ROMAN THOUGHTS AND LA DOLCE VITA

What can you say about Rome that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? I could probably think of many things but that would involve my usual themes of supermarkets, travelers’ constipation, TV and politics. I don’t want to do that, not yet anyway. Rome is better than that. Rome is transcendent. It may not exactly be the Eternal City as claimed for publicity purposes, but most places aren’t exactly what they’re claimed to be. New York is not the ‘City that never sleeps’; Bangkok is. Rome in fact was almost entirely depopulated during the Middle Ages, a far cry from its imperial glory days of almost a million souls, wolves finally entering the city walls to take up the slack and see what they could scavenge, just like medieval tourists, just like us modern tourists in fact, crawling through the piles to pass our whiles. Rome is in fact the city that tourists sustained. The Italian Renaissance occurred mostly elsewhere, especially Firenze, as did the growth of cities, Paris and London and Milan and all the rest. The ultimate insult was the Church itself even moving its headquarters out of Rome for a spell. To this day Rome’s only industry is tourism, that and government and religion. It’s NOT the eternal city; that’s Jerusalem.

Rome is a palimpsest, the waves of time washing over it in repeated successions throughout history, leaving silt and sediment and new soil for planting. Like much of Europe its past is its present to us, and it manages to keep re-inventing itself accordingly. With much of space already conquered, at least the easiest pickings, time is the new frontier, and memory is the easiest path. We of European descent know that well, hoarding our souvenirs today and selling them on e-Bay tomorrow. Others have other ideas. For all their past of ancestor worship and vertical blood lines, the Chinese bury all public view of it as fast as they can. You’d be hard pressed to find a traditional district left standing there. They think they ‘gain face’ by emulating las Vegas and turning their country into a Pai Gow pinball machine defined by its bells and whistles rather than its collective soul. Europe doesn’t do that, not much anyway, or at least not yet. Luckily for them America’s already done it, so that’s reason enough to avoid it right there.

Rome is compact. Save that one-day Metro pass unless you want to camp out in the ‘burbs, which is not a bad idea. With e-booking there are some deals to be had out there, since they lack the walk-in traffic of the rookeries surrounding Termini station. How does a room in a sprawling villa for $50 with breakfast buffet sound? TV sucks of course, at least until midnight when the naked girls come on advertising their wares by taking off their wears. That’s reassuring for young boys everywhere. That was always the urban legend growing up- the naked girls come on TV at midnight. Very few hotels of any price will have wi-fi and you’ll be pressing your luck regardless. My place claims to have it in the common areas but no go, ‘local only’, ‘limited access’, etc; you know the drill. I guess that’s the drawback of so much attachment to the past. The present might get overlooked. Maybe they’ll wait and see if Internet passes the one-hundred-year test. Any place that actually has it probably has some other serious disadvantages. I persevere. The time when I can write a travel blog to you in real time is still a ways away. In America it’s pretty standard fare for hotels and easy to find elsewhere for the price of coffee. South America’s not far behind. Elsewhere in Europe and Africa and Asia you can sometimes get lucky, even in places as far-fetched as Phnom Penh and Dakar and Port-of-Spain. I guess Rome figures they don’t need it.

Rome sprawls in time, not space. You can see the Colosseum from almost anywhere, and even the Vatican is not much of a walk. The map makes it look big, but it’s really not. Just walk until your feet get sore, then take a break, and do it again. You can see it all in a day or two. Imperial ruins poke through everywhere, giving the Middle Ages a run for its money. The modern era has hardly made a dent yet. What would it look like if it did? At least supermarkets seem to be making inroads since my last visit five years ago, so that’s good. You don’t have to buy your groceries in bars anymore. The only problem right now is the weather. Europe’s had a rough winter and it ain’t over yet. I certainly don’t remember it being this cold in Marseille at the same time last year. Maybe it’ll be warmer in Tunisia. I hope so. If it is, I may hang there for a while and practice my French. Like any son of Rimbaud worth his verse, I’m just looking for creative derangement of the senses, the better to find some unusual pattern of words or images that have yet to see the light of day. Unlike some others, I’d rather try it without the aid of drugs. I’ve done all that. And I’d like to do it sustainably. Burning out at twenty-two is hardly an option for me now as I close in on fifty-five. In other words, I want to get my trips with trips, hyper-trips to the point of illumination.

