes everywhere. They only dressed like transvestite hookers. It made no sense: plastic high heels, daisy dukes and halter tops and bare midriffs in the middle of winter in a Muslim capital, tons of make-up, fake blond hair, and fat boyfriends in capris and tight shirts. Worse, they were rude. You could be reading a plaque, and they would literally push you out of the way to get a better look.

I had been confused when people kept telling me how nice the Egyptians are. I mean, yes, they are. But, I thought, where aren't people nice? Pretty much everywhere I've been, and that includes New York and Paris. Now I know: they aren't nice in Russia. They are assholes.

Back to the museum. Sigh. So much wealth, just squandered. Everything was arranged pell-mell, much of it behind grimy glass panes. The toxic cloud from outside crept into the main hall, and turned the air inside a sickly yellow under the glare of the fluorescent lights.

I think of the incredible impact just a few Egyptian pieces had at the Louvre, and how little impact this museum had for all it's pieces, and can't understand why this museum can't find the resources to apply the most basic modern principles to managing or displaying the collection. With the 25US entry, plus 50 for the mummies, and the thousands of tourists there just in the few hours I was inside, and we're talking tens of millions of dollars a year just in entry fees. Poverty is not an excuse here. Certainly they could have at least put in decent lights, or washed the grime off the walls and display cases. Or - inshallah - put in bathrooms where you didn't have to bribe the doorman for toilet paper (or have them demanding baksheesh while you were still pissing).

But overall, this was Cairo. Noise, chaos, dirt, and a government that seems more interested in putting money into the military and secret police than providing basic services. There's such an amazing infrastructure here. It's a shame it's been allowed to decay. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go cough up a lung and then find somewhere to eat.

Cairo Day Three

I just had a really good day. It was a surprise - because I haven't been liking Cairo until now.

Technically, I fucking hated this City. I hated that every transaction had to be a fight, that you could not let your guard down once, that 90% of any random merhaba was followed by a demand for a bribe, baksheesh, or the beginnings of a scam. I hated the air, thick with exhaust fumes. I hated that I couldn't catch a taxi without bargaining hard, and that it would take three to four tries before I would get a taxi offering close to a reasonable price.

I had great plans to explore the city's nightlife. Those are all out the window. It's too much a pain in the ass to wander far.

I hated the hotel. I want a hotel to be a refuge from the world, especially one as chaotic as Cairo. This one is basic - I knew that - but even here I was charged obscenely to hire a driver for a day. The bite was, I knew I could have gotten a private tour with a professional Egyptologist for the same price, but I was stuck with this one as I don't have a phone to arrange other plans. I tried to tell myself that 50 US wasn't bad for a private driver, that I could afford that - but the exploitation from this hotel still stuck in my craw.

And I hated the horns. The non-stop blaring horns. I know there's a secret language in them, and that there's different honks for hello, and do you need a taxi?; a short quick honk for it's safe to cross, and a dreaded long honk for you just fucked up homeboy and are about to be roadkill.

It was probably the horns more than anything that were jangling my nerves. There was no rest, and no peace except for under the covers of my cell-like room. I was like some delicate English lady sent out to the colonies to live with her Officer, totally unprepared for the madness of life outside London.

So I woke up in a dark mood yesterday, all gunked up inside from breathing this air - and the the blackness of my lungs was only matched by the blackness in my soul. I wanted to fly out that night, but I had paid for five days & had a flight on Friday evening to Aswan.

I couldn't believe how badly I misjudged this. But how could I have known? I've liked even the most unlovable of cities, and wasn't Cairo once the Mother of the World?

So, yesterday, I met a Peace Corps volunteer from Armenia, and invited her to share the ride (for which the price went up, dammit). The driver was pleasant, and we started off visiting the pyramids and necropolis at Saqqara.

My spirits went up a little when we say the pyramids of Giza framed on the horizon. I tried to maintain that brief moment of joy while at Saqqara, but ... it was a challenge.

Our first stop: the Mastaba of Mereuke, a tomb for the vizier with 32 underground rooms. It was interesting, but we got trapped in the tomb between a very loud and very large Spanish tour group and a slightly less loud Russian one. We couldn't pass through, and were stuck waiting for them to move before we could.

