ABOUT ME AND WORLD MUSIC

Hi! Welcome to my new world music blog. It’s good to be back here writing, not playing with widgets and gadgets, so I hope the new layout is pleasing enough. I think it’ll only get better. As I make the transition from a travel blog to a music/film one, there are other changes that are both cause and effect, undercurrents and overtones to the most obvious one. One is the transition from a personal blog to a professional one. Related to that is the transition from a non-commercial site to a more commercial one (I hope). Hey, I got bills to pay and habits to feed. The difference is also more apparent than real anyway, one of degree not kind. I get no salary for this, so any pocket change is welcome. If you’re thinking of buying something from Amazon anyway, I could use the commission. Thanks. If it’s starting to look like Chinatown here, well that only adds to the ambience, right? Lastly there’s the transition from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle for me. (Pssst! Don’t go there, Hardie…) Okay, so let’s move on to other things. So, for those of you who don’t know me, and maybe some who do, maybe you’re wondering what qualifies me to pontificate on world music and film?

I’m no musician and though I studied some film and video and made at least a few, my experience is not vast. I never even heard the term ‘ethnomusicology’ when I was going to school, and Putumayo was a river in Colombia where I went looking for yage in the steps of my patron saint Uncle Bill Burroughs. I never found the vine (though it’s now available over Internet), but I did meet Mr. Burroughs at Naropa in 1982. Now that doesn’t qualify me as an expert in music or film, so I guess I’m just a fan, hopefully an educated one. I’ve traveled in fifty some-odd (some very odd) countries and kept house in a couple of them, worked in even more. I got into world music at a slow point in my career while listening to my stepson obsess over the Thai group Carabao. I liked Carabao a lot a decade ago when I first heard them, but understanding the lyrics opened up a whole new dimension, like the first time I heard Dylan or Costello or Cobain. There are very few lyricists that good. It’s mostly about the music. I felt that they deserved a larger audience, and still do, and I even adapted a few songs to English, but it’s not that easy to create entire new dimensions or wormholes between worlds.

So, though I’ve long liked ‘world music’ I’ve only been serious about it for just a few years. I like the ‘indie’ and ‘Americana’ genres just as much probably, and the terms are all equally vague and subject to interpretation, but world music deserves special care and attention. We’re talking about real people here, rare specimens at that, and if left to the whims and fancies of the American marketplace, world music could easily die on the vine. If you don’t believe me, just look at the current status of world arts and crafts. Once-flourishing cottage industries now lie abandoned as fashions change and the natives don’t, so income is lost; or they do change and traditional culture is lost. Fortunately except for Britain and Ireland Europe has little music of its own, compared to America, so is world music’s main patron. France deserves special mention for the help it gives, especially to its Francophone former dependencies in West Africa. So now that I’ve learned a bit about world music over the last few years, it never ceases to amaze me that many people have no idea what it is. That’s understandable, since the term gets tossed around very loosely even by its main protagonists, to the detriment of us all, in my opinion.

To some promoters, especially on the US West Coast, ‘world music’ is a new market-savvy term for reggae, simple if not pure, like calling granola ‘muesli’ for new sales hooks. On your favorite airline’s in-flight play list it’s likely a very smooth version of foreign pop music or light jazz. To drum circle and percussion enthusiasts, it’s totally different, anything but smooth and heavily oriented toward Africa. For Europe it’s heavily oriented toward Africa and Europe’s own ethnic and cultural minorities, especially in the Balkans, East Europe, and Spain. The US East Coast follows much of that logic and adds a strong Latino and Caribbean emphasis, including the US’s own rich Louisiana heritage. It’s a categorical mess, with ethnicity crucial to some, meaningless to others. The best definition I’ve heard goes something like, “non-English music from all over,” to which I would only clarify ‘non-English SPEAKING’ and add minority CULTURES regardless of language. Ghana and Nigeria should not be excluded because of English proficiency.

For the uninitiated I’ll give a quick history lesson. World music first come to the public’s attention around twenty-five years ago when somebody, probably inspired by Bob Marley’s success and untimely death, decided that Africa was ripe for the picking. Thus the ‘scramble for Africa’ began, and ‘world beat’ was the catchword. Oil-rich Nigeria was relatively prosperous and numerous bands had long caught the fever of pop music from the US and UK. From there Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade were quickly signed, and enjoyed wide success, spawning many imitators. Many Western rock legends such as Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Peter Gabriel at this point were inspired to get involved and facilitate the process, creating record companies, festivals, and collaborating, a process which continues to this day. Ry Cooder went even deeper and resurrected almost-dead genres in his collaborations with Buena Vista Social Club and Ali Farka Toure’ and in the process helped move world music beyond its original slick ‘world-beat’ phase into something more meaningful. To this day Cuba and Mali are the shining examples of world-music’s ability to transcend its circumstances.

Fast-forward to the present and world music stands at the cross-roads, like all minority interests, torn between purity and loyalty to its roots or assimilation into the mass culture developing rapidly with the global MySpace generation and widespread use of English language. It’s a delicate balancing act, made more difficult by its own proponents’ almost stubborn refusal to develop it into one commercially viable genre, and its inability to make much sense in the wake of its conglomeration from too-numerous sub-genres, far too many to even mention. While one music blogger derides the term ‘world-beat’ as ‘cutesy’, I find it useful, basically dividing all music into two categories- fast and slow. A more elaborate analysis might settle simply on the American nomenclature of rock, jazz, blues, folk, pop, modern urban and country styles, to which I’d only add ‘traditional classical.’ Almost all world music could fit into one of these categories, albeit prefixed with the country of origin.

Obviously the term ‘world music’ is something of an Anglo-centric one; that’s a given. English language is the de facto international medium, neither rare nor well-done. Nevertheless world music festivals can and do occur in non-English-speaking countries to broad audiences. Most people ‘get it,’ but the promoters don’t always, booking a US blues or bluegrass or straight-ahead jazz band just to be ornery I think, maybe smirking, “I figure the US is part of the world, isn’t it?” This is not helpful. We want different music with different rhythms in different languages from different cultures, plain and simple. Is that so hard? Nevertheless a play list and Top 40 of sorts is emerging, which I think is good. Some blogs will go on and on about Bob Marley, Paul Simon, and Ry Cooder. That’s old news. Others will tell you about bands so obscure that they don’t even have a MySpace site. Enlightenment lies along the middle path. To experience the depth and diversity of what’s currently happening in world music, listen to the following, if you haven’t already, and then see what you think. These acts are all alive and kicking and coming soon to a city near you. Here goes (off the top of my head, in no certain order): Tinariwen, Dengue Fever, Manu Chao, Lila Downs, Angelique Kidjo, Vieux Farka Toure’, Orchestra Baobab, Etran Finatawa, Seun Kuti, and Ozomatli. That’s just for starters. Who says World Music has no hooks?

WORLD MUSIC WEEKEND IN LA—TOO HOT!