The problem with practicing French of course is finding a country I like that speaks it. It’s hard to learn the language of a country you don’t especially like, though Marseille last year was an improvement. If there’s anything more pretentious than Parisians themselves, it’s people pretending to be Parisians, e.g. Bonairenses. And though the Maghreb speaks it often and well, it’s still NOT the first language, and overhearing and understanding a language spoken among native speakers is the final test of fluency. My next option may be Madagascar, which still uses that colonial language, not odd considering it has many competing local dialects. What IS odd is that all those local dialects are Asian in origin, from Borneo to be precise, reflecting an ancient migration of probably humble proportions. Even odder is that English is now one of their official languages also, EVEN THOUGH NO ONE SPEAKS IT, at least not outside the tourist areas. I think they just one-upped Thailand in some category of wackness, though I’m not sure which. Sounds like my kind of place. Stay tuned.

My inability to master French in my two months in French-speaking countries is a sore spot with me. I did study for two years at the university basic and intermediate levels after all. I understand more Italian on TV with no formal study and less than two weeks in-country, at least equal to Portuguese, thanks to my prior knowledge of Spanish. Portuguese pronunciation deviates from the spelling almost as much as French, and if it indeed sounds like a drunk Frenchman trying to speak Spanish, which it does, then French must be like a drunk Portuguese trying to speak English. The Maghreb is interesting from a linguistic point of view, pure Old World, the linguistics of language acquisition, not abstract theory, the language acquisition of a prostitute with her eyes on the prize between your thighs, hot rize plus and the finest buns ever was, i.e. consummation and fulfillment and y’all come back now, dahlin’. The average Moroccan taxi driver probably speaks more languages than the average UN interpreter, though a footnote is necessary. Tourist-oriented vocabulary is limited, and I heard as much bad Spanish there as English.

These European vocabularies are all closely related, mind you, though also notable is their mastery of local as well as classical Arabic. The language they speak to me there depends on their shifting perception of who and what they think I am. That’s not code-switching; that’s chaos. It’s a trip. Sometimes I get so bumfuggled I forget which language I’m speaking myself. Of course English’s only legitimate claim to the international standard is its analytic isolating quality, hard to appreciate unless you’re Asian. People who speak half a dozen Asian languages can’t figure for the life of them why Spanish verbs have several dozen different endings, when only one is necessary. Don’t ask me why, but English is only lightly inflected that way. Other than that its only claim to ascendancy is its imperialistic status. It’s a mess orthographically.

I picked up a bad habit in the Caribbean, i.e. booking ahead. This runs contrary to the backpacker’s credo of spontaneous emission. When it’s time to fly, then fly. That’s a metaphor; flying is the problem actually, that and expensive accommodation. When you’re traveling overland, there’s hardly a reason to book more than a day or two ahead really, unless rooms are tight and dear. You can’t do that in the Caribbean. They won’t let you. They’ll call you on those fake hotels you write in on the landing card. ‘Happy House’ indeed! Then the room they found me was the one I stayed in long term anyway. That’s the nice thing about the slow season- rooms are easier to find and cheaper. Of course this slow season may last a few years. We’ll see how gas prices respond in the next few months. If the speculators get over-anxious they may kill the coming summer season in its infancy. It’s not entirely coincidence that huge gas price surges were followed by the Next Great Depression. Though predatory lending may have been the immediate cause, it’s all part of the gold-pan get-rich-quick philosophy of the son-of-Reagan Republicans.

Big news here is the Japanese finance minister showing up drunk at the G7 economic summit. Did that make CNN? I bet it made Fox. What else is new in Rome? Well they seem to have finally perfected the combination toilet/bidet, so that doesn’t have to take up space next to the bed like in France. This is good for those of us accustomed to the Thai system which has a rubber hose and nozzle next to every toilet. This was probably intended for the chambermaids, but creative minds couldn’t pass on that opportunity to stay clean and green. The Italian bowls even have the water jetting sideways instead of straight up the you-know-what-hole, so that’s even wilder (and easier on sensitive tissues). But I digress. Tunisia’s next on the list, on the other side of the Mediteranean, the crossroads which have seen Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Normans, Romans, Carthaginians and Greeks all claiming pieces of turf in their own good time. To this day Malta, European to the point of Euro currency, even still speaks an Arab dialect, albeit written in Roman alphabet. How’s that for multi-kulti patchwork pragmatism? That comes next after Tunisia. Stay tuned, and pray for sun.