Next stop: The Mastaba of Ti. This was off the main route, and we had to walk a brief way across the desert to the entrance. Our spirits shot up when we realized we were the only ones there. We descended stone stairs into an underground channel - and the Bedouin pounced from behind one of the pillar. He was like some angry spirit of the tomb, hungry for baksheesh and forcing himself on us as a guide. I tried to ignore him, but he wouldn't allow that. Sir! Sir! He'd snap in my face, and then hiss if I ignored that. Sir! LOOK HERE! ELEPHANT? SEE? ELEPHANT? NOW LOOK HERE. CROCODILE. He was almost as loud as all the Spaniards combined.

Penny (my traveling companion) was a dear old gray haired lady, and unfortunately much more polite than I was. We were stuck with him. He of course, demanded baksheesh at the end, and I gave him a pound (I would've paid ten times that to make him go away), and he got angry. He tried to follow us out of the tomb, but the Tourist Police stopped him.

The Police then asked for baksheesh. Which: no. I draw the line at paying bribes to cops. We walked on with a smile and a masalama.

Then we drove to Zoser's Step Pyramid, the first of the pyramids, built by Imhotep. It was impressive. I wanted to explore some of the other sites (the Serapeum, the Persian tombs, the inside of the collapsed Umas pyramid), but all were closed. Random Bedouin carried keys and offered to open up secret tombs for us, but we declined.

So Saqqara was mixed. It was cool, but it could have and should have been world-class. It has the raw resources, but too much was locked up and only open to those who paid bribes, and it was impossible to know what locked doors led to interesting things and what to empty rooms.

Then we did lunch, at the Pharaoh's Carpet School and Garden. It was our driver's choice. I was ready for more tourist hell, but it turned out to be the perfect pit stop. We ate in a garden of Date palms, and the food was excellent. There was a bit of kitsch - dancing Arabs in tambourines played and danced around us when we entered, left, or went for a piss. But it was also an oasis of peace.

Refreshed, we went south to the pyramids at Dahshur. They were built just prior to the huge ones at Giza, and are almost as impressive. Best of all, you could enter the Red Pyramid. Penny and I lucked out, we were the only ones inside. I was a bit claustrophobic, but made it all the way down the long ramp into the inner sanctum. It was a great end to the day. The cops tried to demand bribes again, but this time I just laughed. Seriously, no fucking way am I going to pay off a cop for doing his job.

But I still could've left Cairo after that.

Today I meant to head to the museum, but changed my plans en route and hopped the metro to Masr Quadima, the original Coptic and Roman town (Memphis, the pharonic city, has long since sunk under the mud of the Nile).

I went without a map, and had to cross multiple highways to get there. That alone was an adventure. I'd join a group of men, and move with them through the traffic. It almost felt like we were a school of fish, all turning left then right in unison until we made it across. The subway was less challenging, but you only had a few seconds to jump on or off the train before it took off. It had it's own dangers.

And Masr Qadima was fabulous. I wandered into convents with signs telling us "No Photos ... Blessed are the Obedient." There were ancient Greek churches, the last Jewish synagogue in Cairo, secret alleys, and mysteries behind every door. In the old cemetery I was shocked to smell. Herbs and flowers, vaguely Mediterranean, but also unique to this place. This, I thought, is what Cairo must have smelled like before 21 million people and 3 million cars.

I spent the day exploring. It was the experience I was hoping for in Islamic Cairo, but that quarter's monuments are stripped and barren. This was the real thing.

And since I didn't have map or agenda, I ended up a bit far from the tourist paths. And this is how I stumbled onto the City of the Dead.

I was walking down a dirt road bounded by two walls, trying to find my way back to the main thoroughfare. On the left was the Greek cemetery with it's smells. Behind the wall on the right I could see what looked like the roofs of a village. I came to an open gate, asked a young man lounging under a tree if was ok to go in, and he motioned me to go ahead.

I entered, once again, into another world. It looked like a village of small stone or brick houses, all packed close together and with neat dirt alleys and paths running between them, and many complete with doors and stairs and porches. Each house, however, was a tomb. It was a tidy Our Town for the dead. I explored for a good thirty minutes, with no company but the stone angels perched on the roofs of the tombs.

I left in a bit of a daze. It was the singularly most haunting place I have ever seen. I recouped for a bit in a coffee shop, then hopped the metro back to town.