The first weekend of summer here in LA last weekend was one for the record books, temperatures climbing way up into triple digits in the valleys and not much better downtown. I usually avoid such temperature extremes, but you get used to it after a few days and weekends aren’t so bad anyway what with less traffic and turmoil. The Seun Kuti show Friday night at Cal Plaza was even a bit warm though quite tolerable, considering the immense talent of dad Fela’s ‘Egypt 80’ band and son Seun himself. Saturday would be a challenge, though. Pasadena sounds cool whether it actually is or not, so my wife Tang and I said “damn the torpedoes” and charged with little trepidation out into the noonday LA sun. The choice of Pasadena was fairly easy since I’m a huge fan of Dengue Fever and also wanted to check out the Mexican groups there. Otherwise I might’ve seriously considered the ‘Bayou Fest’ in Long Beach, featuring the likes of zydeco stars Terrence Simien, Savoy Doucet and Geno Delafose, with plenty of Cajun, creole, jazz, and blues also for their diverse populace. Those bayous run deep after all, way up into north Louisiana, too. Downtown there was a major Latino reggae/ska fest called LA Sound Systems going on also, featuring groups from seven countries, including Maldita Vecindad and Anti-Doping (I expect names like that from Thailand, not South America). I’m no huge ska fan and never heard of ‘Reggae en Espanol’ (not to be confused with Reggaeton), and that festival was fifty bucks a head, so you know…

The others were free, including a ‘solstice’ 60’s festival in Santa Monica featuring Cubensis and other nostalgia groups. The first-year Pasadena fest was the only one with a ‘world’ stage, though, logical since it is affiliated with the multi-national ‘fete de la musique’ and partially sponsored by France through its local Alliance Francaise. It wasn’t exactly another Festivale Internacionale in Lafayette, Louisiana, but still a good start. For those who don’t know France is a major supporter of world music, part of its on-going efforts to promote Francophony and French-speaking countries around the world, most of them in the West African world music heartland. Unfortunately the world stage got the short end of the stick, located far from the others, and without proper shade, no small consideration on a triple-digit day. I hope that’s improved for next year. World music has enough problems without suffering promotional slights.

But the show must go on of course, so we all persevered in the heat. I got there in time for the acclaimed Tijuana group Nortec Collective, but found the experience, though not the music, disappointing. There’s something to be said for a group going Euro-style with a guy on stage tweaking the knobs of his laptop computer, but two of them, hunched over like a couple of video-game geeks? This is uninspiring. I go to a festival, or concert, to hear live music, not ‘sampling.’ A video display doesn’t help much in the bright daylight either of course, so this show would’ve been much better in the dark and indoors, where DJ’s have long established their turf with similar displays. Fortunately there was a continuous live accordion accompaniment with occasional horns, so that helped keep things lively enough for the mostly Anglo crowd. Make a laptop shaped like a guitar for on-stage use, though, and then you might have something.

Dengue Fever came on next, looking like assorted apostles, fishermen and farmers following Cambodian lead singer Ch’hom Nimol to the altar of entertainment, there to make sweet and savory offerings to lesser gods as they play out their fantasies in real life until it becomes legend. For the uninitiated the story goes that these guys discovered 60’s Cambodian pop while on a backpack tour there in the 90’s and subsequently delayed while recovering from… guess what? Dengue Fever. I myself listened to and watched old ‘Cambodian Bandstand’ videotapes for hours while in Sihanoukville; they’re killer. From there the Holtzmann brothers perused the Cambodian clubs of Long Beach looking for a lead singer, until they finally found Ch’hom Nimol. The rest is history, a slow climb to stardom, though poor Nimol’s flower looked ready to wither in last Saturday’s heat. Nevertheless it was a typically brilliant set, complete with encore. These guys write their own songs now, in Khmer and English, and are ready to break big on the world stage.

AfroBeat Down followed with some danceable rhythms, but by then I was hot and hungry and ready to get back to the main action on the other side of town. There the Raveonettes were finishing up their rave-on set to audience applause, so we grabbed a pizza to await the Kinky show. Kinky, like Nortec, is a Mexican group, this time from Monterrey. Like Nortec they play their own unique brand of fusion techno/ranchero, but unlike Nortec, it’s all live, and they had a large appreciative crowd. Considering there were six stages scattered around town, it was impossible to see everything, and world music is a large umbrella (more about that later), but Bobby Rodriguez’ large band closing the show at the jazz stage was probably the highlight for me. For one thing acts like this are hard to find these days. These guys, many advanced in age, were right out of the fifties and the heyday of Cuban-inspired Latin jazz. I almost expected a wacky redhead to wander out from the wings at any moment. For another thing, these guys are good, a sound as crisp and full as the rapidly cooling evening air. You can go to Hollywood Bowl and hear similar yet more famous more expensive music, but I don’t think you would hear much better. Arturo Sandoval’s got nothing on these guys.

This weekend may be a little less festive, but there’s no shortage of music. Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s Minister of Culture and veteran musical journeyman dating back to the Bossa Nova days, is headlining the Hollywood with quirky Indie-Folksters Devendra Banhart as part of KCRW’s ‘World Festival.’ They didn’t call it ‘World Music Festival’ so I won’t waste any space questioning their motives right here right now, but I’ll probably check out Kusun Ensemble and Quetzal at the Levitt Pavilion in Pasadena on Friday and Saturday nights respectively. Like most of the best things in life, it’s free.

Wanna' buy a MP3 download for a buck, buddy? (See you in MySpace)

Okay my dear friends and readers, here's the deal: as you can see the old blog is being converted to my new world music/film blog, so please stay tuned if you're interested in such things. Meanwhile, I'll try to continue a personal blog over at MySpace, which could be interesting since it has enough members now to rank as about the fourth most populous country in the world, depending on whether they can continue to grow faster than Indonesia can reproduce. MySpace is more than a social network, you know. It is simply THE best place to listen to any kind of music in the world, and it's improved so you don't have to click on individual songs so much. Check it out. And don't rule out the possibility of networking either. I know there's a generational divide on this, most of us old flatulaters preferring to actually sit down and look each other in the face, not on the screen, but this can be more than a fashion statement, you know. Aside from 235 million members and upstart counterparts at YouTube and FaceBook, etc., the fact that so many people (OK, mostly kids) see this as a way of life, it derives an unparalleled potential from that very fact. Be my friend over there! I'm tired of Tom! Wanna' see some dirty pictures? That's

http://www.myspace.com/karges

See you there! (hey, somebody download a MP3 song from here and tell me if it works!)

BLOGICIDAL TENDENCIES- Putting the Family Blog to Sleep?