The Matter with World Music

The problems with world music are many, but fortunately for you that mostly impacts the promoter, not the listener. The main problem for me is its very lack of definition. What exactly is world music? If you’re a new listener and think you might be interested, that’s a fairly important consideration. Definitions vary, but almost all of them are extremely broad and inclusive. My own consists of three parts: music of different languages, cultures, and styles, other than the dominant Anglo-American genres, or at least those that have names. If the music has at least two of those three, then it’s world music as far as I’m concerned. This is not without its problems of course. By this definition Cajun music sung in pidgin French passes, while that in English fails. That’s okay; we’re not on a pass-fail system. If it’s any consolation ‘indie’ is almost as hard to define. Neither is a true genre, both more like ‘none of the above’, either capable of being lively or sluggish, comprising a full orchestra with strings or just one person with one string.

The main problem concerning world music for a promoter is that it’s a hard sell. About the only genre that scores lower points- whether MySpace hits or actual sales- than ‘world’ is ‘bluegrass’, and that’s a relative point. In Flagstaff, AZ, bluegrass is nearly, if not clearly, the most popular genre. The same is true for ‘indie’ in LA, and ‘Latino’ in Miami. Back East or Down South the story would be different I betcha’. Obviously a genre besides hip-hop, country, pop or mainstream rock needs to find its niche to survive and thrive. That’s doable. In Europe where most music comes from somewhere else anyway (especially the US) ‘world music’ fares much better. Music’s almost like DNA dividing and diversifying to the point where you have primates of Asian, Nordic, and Black African flavors in that historical path from cyanobacteria. Not coincidentally these races are not only viable, but excel in their respective fields, and hybrids of them are likely more vigorous than the original, though that might be hard to prove.

Popular music is the same. From a point in the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, there was little difference between mainstream ‘white’ music and the parallel reality of so-called ‘race’ music. Accordingly Pat Boone could take a popular Little Richard song, tone it down a bit, put on a white sport coat, then go play it on the other side of town for bobby-soxers. Both Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins were early rockers before they became country music fixtures. Similarly even a decade later Duane Allman or Eric Clapton could take a current Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters song and make it rock or blues-rock with little change, just a change in marketing, nothing spatio-temporal. Thus a torch was handed off as American blacks lost interest in a genre they created. That’s hard to do today. The dominant American genres of hip-hop, country, and rock have little in common, though a trendy middle-road commercial ‘pop’ is always ready to borrow liberally from them to give their music the muscle that it otherwise lacks.

World music itself does the same, borrowing liberally from diverse sources. Concepts such as ‘authentic’ and ‘indigenous’ have little place in the discussion, and frequently face a chicken/egg situation, such as, “which came first, African or Cuban?” To be sure Cuban roots go back to Africa, but just as surely modern genres of African music look straight to Cuba. Thus musical DNA proceeds by artificial selection. Which didn’t we have ‘world’ music before the eighties? It didn’t exist. Few modern genres of African music predate the seventies. Fast forward to 2008 and much of the world music play list comes from big Western cities- Paris, London, New York, LA- with large immigrant communities and what I call ‘slash bands”, as in Mexico/US or France/Tunisia, bands with members from diverse origins who find common ground in eclectic music. Those who dismiss this approach out of a preference for the ‘real thing’ might be missing the boat. They might not like the real thing even if they can find it even if it exists and that very act will change it in the process. This is the Cultural Uncertainty Principle (CUP). Let’s drink.

The nice thing about world music is that it crosses all boundaries (hopefully pulling thread in the process)- of age, of race, of gender, genre and nationality. It has a timeless feel, not necessarily the passing ruminations of the snot-nosed kid down the block. World music has usually been fomented by popular sentiment and fermented like fine wine through the filters of time and tradition and mixed to the tastes of modernity. I know the kid down the block has a creative urge to release, but that mostly applies to other kids. You and I have been through that already, haven’t we? I know that youth is the great progenitor of new ideas. Albert Einstein was 26 the year of his anno mirabilis in 1905, and Schroedinger’s publication of a major theory at the old age of 39 was unheard of. Okay, so that might apply to the Dylan-Hendrix-Cobain phenomena of pop music genius, but those are the vast minority. Most is simply kid rock. No I don’t mean that Kid Rock, but kiddie rock, music for adolescents. Whether it’s pop star Katy Perry kissing a girl “and liking it” or indie darlings Ting Tings begging “shut up and let me go, hey!” doesn’t matter. It’s all trivial meanderings, mostly who’s doing whom.