So. Cairo. The walk back was ok. The horns still irk, and I still can't breathe, but ... it might not have been such a bad choice after all.

Tomorrow I take the train for a day trip to Alexandria. Inshallah.

Cairo the Rapacious

This city is kicking my ass. I'm starting to develop an atitude that would put New Yorkers to shame.

The truth is, I was more anxious than I let on in visiting. Breathing the air, they said, was the equivalent of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. The merchants are so cunning they once fleeced the King of Mali of twenty camels laden with gold. The traffic is so insane that the guidebook recommends hiring a taxi to cross the street. 21 million people are squeezed between the barren desert, with an increasingly deadly police state above and the Muslim Brotherhood on the streets below.

I arrived at the hotel, crawled into the bed, and debated staying there until my flight to Aswan.

Seriously. I only act tough. I'm like the kid who climbs to the highest rock to dive off it, and he only did that because he read about it in a book, and then remembers too late that he's scared of heights.

Books are bad.

Thirty minutes after lying in bed my stomach overruled my timid brain & demanded that it go out and find food. And so I ventured out for my first taste of this city of 21 million.

I'm staying on Zamalek, an island in the Nile. It's slightly more upscale than the surrounding madness on either bank of the Nile. It has it's crazy high-speed no-rules roads, but it also has quiet sidestreets where guards sleep standing up in the shadows, and embassies are hid behind high walls and private gardens.

Within the hour I'd eaten my first meal in Egypt - pigeon on a stick. It was stuffed with wheat, then roasted on an open fire. The chef snapped the head off before serving me, for which he has earned my eternal thanks. An hour after that I'd shaken off my first hustler. He hit me up while I was taking photos of the Nile. It was ... muddy. Not photogenic at all. I suppose I was expecting the Seine, all golden lights and stunning vistas. As for the hustler? He was an amateur, to be sure, but still - it gave me confidence to handle him so easily.

Same routine this morning. I debated hiding under the sheets for the day. I wondered if I shouldn't cave and join a tour group. Or spend the day locked in the museum.

Instead, I hailed a taxi and rode into the heart of the madness - Fatimid Cairo, the original Islamic quarter. This was the quarter that has caught my imagination, even more than the pyramids and the tombs and all the other pharaonic monuments. You can blame books again - I'd read too much Naguib Mahfouz, and too much of the history of the area - Mohammed's conquest, the rise of the Fatimid dynasty, it's take over by Salahadin, Crusaders camping at the gates, the slave-wife who hid her husband's death long enough to take charge herself and establish a dynasty of former slaves who later enslaved the caliph's family after Genghis Khan destroyed Baghdad ... I had to walk these streets myself.

First I had to survive the taxi ride. I was warned a Cairo taxi was an adventure in itself. I wasn't prepared for the driver to approach a crowd of pedestrians and then hit the gas. We went plowing through the crowd, slaloming between the poor innocents, and somehow came out the other end without hitting a soul. There was no time to breathe before we approached a merge at speed where three lanes closed into one.

Thirty minutes of this, and we turned a corner into another millennium. I had asked to be dropped off at Bab Zuweyla, the southern gate of Fatimid Cairo. I expected - what? Not this. Not a dusty dirt road in the middle of this metropolis, flanked by thousand-year old stone walls, with covered alleys leading away into mysterious directions.

And all without another tourist to be seen. I was shaking when I got out of the cab. I climbed the minaret for a good view of Cairo, and sorry that you'll all have to wait for the photos. Spent the rest of the day wandering the streets and alleys of the old city.

And like the poor King of Mali, I was royally fleeced.

First the good: just being here was an adventure in itself. The keeper of the Bab Zuweyla gate gave me a great tour. In Arabic, but he kept it simple. The restored Ottoman House of Beit Suheimy was fabulous, and was like stepping right into the pages of Palace Walk. The view of the Cities of the Dead were haunting. And the mosque of Sultan Hussein had beautiful marble work that provided perfect acoustics for an Iman singing prayers in the mausoleum behind the prayer room.

The mediocre? Nowhere to piss. I had to hide behind a ruined monument. You would pay a guard 20 EGP (2 dollars) to open a locked door - but there was no guarantee that there'd be something interesting behind it. The hustlers were supposed to be bad, but I found them to be a minor, almost charming, annoyance.