Well, things are not going smoothly for the new world music/film blog. You’d think you get what you pay for, but actually the paid service through TypePad is causing more problems than this blog by Blogger, which is free. WordPress is also free, but allows no advertising, though they do envision it at some point in the future. At my age the future is now. The problem here at Blogger is that third party services confuse the new and old blogs. That’s why you see all these extra ‘widgets’ (click buttons) in the upper right that are supposed to be on the new blog. It’s starting to look like Chinatown around here. The idea is for the new blog to be more professional with ads and sales and services and… (drumroll here please) MASS READERSHIP. I’m not greedy you know but… I could use a job, and selling Thai girls by Google Ad isn't working out. I thought about just killing this blog to remove the confusion but then you guys my friends and faithful readers might lose track… so, what I might do is just convert this blog to a world/music film one and start a personal non-commercial blog elsewhere, or not at all. This blog’s name might even change but the URL stay the same. Please send me an e-mail if you’re confused as this blog gets chaotic, but it should work out within a few days. My personal life’s pretty boring these days anyway, pretty much just Tang, Tang, and Tang, my mother wife and child a full-time job mentally if not physically. Some people think I shouldn’t be talking about her here since she can’t read it, but believe me you don’t know the half of it. Anyway, pardon our dust as we work out technical details and make executive decisions. STAY TUNED! (And I’ll post the new blog here just for a teaser, heh heh… on second thought, maybe go ahead and subscribe to the new blog address above just in case; can’t hurt)

LA’S MALAISE (part 2)- GRACIAS A DIOS POR LA MUSICA!

If you drilled a hole through the center of the Earth, starting at Thailand, where do you think you’d come out (yes, I actually do stuff like this)? Wrong. Guess again. Wrong again. Okay, so pull out the globe if that’ll help. No, you don’t have to actually drill the hole, but you could pull a string around the widest point then mark the half-way spot and do it again. It’s probably easiest to just check the co-ordinates and do some simple math starting with base sixty Sumerian multiples that have been handed down as the number of degrees in a circle. Disregard the fact that the world is not a perfect ball, actually somewhat pear-shaped, and pretend that the center could actually be defined as a certain exact point. If you’re lucky you’ll come out somewhere in Peru. If you’re unlucky you’ll come out somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, depending on your specific starting point. Thailand’s a big country. So is Peru. If you started around Chanthaburi, you’d come out in Lima. You might be disappointed. It ain’t pretty, most of it, outside the Plaza Mayor and Plaza De Armas. Neither is Bangkok in my humble nature-loving opinion. Try to find a park there! For much of it though you probably wouldn’t notice much difference. You’d see the same brownish swarthy skin all over punctuated by a lucky few much lighter. You’d see the same noisy streets. In small towns you’d see the same crowded pungent markets. Until you listen to the language being spoken and the food being eaten, they could be almost interchangeable. In terms of cultural evolution the language is the main thing. But what a difference when you go outside the cities! The rice fields of Thailand are gone and potatoes reign supreme in Peru, all two hundred varieties of them. The pine trees and mangrove of Thai coasts are gone and the desert rules eternal in Peru, some places that haven’t seen rain in a hundred years. The lowlands of Thailand are gone, the Mekong Basin only a few hundred feet high a thousand miles from the sea, and the Andes shoot straight up from the Pacific Coast, only to fall off again and forever into the endless green expanse of the Amazon Basin.

Still the natives of both places are not so dissimilar, perhaps because of their common origins, whether via a land route or sea, though long separated in both time and space. They’re two of the most enigmatic cultures in the world, however lovable, though they know little or nothing of each other. But they’re all here in LA, and for the most part have little to do with each other, people largely staying within their own group for social intercourse, Asian women and Anglo men being the most likely exception to that rule. It’s a pity, that the various cultures of the world connect what little they do, only via the predominant English-speaking one, by insinuation if not actual assimilation. In the process indigenous cultures get lost and the dominant one maybe becomes more diverse racially but not culturally, people lost in the shuffle in a nation ‘of laws, not men.’ I’d like to change all that, and music seems the place to start, being the universal language in my opinion (equations don’t express emotion). LA’s wealth is that of its immigrants’ diverse ethnic origins, and I’d like to devote some of this time and space to bringing them a little closer, at least to us if not each other. That’s always been my goal as traveler and trader, so it must be part of my make-up psychologically (where’s my mascara)? So if evolution loves a mass extinction, then so does this blog. It has to reach the end of its current trajectory before it can become something else. And so it shall I hope. Given its current scatter-shot catch-all forum for whatever I happen to fancy expounding on at any given moment, this is good. Though part of this catch-all title was to gain rank in the Blogosphere by using keywords and meta-tags where and when such things matter, much of it was simply my own lack of focus and assumption that it would be a de facto combination travel/ex-pat blog which seemed feasible and which has defined my life for the last few years, hyper travel (while dabbling and indulging in world music) with a base in Thailand. Both travelers and ex-pats are fairly avid bloggers and readers and forum participants, perhaps intrinsic to their circumstances for lack of other outlets in which to merge their urge to ‘stay connected.’

But things change, and so must this blog. I’ve learned some things by affiliating with Technorati, Feedburner, and Google, etc. the last half year. If you google the words ‘Thailand’ and ‘Timbuktu’ simultaneously, we’ll still come up #1. We might still twenty years from now. These are messages in bottles that don’t always wash up. That’s OK. And it takes some time to write over a hundred pages in a few months for something that’s a labor mostly of love. But above all it’s always been a personal blog, and so it shall remain. The new off-shoot will not be. It’ll be a world music blog, based in and around LA, for now at least, and hopefully bound for glory, or at least greater professionalism, links to Amazon and all that jazz. Hey, you gotta’ have dreams. As I’ve already mentioned such acts as Seun Kuti, Tcheka, Son de Madera, and Ricardo Lemvo are scheduled for Grand Performance at Cal Plaza this summer, and that’s not the half of it, much of it for free. In the last three days I’ve seen no less than Seun Kuti, Dengue Fever, and Mexico’s Kinky, and missed no less than zydeco’s Terence Simien and Gene Delafose. There were Pasadena’s ‘Make Music’ Festival, Long Beach’s Bayou Fest, Olvera Street’s Latino reggae/ska festival, Santa Monica’s solstice hippie-fest, and even a Mariachi blow-out at Hollywood Bowl, ALL IN ONE WEEKEND. I chose Pasadena, partly for Tang to see the ‘real America’ of white people and picket fences and of course the music, including everybody’s favorite Cambodian band that I missed last week because the blue line to Long Beach is undergoing repairs. What I’d really like to do is penetrate the seamy Latin underbelly of music here and hear the stuff coming through from Latin America that maybe never even makes it to MySpace. Much of that is late late night at the Hollywood Park Casino, way off the bus line, but there’s El Floridita not far away and maybe I’ll check out GuateLinda in Hollywood soon. Hopefully it’s still got some Latino stuff, though it’s now trendy with its Thursday night ‘Club called Rhonda’ for the emo-, metro, poly-sexual crowd (cracker anyone?).