The goal is novelty of course, for listeners and music industry professionals also. This is what generates sales as well as emotion after all. ‘New’ means ‘more’. Following the trials and tribulations of youth undergoing their pains growing and groin gets old though. With five thousand languages and more or less as many cultures out there we should be able to do better, and that’s what world music is for. It’s a way to satisfy one’s urge for novelty in a way that’s, uh, novel. So there it is. Come and get it. Can’t enjoy a song whose lyrics you can’t understand, you say? How many words did you understand of the Feist song “Sea Lion”? I understood two. Yeah, it’s nice to understand a word or two, but that’s usually enough. Would the song, ‘Oye Como Va?’, by Tito Puente and popularized by Santana, have sold more copies if you knew the lyrics meant, “Hey, how’s it going? The rhythm’s… sure good for enjoying” (repeat ad infinitum). I doubt it. It might have even sold less. Point is, except for a few spectacular lyricists, the music’s the message, not the lyrics.

Ironically, since by my definition one of the requirements for world music is the use of languages other than English, it seems equally of de facto importance that at least one member of the band does speak English. The customers do, after all. It’s no accident that the Mexican groups that are active in the LA indie scene- Kinky, Nortec, Ceci Bastida- all come from border areas with ample opportunity to practice English. Local DJ’s boast about the fact that they helped Julieta Venegas ‘break out’ and ‘go Coachella’, seemingly unaware that she’s been a big star in Mexico for years, pure Mex-pop. She’s only ‘indie’ for US marketing purposes. Meanwhile Mana’ is bigger than all of them put together, and has toured with Santana, but does no promos in English, so goes un-noticed. MySpace comments for the others are mostly in Spanish also, it’s worth noting.

Local promoters even blur the issue further by booking acts like Gnarls Barkley for their ‘world fest.’ Maybe it’s time to ‘re-define world music’ as the LA Weekly puts it, but I doubt it. The same weekly warned viewers to ‘beware world music’ two years ago under the same circumstances. Gnarls Barkley is NOT world music, though a case could be made for Sigur Ros. If newcomers think that Gnarls Barkley represents world music, then they don’t bother with Tinariwen, which is something a world apart and at least every bit as good and important, if not many times more so. Cold Play likes Tinariwen too. The point is that world cultures are disappearing under the onslaught of increasing population, universal English, and the lust for money. Money is a universal language already. So is music. It doesn’t have to be refined into English-language pop crap. The efforts usually don’t work anyway, so vive la difference!

CIAO CARRY BEIN’- ‘DYER MAKER, QUEUE BA, BAR BAIT-O’S & GUY ANNA

continued from previous So I’ve ‘done’ over half of the Caribbean countries now, seven down and only six (depending on current political events) to go. ‘Big deal’ you say, except that that’s a lot of flights and connections, not to mention expense. You don’t see many backpackers here, unless they’re sailboat-savvy. I hear you can get on boats in Antigua (drop the ‘u’ to match local pronunciation). That’s a greater number of countries than in all of South America. With your indulgence I hope to check some more Caribbean countries off the list by doing some simple airline stopovers. These are tiny countries with tiny less-than-Alaska-size populations and it’s not like they’ve all got distinct cultures. I figure if I get to Antigua I can go RT to Grenada on a LIAT milk run stopping off at several different countries on the way down and back. Then I’d just do a side trip to St. Kitts where I might even buy citizenship if I think it’ll get me into those countries that might not like a US passport. I’m serious. Current rate is $300K investment and $35K for paperwork. Who knows? Maybe they’ll let me run for president. With another little side trip from Miami to the Bahamas, I’d then have the Caribbean zipped up, all thirteen countries.

So I’m already planning two or three trips ahead while sitting in Montego Bay, probably not the typical activity here. They’ve seen it all. MoBay is yesterday’s travel news, like Acapulco or Hong Kong or Rio. I was shocked at how small the tourist strip is here. I haven’t been to Negril but I’ve been to Kuta in Bali, the road that never ends. If it weren’t for the airport and the cruise ships, this wouldn’t seem any more of a tourist destination than Hollywood or Chiang Rai or Flagstaff or Berkeley or Portland or Boulder, all places I’ve called home, however temporarily, chronologically inverse. I’ve seen cruise ships before in Ensenada, but not like these. These cruise ships are amazing, huge floating hotels that bring you only one step closer to ‘the real thing’ than watching the world on Nat Geo. The passengers go crazy when they land of course, ready to drink and shop. Would they even know the difference if you merely toured them around an island theme park, each stop a different country theme? It’d save on diesel fuel.