The bad? Lunch. I ate at a local dingy hole in the wall. The proprietor started piling food in front of me. There was so much chaos and noise all around, and such a mass of shouting people at the cafe, that I couldn't manage to say no, stop, this is enough.

And so I ate eggplants and an egg soufflé and falafel and hummus and a tomato salad, and finally had to order him to stop. I was going to burst, and it was turning into an awkward situation.

Then he brought desert out. No. I begged. I wish I knew how to say "I'm full." Instead, it was la la la shokran no please no thank you for the love of god no. I held his hands and looked into his eyes and tried to get my message across.

No luck. He force fed me. No shit, and no exaggeration - he took the spoon and forced it in my mouth.

I was laughing. It was all a bit surreal, being force-fed by a mad chef in a medieval city. Then he gave me the bill.

By American standards, it was slightly over-priced. By Egyptian standards? Ten to twenty times what the cost should have been.

So no more laughing. They got me. Me and the King of Mali. I paid, left the shop, put on my shades, and hit the streets with a new attitude.

One upshot of all this was, I wasn't scared of the traffic anymore. Once outside the quarter I was walking across the street with the best of them.

I'm determined to get the better of this City. It feels like a competition.

Tomorrow - I've hired a driver to take me to the pyramid fields at Dahshur and the Necropolis at Saqqara. "These are not tourist," he told me. "You like Giza better, yes?"

But I'm sticking with Plan A.

Munchen on a Sunday Morning

I landed in Munich last night, completely but expectedly disoriented. The flights went well, and I was doing alright until a few brief hellacious hours at London´s third-world Heathrow Airport. It knocked the winds out of my sails, and the final leg from London to Munich was a bit of a daze. My original hotel had some water damage, so instead of checking me in they arranged for a room at a higher-class hotel down the road, and handed me enough cash to make up the difference in cost.

That was totally unexpected - especially from a budget hotel sandwiched between Man´s World and Tiffany´s Lap Dance Palace - and kind of puts Waikiki hotel´s to shame. We have so much to learn.

I left my house at 5am Friday morning, and arrived at 5pm Saturday night. Thirty six hours by the clock, though my body only went through 24 hours - and I´m applying this to a new theory on how to beat jet lag, my own little special theory of traveler´s relativity. I won´t think: oh, I´m x hours ahead of home and how will I ever adjust? Instead I´ll tell myself that there is no time difference, and that I merely traveled forward through time at a faster rate than the kids back home. I did one and a half hours for every hour they did, and that´s that.

It might have worked. I was sick and beat when I arrived, but a nap, shower, wander through town, and sauna was all it took. By midnight I was feeling fine - demonstrated by a sudden and ravenous craving from bratwurst. It might have been the statues of pigs all over that triggered it. I first thought it might be a Christmas thing - a Yule hog to go along with the tannenbaum and lights; now I´m thinking it must be some deeper pan-seasonal symbol of Bavaria.

The town itself is beautiful. I arrived with a google map and a rough idea of where the train station, hotel, and sauna were. I planned on winging the rest. I wandered in a good-seeming direction, and stumbled on the Marienplatz. It was bounded by a huge gothic cathedral with a huge Christmas tree out front, and it looked like some child´s fantasy of what the holiday should look like.

I tried to use the castle´s spires as a landmark to navigate home, but I didn´t realize that it was just one of who knows how many castles and cathedrals in a small area. I didn´t get lost, amazingly, but did take a bit of a detour trying to find the route back to my bed.

This morning I´m immobile again, but for a different reason - German breakfasts. The hotel spread was stunning - fourteen kinds of meats and sausage (I counted), fourteen kinds of cheese (ditto), a dozen kinds of bread, two kinds of smoked salmon, a yogurt bar, a muesli bar, strong bitter coffee, espresso, fresh squeezed juice, an assortment of pickles, eggs, potatoes .... frakkin´heaven on a cold rainy morning. Next time someone tries to pass off a croissant and nescafe as a ´Continental Breakfast' they´ll be getting an earful from me. I could´ve spent all day there, but after trying to sample all the meats and cheeses I hit a wall, and would´ve had to purge to continue on.

Twenty more minutes and I leave for the airport to fly to Cairo; then the real adventure begins.