So the new blog’s up and running, ‘synesthesia’ at http://hardiek.blogspot.com/ , so check it out. Meanwhile I’m busily tacking on widgets and trying to make it look and maybe even sound good. That’d be nice, since it’s about world music and film. There are plenty of both here in the entertainment capital of the world. The music aspect will focus on world music in general, but particularly what’s playing in LA and from a west-coast perspective, i.e. closer to Latin America and Asia. Most world music is more likely to be East Coast/Europe/Africa-oriented. I’ll be more ‘occidented.’ World film is huge, also, and hugely overlooked, so I’ll try to toss some reviews in as I come across them. ‘Opening weekend’ is hardly an operative concept for foreign films anyway. It’s interesting to be back stateside US after a decade and see what happened to all the cutting-edge musical acts I was listening to in the 90’s, before I got world religion. Grunge is dead, of course, along with its chief protagonists, but Himmelman and Michael Penn are now scoring movies (and rewards), and Lanois and T-Bone are the hottest producers around. Sam Phillips is doing some gigs now while T-Bone is touring with Alison and Robert Plant, same as Penn and Aimee. On an even more Hollywoodish note, Juliette Lewis has a band now, likewise Billy Bob Thornton; too bad Juliette’s band isn’t composed of Brad’s exes. There’s some powerful connections there with Jennifer now Jon Mayer’s main squeeze and Gwyneth the Cold Play girl. So Sheryl Crow and Sarah Jessica battle it out on the billboards for ‘big hair mama’ of the month, with locks that would make the cowardly lion blush and the rest of us just flush. Aren’t you glad world music’s nothing like all this paparazzi pap that dominates the Hollywood scene? And who’s Marie Digby anyway? But I still like Death Cab for Cutie. Stay tuned. And don’t try drilling that hole through the earth just anywhere. It’s mostly water. You could get lost out there.

p.s. While this blog was sitting in the can the last day or two I just got notice that I have another poem being published, coming out in December at http://languageandculture.net/. See? I told you I was a writer. Not surprisingly it’s less of an inner-circle poetry e-zine than most, and considering they carry translations of heavyweights like Apollinaire I could almost get giddy (git getty?) imagining the possibilities, like me some modern-day Rambo e-mailing in his poems to Verlaine from SE Asia… (There, I’m better now.) So that’s cool and now I can refer to my publication credits in plural, but the funny thing is that the poem being published is based on the same little thought experiment of the first paragraph above. Now that’s spooky; or is it sympathetic magic? You decide. And don’t forget my new world music and film blog. Check it out if you got time. That’s http://hardiek.blogspot.com/ and since I’m feeling a surge of self-confidence, remember http://hkarges.wordpress.com/ for you hard-core m-f’s who like really pretentious stuff. SUBSCRIBE!

p.p.s. Well, all these new widgets up above certainly make it easy to subscribe to the other blog, but I didn't intend it that way, so it's problematic with third-party services all confused. So I guess I could commit blogicide on this one, or go back to the original 'new blog' I first started at
http://worldmuse.typepad.com/world_muse/ . Any opinions?

LA’S MALAISE- HEAT, INDECISION, AND THE SUMMER SUBLET FROM HELL (part 1)

Okay, so it’s not exactly fear and loathing in Las Vegas, but you get what you pay for, hopefully. Or at least that’s what I thought when I decided to pursue a summer sublease in the general environs of Hollywood and Thai Town, ‘Hollywood adjacent’ in renters’ jargon. Hotels here won’t let you stay longer than 28 days for reasons unstated, and even those weekly rates go up precipitously come June (not to mention the stigma of being ‘transient’). A micro-wave oven and a mini-fridge does not a kitchen make, either, almost but not quite. Furnished apartments are almost unheard of, witness box springs on the sidewalk the first of every month, and likely not cheap. Ditto for less-than-one-year leases, almost unheard of. Buying a house in LA is not for the faint of heart either, a cool half million just to get started, and don’t forget the security system. They say prices are down 30% from last year, but fail to mention that those prices are still 70% over 2000. Do the math. So a ‘summer sublet’ seemed like an inspired idea for anyone who knows how to log on. The print press ain’t got jack. It’s time to look to good ol’ Craig’s List, right? Even Internet bozos should be able to handle a simple sublet, right? That’s a so-called ‘no-brainer,’ isn’t it? It seems others have the same idea, so the competition is fierce, even though there are probably two hundred new listings a day for ‘greater LA’ (don’t laugh), and those list for a week, so some thousand listings at any given time. Those aren’t all around Hollywood of course and many are well over a thousand a month. They can get weird, too, renting out the master bedroom while major tenant sleeps on the living room couch, and so on. Such is the dream factory. Rooms for rent in a shared house are ubiquitous, which is good if you got no credit, but we didn’t want that. Still I responded to half a dozen before I even got a call-back; small units may not want couples.

Finally I got a response and things seemed amenable to both parties, an inexpensive sublet through the busy summer months right off the red line metro train in Hollywood. I might have known something was flakey when she wanted to meet first to make sure we were ‘cool enough’ to hang out with her neighbors, but I didn’t. Fortunately we passed or my self-esteem would have reached unfathomable lows. So we signed a little pro-forma lease, I giving her a lump-sum deposit and monthly rent including utilities, and she’ll handle the actual bills. That sounds simple enough, right? What could be easier? There’s only one problem, one at a time, that is. She mentioned nothing of this arrangement to the landlord or apartment manager. Now I haven’t rented a crib in the US for some twenty years, since before the days when you had to pay to apply for such, but even I kinda’ knew that subletting wasn’t OK unless you OK’d it first. But even then you might slide through like somebody’s big brother AS LONG AS YOU PAY THE F*&^%$# RENT ON TIME! Well of course anybody would go that extra mile for their guest sub-lessee wouldn’t they? Naah…

First I knew there was something wrong was the evening of the third day of this month when the apartment manager stopped me as I returned in the evening and asked who the Hell I was. I explained to no good effect. Then the apartment owner (yes, OWNER, he of some two thousand rooms) wakes me up the next day at 6am to tell me I’m out of line and out of time, get on the lease or get out. Well, this will blow over quickly as soon as the rent gets paid, right? No way. He wakes me up the next day, too, threatening to change the locks before another day passes. After a little flurry of stop-payments on my part and late fees on the original lessee’s part, I finally ended the little mini-crisis by taking over the lease myself, agreeing that we could do the same thing in reverse again in August per our original agreement. Fortunately the apartment’s original renter was actually still in the area, at Mommy Dearest’s house in the valley, her only problem one of cash flow, or we’d’ve really been screwed. But anyway, problem’s over, right? For that to happen the check would have had to ACTUALLY CLEAR, THOUGH, WOULDN’T IT?! Unfortunately my replacement check to her HAD cleared (after an earlier stop payment), so my only collateral was her furniture which I’m currently using. At that point I was certain she had cleverly and sneakily manufactured the whole scenario as a way to rid herself of apartment and furnishings at maximum benefit to herself. I was actually surprised when she coughed up a money order (with penalty) to clear the little rent crisis and I realized she wasn’t a sneak, just a flake. But at least all’s well with the place now, right? All WAS well until I got the ‘final notice’ in the mail yesterday to pay LADWP ASAP or face shut-off of power and water, this bill going back three months. Fortunately in a flash of insight I had insisted on opening the bills myself and paying them or I’d’ve never known till the lights went out. It’s just another day in Paradise.

So the temps here hit three digits Fahrenheit for the fifth day running in this heat wave from Hell. It’s enough to make you miss Celsius. Forty just doesn’t sound so bad. Still life goes on and I’m still a transient, a nomad, and an ex-pat in Thai Town, looking for a job, looking for a reason for the season, albeit with my name on an apartment lease and a marriage license, still far from God, still close to Mexico. But I can’t go. I have to baby sit my wife, she of little English lingo and my name on her visa, which just passed the initial three months entry. I sent in the ‘green card’ papers, now a thousand bucks a pop, but at lest a three-in-one pop, with concurrent applications for right-to-work and ‘advance parole’ to leave the country with proper permission. The work permit will be nice since she’s been working without it for two months. Maybe the ‘advance parole’ will be multiple entry so we can go to TJ some Sunday and fill up the tank with gas. Just kidding, as I don’t have a car, not here at least. No, I’m still stuck until I can drop her off in Thailand for a spell and recuperate with a trip to Ethiopia. It’s not fair here. If we have a fight I still have to baby sit her. I can’t just stomp off saying, “see you later,” then resume the conversation in bed, older but wiser. I have to be responsible even when I’m pissed off. That, my friends, is simply not fair. At least she’s on her best behavior her, right? Yeah, right. And when we are getting along swimmingly, if I tell her I love her, she’ll ask me for a diamond ring, the silly Thai girl. I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. At least she’s paying her half of the bills, the same gal who once had illusions of being housewife-for-life. And I waste time worrying about what to do with this silly blog, while NPR tells the good news about a slackening in the ‘rate of increase’ of oil prices. Thank God for small miracles.

TO REFLECT IS HUMAN, TO SHINE IS DIVINE

America can be brutal, a little bit of Gitmo in all of us and waiting around every corner. This morning was a good example. It’s never fun being awoken at 6am by bangings on the door and bargings on in by what sound like Israeli storm troopers. It’s small consolation that it’s only (?!) the landlord, doing his job without proxy nor finesse. Such are the trials of renting, or rather sub-leasing, an apartment, borrowing a piece of the rock rather than buying it. That’s the problem with cheap hotels also, not the funkiness itself which can be lovable, but the funky attitudes of your neighbors, who can be self-centered and petty, no matter how politically correct. You can hardly blame the landlord being pissed at irregularities in his complexes, though the methods may be a bit heavy-handed. For all he knows I may be cooking up meth in the bathtub, our modern alternative to gin. There’s more than one way to beat Depression. Myself I feel like the junkie whose life revolves around that one all-consuming fix, whether good or bad, in this case my wife, something of a soup Nazi herself on bad days. If she has a bad day, then so do I; she’ll make sure of that. She’s perennially concerned that my minimalistic lifestyle vis a vis possessions, or lack thereof, is basically a smokescreen for the fact that I’m a loser and she’ll end up penniless and faceless. She may be right. Financial statements mean nothing to her. Actually I feel like my main accomplishment in life is that I’ve been at least marginally successful without becoming the victim of it all, possessed by my possessions. How do you explain that to a Buddhist? It should be easy. It’s not. Shacking up in Hollywood I feel literally like a kid with his first apartment. At my age that’s cool….

Right now might be a good time to thank you, my faithful readers, who heeded my call to subscribe, for what I promised would be a thrill-a-minute through the wacky ways of Thailand and assorted arcane geographic locations. How did I know that the visa papers for my wife would show up at the door in Thailand all of a sudden calling her to interview? A few short months later, here we are, far from Thailand and even farther from the open road and open skies of travel. Actually if you consider LA the 77^th province of Thailand, then I guess we aren’t so far away after all, for what that’s worth, on the surface probably not much. By reputation that’s all there is, surface. LA loses itself, or finds itself, in chockablock development, strip mall after car lot after weenie palace after homeless hovel, 1056 shades of nothingness all somehow blending itself into something quintessentially American and marketing itself to the world as ‘the dream.’ Go figure. So here I’m stuck in superficial LA, the epitome of everything I’ve ever held useless, all the while wishing it cared about me more than I cared about it. It’s a love/hate relationship you see, the fact that I’ve never been very successful here defining the logic by which I fail to see its benefit, that and the fact that it can be one goddawful lonely place. That’s what Tang’s here for. She thinks I’m here for her. After all Thailand gives superficiality a good name, or at least a better one. They love it here and in Las Vegas, the more mindless the better. So as we dig our heels in here, sketchy at best are my goals for this blog because there’s no mo’ Thailand in the immediate future nor more travel either. My God! I’m stuck! So far from God, so close to Mexico! I’ll find other writing projects. That’s why I started this blog anyway; I was doing so much travel and had no other current writing projects. So what do I do here now? If you wanted to hear ruminations on individual pasts and collective futures, you’d be reading the other blog. You’re not.

It’s funny, not this blog or the other one either, but the fact that this blog has more subscribers, mostly friends, but hardly any comment. My friends are like that. The other ‘time travel blog’ has more comment, especially whenever I talk about Guatemala. They’re different from Thailand’s fans. I don’t want a forum anyway, so illiterate is the general populace, and I wouldn’t have the heart to tell people to learn how to spell before sending in comments. So what do I do now, talk about Obama? If life is partially defined by those moments of epiphany when you realize ‘I’m not alone,’ then Barack’s ascension has yielded one. I was always skeptical of his halo effect, unsure whether it was naturally settling upon him every time he spoke or whether he was consciously invoking it, or whether like lightning on its way to the ground, a spark leaps up to greet it, a mutuality confirmable only in slow motion. I still don’t know, but others have also noticed. In the ‘Onion,’ an LA-based humor rag, it’s current headline reads, “Obama Practices Looking off into Future Pose,” going into detail about his 54-degree chin tilt, his 1.43cm eye aperture and his head rotated 37 degrees to the left. “When you look to the future, you look to the left.” It’s hilarious. Considering that my previous moments of epiphany with artistic media included the songs “Positively Fourth Street” by Bob Dylan and “Waiting ‘Round to Die” by Townes Van Zandt, I guess I’m mellowing out in my old age, though many people miss the close connection between horror and humor.

So where does that leave us? Still looking for a theme for this blog I guess. Ads for single Thai girls still pop up, so I guess that’s a cosmological constant. Frankly I’m not sure why they’re such a hot commodity, given the generally pathetic level of their English and their suitors’ Thai language skills. Here’s a hint-- actually that’s a help, not a hindrance. They’re out of their minds. Fortunately they’re into their bodies. But others are getting into the game fast. Colombia’s got some girls on the market guaranteed to melt your hardened heart or money back. Just take your pick: doctor, lawyer, or architect; brunette, brunette or brunette; Cali, Bogota’ or a smaller city called Manizales that seems to have little else to distinguish itself. We’re not talking about funky TJ border-town behemoths cheaper-by-the-kilo, either, but some forty-five kilo cuties that could charm the pants off a diplomat. So where does this blog stand in the rankings now? Well, we’re averaging fifteen to twenty subscribers according to Feedburner (I don’t know why it should fluctuate, but it does) and somewhere in the lower 600,000’s in the Technorati ‘authority’ rankings (hey, we started in the lower nine millions), so that says something. If you Google the words ‘Thailand’ and ‘Timbuktu’ together, then I’ll still come up number one, for what that’s worth. Perhaps more importantly, these blogs do get picked up by other websites for use, kind of like a poor man’s syndicated column. You shop XYZ’s website for underwear and below there’s the first few lines of my blog selected by one of their, uh, selectors. If you like then you click and voila!, you’re back here with the guy in his over-the-pub compartment out by Heathrow with planes flying over and pretending it’s his own private 9-11 mini-moment. It might as well be LA.