Living His Life Faster

Jonathan Keller took a photo of himself every day for the past eight years, less 239 days in 1999/2000 when he was in Antarctica.

These are the photos as of October 1, 2006.


Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK's Daily Photo Project from c71123 on Vimeo.

Flying the Ama

I stumbled on this teaser-trailer from Soul Fabric Films.

Shock Doctrine

This is a video Alfonso Cuaron did with Naomi King to promote her new book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.



The basic theory is that free-market capitalism willfully exploited disasters in the past four decades in order to promote the market. This is an excerpt from the book that was published in the Guardian. I'd add it to my amazon list, but I'll probably end up buying it before the week is out.

I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African- American southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did.

Born and raised in New Orleans, he'd been out of the flooded city for a week. He and his family had waited forever for the evacuation buses; when they didn't arrive, they had walked out in the baking sun. Finally they ended up here, a sprawling convention centre now jammed with 2,000 cots and a mess of angry, exhausted people being patrolled by edgy National Guard soldiers just back from Iraq.

The news racing around the shelter that day was that the Republican Congressman Richard Baker had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city" - which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets", you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.

Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died."

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?" A mother with two kids chimed in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, "Uncle Miltie", as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."

Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.

The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that "Katrina accomplished in a day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster capitalism".

Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.

In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine". He observed that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo". A variation on Machiavelli's advice that "injuries" should be inflicted "all at once", this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies.

Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock after Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.

It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a "Chicago School" revolution, as so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic "shock treatment". In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy", has been the method of choice.

I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.

Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.

When I began this research into the intersection between super-profits and mega-disasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to "liberate" markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF.

As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.

Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy.

The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint, some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.

Until recently, these conditions did not exist in the US. What happened on September 11 2001 is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home. The Bush administration, packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld, seized upon the fear generated to launch the "war on terror" and to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering US economy. Best understood as a "disaster capitalism complex", it is a global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the US homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all "evil" abroad.

In a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the centre of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary functioning of the state - in effect, to privatise the government.

In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the "emerging market" and IT booms of the 90s. It is dominated by US firms, but is global, with British companies bringing their experience in security cameras, Israeli firms their expertise in building hi-tech fences and walls. Combined with soaring insurance industry profits as well as super profits for the oil industry, the disaster economy may well have saved the world market from the full-blown recession it was facing on the eve of 9/11.

In the torrent of words written in eulogy to Milton Friedman, the role of shocks and crises to advance his world view received barely a mention. Instead, the economist's passing, in November 2006, provided an occasion for a retelling of the official story of how his brand of radical capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every corner of the globe. It is a fairytale history, scrubbed clean of the violence so intimately entwined with this crusade.

It is time for this to change. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful reckoning with the crimes committed in the name of communism. But what of the crusade to liberate world markets?

I am not arguing that all forms of market systems require large-scale violence. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that demands no such brutality or ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy - such as a national oil company - held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.

John Maynard Keynes proposed just that kind of mixed, regulated economy after the Great Depression. It was that system of compromises, checks and balances that Friedman's counter-revolution was launched to dismantle in country after country. Seen in that light, Chicago School capitalism has something in common with other fundamentalist ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity.

This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman's counter-revolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change - when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way - moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture - a flood, a war, a terrorist attack - can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.

Torture: the other shock treatment

From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. Chile's coup featured three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would re-emerge three decades later in Iraq. The shock of the coup prepared the ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks.

But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic. Torture, or in CIA parlance, "coercive interrogation", is a set of techniques developed by scientists and designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation.

Declassified CIA manuals explain how to break "resistant sources": create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The goal of this "softening-up" stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want.

The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster - the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown - puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.

Hot Hot Hot

This is the school Miss Teen South Carolina wants to attend. I was going to post it and laugh some more at the hicks, then thought twice about it.

Then, a few hours ago, I heard that their football team beat Michigan.

That is almost as unbelievable as this recruitment video.

Talk about it at Videocracy

When Fashion Turns Deadly

Last video before I purge ... a new threat rears its ugly head in North Dakota. And North Dakota panics.

People who are this dense should not be allowed to vote, breed, or leave the Dakotas.

The Secret of Brokeback Mountain

A viral for Canal-Plus

Canal+ Brokeback Mountain +English subs
Uploaded by YforYerom