So I’ll still do this blog when the inspiration strikes, though its goals are now murky. I’ll do the other already-written blog every day regardless. Sound sketchy? Lit’s a wide-open ballgame now, the publishing business following the lead of the recording industry, or lack thereof, MySpace-type sites for writers springing up like mushrooms in cow shit. When I can not only publish my own stuff, but get it listed and sold on Amazon made-to-order, why wait a year for a return to my query letter from some agent who’s overworked and underpaid already? There’s food for thought. Publishing companies themselves haven’t read new work in years. But in the meantime I think I’ll do a blog on world music. Though I’m not really qualified (who is?), I can certainly review the many shows scheduled for California Plaza here in LA this summer- including Seun Kuti, Tcheka, Son de Madera, and Ricardo Lemvo, one big world music festival scattered throughout the summer, and all for free. The opening show, ‘Miles from India,’ featuring the music of Miles Davis played by a combination of Jazz and Indian musicians, was incredible. Stay tuned. There’s more.

MISSISSIPPI SAMADHI: YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN… BUT YOU CAN’T STAY

Don’t go looking through your cookbooks for this one, trying to find what comes after masala, trying to figure out just how this guy might mix and mash a single metaphor for public consumption without resorting to various linguistic chutneys and high-flying adjectives that might be seldom used and therefore perfect for describing the indescribable, the little upward-flowing diverticula of consciousness and lapses in synapses that occur when a sentient being becomes caught in the cross-fire between his responsibilities and his desires, his past and his future. No, samadhi is meditation, pure and simple, hopefully, and more than a little appropriate considering my own Asian leanings, precariously toward the horizontal, and the birthplace and birth race of my wife. Every people get the religion they need I suspect, and meditation founded in Hinduism and grounded with Buddhism, certainly fills the bill. If anybody needs to stop the internal dialog and take a chill without taking a pill, it’s them, and by extension me. It could have been disastrous, after all, taking my copper-toned slanty-eyed succubus of a wife home to meet the homies after years of whisperings and wonderings and educated guesses gleaned from the pages of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Of course most people don’t know the difference between Thailand and Taiwan, so facts tend to be half-baked at best, three minutes in the microwave of public opinion, stir, then serve liberally, for Mississippi at least, with ketchup, as in catching up with the present. She charmed them of course, just like she charmed the pants off me seven years ago. The Asian dragon-lady image is the stuff of downtown Hollywood after all, not Thai Town, and anybody who has tasted the forbidden fruit of inter-racial Biblical knowledge knows that those fetching displays of exotic product are much more likely to have a stuffed animal lying on the bed back home than whips and chains or pipes and papers.

Broken English itself can even be charming at first byte, full of wild gesticulations and broad non-grammatical vocal inflections full of heartfelt if inarticulate meaning, washed down with frothy smiles. That shit gets old of course and there’s no substitute for correct grammar, something few Asian immigrants over the age of thirteen ever accomplish. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, climbing ladders and accomplishing through wiles and intuition what she lacks in vision and technical expertise, gaining more by standing under than by understanding. That’s not the history they teach in books of course, full of wars and conflicts, generals and majors, general snafus and major disasters. It’s the history of cultural drift, following paths of least resistance and imitating successes, long before anybody thought about writing it down and claiming credit. The Industrial Revolution may have had its heroes, but the Agricultural one didn’t, just people following their instincts and their neighbors, to better pastures and a better future. Governments notwithstanding and frequently falling, Asia is more a continent and culture of accommodation than enforcement. That’s what’s held China together for millennia, the culture in continuous transmission, outlasting and even absorbing hostile governments. That’s the basis of ancestor-worship, essentially time-worship, dedication to a lineage extending back into time immemorial, all converging on a single point presumably. If many cultures pride themselves on their individuality, Asia prides itself on its conformity. It’s a female thing, the old-fashioned type, favoring compromise and conciliation over conflict, the perfect breeding ground for either Buddhism or Communism; take your pick. Asia’s pretty cool, but can become stifling and over-stuffed, silly and superstitious. It can become full of itself and full of IT, the smell of decay overwhelming.

So can Mississippi. If LA reminds my wife Tang of Bangkok, then Mississippi reminds her of Chiang Rai, my home of birth reminding her of hers. I guess there’s some poetic justice there. Her parents didn’t come from there originally any more than mine came from Mississippi. My grandmother was born in Harlem back when it was full of German immigrants. They came south for opportunity and land. Tang’s probably did the same, except north, and from Lampang. Ironically while Chiang Rai is relatively prosperous nowadays by Thai standards, Mississippi still lags in most standards of US development. That’s not all bad of course. Land prices in Mississippi and Chiang Rai are similar right now. Wages are not. If anything Mississippi is more beautiful, probably the greenest place I’ve ever seen, including Brazil and Ireland. It has its problems of course, not the least of which is a crime rate in Jackson that must rival that of Johannesburg in creativity, if not sheer numbers. The latest fad is car-jacking. The thief pirates your car while you’re still in it. That way the engine’s running and you can open the door for the new recipient of your old car. It saves time that way and you get to inspect the sidewalk. That somewhat mitigates the circumstances of the other major problem: a police-state attitude toward law enforcement. If that only applied to the mugger fuggers of course then no problem. But no, it applies to me. They wait on the highways at night like fishermen monitoring a pole for any slight wiggles in an imaginary line which represents your trajectory from the immediate present into an indeterminate but well-defined future. They can help you with that; no meaningless infinities allowed here. Ever had a gun held on you by Bozos in Blue talking like the characters on ‘King of the Hill?’ I have. I’ve got a witness. It ain’t pretty. They had the wrong guy. Imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been the right guy. Imagine infinity.

Mississippi has come a long way since ‘the nigra problem’ and its attendant bifurcation of society into rednecks, blacks and so-called ‘nigger-lovers,’ i.e. me and a few others with errant DNA. There were also a few ‘Uncle Toms’ but they usually didn’t last long. It’s truly gratifying to see blacks and whites working together at all levels of public service and if they aren’t mixed together at all levels of society, that’s mostly an economic problem, not a racial one. White flight to the suburbs didn’t start in Jackson nor will it end there and many blacks are counted in those numbers also. As a friend says, “every murder in Jackson means six new residents of Brandon,” my old country home and now suburb. Still old habits die hard and some whites just don’t know how to act around blacks as equals. Mexicans have arrived in heavy numbers also, presumably doing many of the jobs that blacks used to do, or as the president of Mexico once famously said, “even blacks won’t do.” Old habits die hard. Thais are routinely scared of black people and excess body hair. It’s as much esthetic as racial. Thai women spend millions trying to whiten their skin and pluck those pesky underarm hairs religiously. You heard it here first. They’re scared of ghosts, too. As for Mississippi, the few Thais there pretty much got the run of the place. There’s only one Thai restaurant in Jackson so sales are good while the food is uneventful by Thai standards, ditto with Mexican food. Good things take time. Coming back to LA is like landing in Bangkok for Tang, Thai Town a half-way house for recent immigrants. She can even speak northern Thai dialect there, eat Northern food, and talk Northern gossip. I can even be an ex-pat in my own country of birth, hell of a deal. It saves on flight costs. It’s a way of life, crossing borders in minds if not on maps.

…WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL DEPRESSION

I reiterate, “Am I the only one who’s noticed that the world’s bastard-twin little monster problems, i.e. global warming and oil depletion, seem to be somewhat self-canceling, i.e. the depletion of oil will reduce global warming, hopefully just-in-time?” This is not a rhetorical question. I’d really like to know. Maybe I’m just naïve, simplistic, or an idiot, or maybe this is an honest approach to a complex problem. It’s not like a want a free-fore-all forum here or something, but I’d really like to know. Believe it or not, I’ve actually researched all this quite a bit, gracias a la Internet. But nowhere have I seen anyone mention this. Naturally you don’t want people to get complacent and buy multiple SUV’s, but then you don’t want them to commit suicide, either. My main concern right here right now is honesty and articulation, straightforward discussion without smokescreens and pretexts. It’s like all the rap and America-bashing over the budget deficit, exchange rates, and foreign debt. It can all be solved, more or less, by the simple two words that no one wants to say: raise taxes. How many times have they predicted the collapse of Social Security, and how do they resolve the problem every time? Raise taxes. Again, you don’t want to get carried away and watch your precious democracy become reduced to bureaucracy, but you don’t want it to become an unhealthy and uneducated, but lowly taxed, land of slums and slumlords, the few filthy rich lording it over the remaining filthy poor. It’s government’s responsibility to take responsibility where individuals are unwilling or unable to do so, while consciously maintaining a level playing field for all. Government should take from the rich and give to the poor, especially when that means taking from windfall oil profits to encourage alternative energies. For those who cry foul, I assure you it’s usually the other way around, tax breaks for unearned wealth and bailouts for predatory and irresponsible corporations. Considering that our next best energy hope, hydrogen fuel cell technology, is at least forty years away, best guess, this could get really hairy.

But that’s not the real problem. After all we’ll probably survive as a species, but as a technologically advanced culture I’m not so sure. The Dark Ages happened before, and could happen again, Western civilization and its accumulated knowledge stagnant or misplaced for a millennium. Fortunately, last time other cultures transmitted the knowledge onward, Islamic Aristotelians, Syrian Christians and Spanish Jews, so all was not lost. Now, though, who would be up to the task? Internet heads? Yeah, right. Cultures are so intertwined these days that they would probably all fall together, if they fall at all. Who then would transmit nuclear technology on to the next generations? Hmmm, maybe better not… Or what about advanced weaponry? Hmmm once again… Okay, well what about rocket science? I haven’t seen the complete movie about Billy Bob Thornton building his own space rocket, but the prospect is pretty unlikely. A break in a mere generation since the Apollo spaceships to the moon meant that scientists basically had to start over for the next round, presumably to include Mars. All the German scientists who developed the Saturn rockets are long gone and nobody thought to save the plans. Can you believe that? This may be more essential to survival of the species than surviving global warming. After all we may be able to curb auto emissions, but we’ll never control volcanoes. This has been the cause of most major climate changes on the Earth, that and continental drift, and maybe a meteor strike or two. The climate has previously surged far higher than anything imagined from global warming, all within the period of biological florescence, including dinosaurs. What killed the dinosaurs may very well have been post-impact cooling, in fact, not warming.

On the other hand it’s now generally thought that the Earth was a snowball not long before the Cambrian ‘explosion’ of Earth’s first large-scale biological diversity, a period which cyanobacteria apparently survived handily, despite extreme conditions. In short there is no normal Earth temperature, only an average. The fact that we are here having this conversation is a miracle beyond anything that could be imagined given the improbable starting point. Intelligent design? Probably more like brilliant mistake(s). The possibility of intelligent life forming on this or any other planet is infinitesimally low, somewhat supported by the evidence that this planet has itself seen billions of species, but few of them smart enough to induce global warming, much less smart enough to cure it. That remains to be seen. Life out there, yeah, they’ll find that sooner or later, probably not so much different from non-life. Computers and rockets, even stick shifts and turntables, are another thing. Simple single-cell life existed on this planet before the advent of complex organisms longer than the non-life period preceding. We don’t need rocket science to find the others ‘out there,’ we need it to survive the next extinction event, whenever that comes, something like Noah’s ark, maybe Barack’s Boat. Global warming? What a joke! Global warming probably couldn’t extinguish even half the current species extant in the world, about the same as a healthy super volcano like Yellowstone in a good year, no big deal.

Seriously, though, the problem will be survival’s after-glow. Will technology die out for lack of fuel? Will capitalist economic expansion die out? Will we become de facto communists simply for lack of resources and better alternatives? Or will technology save the day and create new fuel sources without limits nor rings around the bathtub, nor artificially red sunsets? The initial phase, starting about right now, will be one of withdrawal, something like a gasoline maintenance program of increasingly smaller doses up to some indefinite vanishing point in the future, which will never be reached but will hopefully become meaningless. Tell that to the policy makers. Even those in countries touting their ‘greenness’ are building new airports as the fuel runs out. Welcome to Thailand (this is a Thai blog after all). A tentative shift to ‘bio-fuel’ will probably accomplish not much more than driving up the price of food. Considering their margins, it’s not likely they will ever come down again. Believe it or not, the price of oil actually could. Will high prices of oil and gas push us into economic depression? No way, though shortages could. They won’t. At that point, production will increase and prices will stabilize at least, maybe even fall. Oil-rich Arab states aren’t about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They’ll play it for all it’s worth, insh’allah.

Don’t laugh; it all happened before. The sharp price hikes of the late 70’s and early 80’s gave way to dirt cheap oil again in the late 80’s and 90’s. The price of a barrel of oil ten years ago was twelve dollars. All it takes is the discovery of a major new source and stagnant demand. They’re looking deeper than ever in the oceans now, and looking to take a layer off Saskatchewan in Canada just like is happening to Alberta to process ‘oil sands.’ Remember ‘oil shale?’ Maybe the Russians are right and oil is a renewable resource if only you look deep enough. Don’t worry; one way or another they’ll find and use every last drop (that’s the conspiratorial ‘they’; read “us,” the editorial “we”). I’ll be glad; if there’s life beyond oil, then let’s get on with it while our elders can still remember life before oil. You don’t have to cut down the last redwood to realize they’re irreplaceable. Look for more nuclear power and more electric cars and charging stations and better battery technology, still pathetically inefficient. “Still won’t be enough,” you moan? You’re right. It’ll take changes in lifestyle, also. Got bio-fuel? Get a horse! That’s how we got here, on their backs. It’s in our genes. Take comfort in the fact that the Golden Ages of both Art and Science occurred in the early 1900’s, long before the Auto-Age of self-indulgence. Since then we’ve only done more more bigger bigger, dumbing ourselves down in the process with our fancy toys. Still depressed that the party may be over? Boredom’s tough to deal with. The depression will be more psychological than economic. Is meditation not your style? There’s always Second Life, the on-line alternative reality. I hear land’s cheap. Watch your back. Eventually the meek will inherit the earth. That’s the part I like.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING…

So now all the metaphors of the Earth as a living organism, living and breathing and having its being, begin to make sense, now that its death seems imminent. What is life, after all, without death? The one certain fact of life is death. Reproduction is optional, and most of us are just going through those motions, which is good. After all overpopulation is still a problem, though no longer problem number one anymore, or is it? It’s hard to say given the exponential potential of population figures, given to long-term surges and spikes that defy short-term analysis and remedies. Considering that the Earth got its first billion around 1830 and got its sixth around last Thursday, the conversation usually deals with surges, but the opposite can happen also. This was certainly the case around the time of the Roman Empire, when the same population movements and political turmoil that toppled Rome also stifled population growth, which was stagnant for a thousand years. Other population ‘bottlenecks’ may have produced the conditions under which our freakish little g-g-g-g-great-granddaddies survived and thrived while others normally the most likely to succeed perished. The thought of excessive population growth was simply never discussed until the 1960’s and particularly with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb. He predicted looming disaster for a world that at that time had only just reached three billion and some change. However right he might have been, he was equally wrong, as was Malthus before him, both proponents of the ‘small world’ mentality that assumes that resources are limited and that stupid humans will breed themselves into extinction if given the chance. The rapid technological advances of recent years that have increased grain yields by 250% were simply never envisioned, much less the idea that thinking people might consciously limit their families as a part of a continuing cultural evolution. Inconceivable to many people to this day is that fact that many others simply have no interest in having children AT ALL under any conditions.

In fact some commentators even say that the world faces under-population, speculating that the world population will peak at somewhere between seven and a half and nine billion somewhere between 2040 and 2050 and then drop sharply. While those numbers may be close enough, it’s probably too early to tell whether population will actually decrease or merely increase at a slower rate. Either way it should become less of an issue, though keep in mind this is a population much larger than today. The commentator even points out that at the current birth rate of 1.4 children per married couple, Japan’s population will be down to 500 by the year 3000. While this is a fairly absurd scenario, more fodder for Hollywood movies like Children of Men than reality itself, it not only shows the difficulty of making predictions, and hence policy, but also the dangers of extrapolating current rates of anything indefinitely into the future, including rates of global warming. So much for computer models. The same mentality that made a conscious adjustment in the past can also make one in the future. People are agents with some degree of free will not reducible to statistics. Nevertheless there just might be another law of population yet to be articulated. We’ll call it the law of ‘Nature hates a vacuum.’ It seems that, given time, people will fill any and all open space(s) to the extent that it is suitable to sustain them and there are populations available to fill them. Over time an equilibrium should be reached, except in cases and places where viruses and bacteria still rule. The only populations expected to increase significantly beyond 2050 are the relatively under-populated Africa and Middle East. So if overpopulation is such a non-issue these days that a Google search generates less than two million hits (!), guess what generates the most hits as the world’s leading problem?

Okay, after the Iraq War, guess what generates the most hits as the world’s leading problem? Global warming, maybe, with forty million hits or so? How about rising oil prices with sixty million? Certainly these would rate anybody’s top five, maybe along with world hunger, AIDS, and maybe another minor inconvenience or two. So why is no one very worried about any of it? Earth Day last week should’ve been the biggest ever, shouldn’t it? It wasn’t. Obviously oil and gas prices are rising; no one can dispute that. It certainly seems that the planet’s weather is increasingly turbulent and the predictions are dire indeed. We should trust our scientists shouldn’t we? They are our best and brightest after all. They wouldn’t deceive us, would they? Surely this is not just some plot to contain China and her economic expansion, is it? Maybe, but I doubt it. Nobody’s THAT conspiratorial. But then again, Ehrlich was wrong and Malthus was wrong. Do the mass of people know something that the intelligentsia don’t? They just might. Surely I’m not the first person who’s noticed that the world’s two biggest long-term problems are somewhat self-canceling, am I? Rising oil prices means oil scarcity means oil depletion, right? The direst predictions put depletion somewhere near the end of the current century. The direst predictions for global warming also assume that things will be really bad by the end of the current century given current rates of fossil fuel consumption and related warming. But wait a minute. With the oil gone and populations level or decreasing, global warming should also decrease, shouldn’t it? I don’t see why not. Admittedly it could be a close race with some anxious moments, but we just might make it through, mightn’t we? We just might. Of course coal will never run out, but we’re not likely to be filling our car’s tanks with that, are we? So now they’re saying that the reason Antarctica hasn’t experienced much warming is because the ozone hole allows heat to escape. Will we revive the use of CFC’s to fight global warming? This could get really absurd. Let’s just chill, folks, let’s just chill. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

If the rationale doesn’t convince you, then the rising price of petrol just might. The closer we come to oil’s vanishing point, the faster it’ll rise, and the less we’ll use, right? But just like the earlier increase in grain production, gas prices are mitigated by advances in technology that get for our newer cars much better mileage than the old family Buick. So, once adjusted for inflation, we’re problem paying less for our transportation as a percentage of our budgets nowadays than we were in the 1970’s when the Saudis turned off the pumps to teach us a lesson. Hopefully we’ll have learned it by the time they do it again. If we had a viable substitute for oil, then Islamic jihad and Venezuela-inspired revolucion would vanish like LA smog under a downpour, in addition to easing the threat of global warming. All of a sudden nuclear power starts looking like the green alternative. Maybe dump the waste in outer space? If rising gas prices hit hardest in the US, it’s only because we’ve been shielded from it for so long. Though the same dollar increase, US prices are a 100% rise over a few years ago, less than 50% for the already far higher rates in Europe. Only now are prices equal to the inflation-adjusted record-high of 1981 at the start of the Iran-Iraq War. Of course we’re talking about much-devalued Confederate dollars now, so I’m not sure how they ‘adjust for inflation.’ Want to see a funny movie? See ‘CSA: The Confederate States of America,’ a 2004 mock-doc movie about “What if the South had won?” It’s hilarious. The joke about Darkie toothpaste is real of course, available anywhere in Thailand as ‘Darlie’. Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima are still widely available of course. Don’t turn up your nose. Spike Lee produced it. It’s almost like the real-life movie about, “What If George W. Bush had won in 2000?” I wish I could laugh at that one. Nevertheless it keeps life interesting. Back when life was rosy and secure, I was bored and listless. Now I can’t wait to see what might happen next. Will there be a happy ending?