The next day dawns gray and blustery again, but I feel better, so I work out. I usually feel worse when I don’t. Now I got a big idea while watching the planes coming in low over the ocean to land at MBJ. Ever since watching the movie ‘Pushing Tin’ I’ve wanted to try that little air turbulence trick like Billy Bob Thornton where the plane flies right above you and lifts you off the ground. Of course it also throws you around so you need some heavy duty safety equipment which I don’t always carry in my pack. Also there’s usually the problem of gaining access to a runway, especially difficult in these days of flight terrorism. But if the flight comes in over water… and I’m content to stay in the water instead of actually flying around… what’s to stop me from a little bit of experimentation in turbulence? Of course there is the possibility of problems with the Jamaican equivalent of the FAA; that’d be a spot of bother, or… it could draw some kind of attention from the other people on the beach; but…

…the Thing, the bug, the virus, whatever- it’s still inside me. Sores aren’t healing and new ones are opening up. Tender tissues are swelling up in sensitive places. What’s in that water any way? Is it even safe to swim in a third world country so close to a city with its trash and sewage and God knows what? You don’t swim in Pattaya, Thailand. It’s not healthy; everyone knows that. Can you safely swim in MoBay? They got two tourist police for each tourist here. Why can’t they hire some people to pick up some trash, too? But there’s no time for abstract speculation. I need an exterminator… fast, before the Thing decides to franchise and found new colonies. I need a weapon. I need antibiotics.

It’s hard to appreciate the fact that bacteria used to rule the world. Think dinosaurs were the most successful species with their 200 million year run of the earth, or maybe (chuckle) humans? Think again. The explosion of multi-cell life as we know it occurred only some seven hundred million years ago. Bacteria have been around at least three billion, ever since Earth cooled down below the boiling point. The amazing thing is not that life occurred; it’s that complex life occurred. And I’m still trying to figure out my wife. Any responsible scientist who claims that certainly more life exists out there somewhere given the law of large numbers, is surely talking about bacteria. Any scientist who swears there are PEOPLE out there is taking corporate money from somewhere for something. The dreamers are just killing time scanning the skies for radio signals, until they actually find one… Back on Earth bacteria, good Muslims that they are, will never give up, always trying to regain turf that they’ve been forced to cede over to modern antiseptic societies. They probably will. It’s just a paradigm shift. In their world view we work for them, giving them shelter and transportation in return for some time on Earth. At least we can understand bacteria; they’re like us. Viruses are another story. They’re like another dimension, DNA in a condom and nothing else, always ready to infect, any time any place any vector. Wear protection.

Looking for a doctor in a Third World country is always fun. The only consolation is that it’ll probably be cheaper than the US, but it’ll probably be more than Thailand. It is, but health is more important, health and happiness. Considering that I’ll see my wife tomorrow for the first time in two months, I need to be fit, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. I wouldn’t mind a little icing on the cake, too, after pretty boring food for two months. The boredom diet works, and the travel diet too. I’m down to 173 pounds from probably 183 a half year ago. That’s fighting weight, lean and mean and polished to a high sheen... Blood pressure’s good, too. So it costs me $70-80 for the office visit and a week’s worth of penicillin from a clinic called, I shit you not, ‘Doctor’s Office’. What the Hell; this trip is way over budget anyway. I only spent $17-1800 for 50 days in the four southernmost South American countries a few months ago. These 60 days will end up at almost three times that, and I’m a frugal muthuh’ fuh’ yuh’, rice cooker and all. Who said that foreign travel is cheap? The initial flight for both these trips was a frequent flyer freebie, as is my next one to Rome; use ‘em or lose ‘em.

But the antibiotics work and this trip draws to a close. Even the defecation aggravation and resulting hemorrhoids seemed to respond. I knew it! They sneaked in the back door! Almost symbolically I caught a Seinfeld episode that I’d somehow missed, lost in the crowd, like the one illusory last peanut in a bag holding mostly empty shells, ‘Serenity Now’ (“Newman!”), the end of an era. It’s time to move on. I’ll spend a week in California before heading out to Rome. See you there. If you like this travel blog then it’ll definitely continue on TravelPod at http://www.travelpod.com/members/hardiek where I’ll eventually tell the stories of all my travel both past present and future, at least until I reach the official UN total of 192 countries. The Thailand-to-Timbuktu blog may revert to its earlier trial role as a world music mouthpiece for promotion and criticism. World music is a worthwhile cause that needs all the help it can get. Stay tuned.

‘DYER MAKER JAH MAKE A JAMAICA ME HAPPY, ‘CEP…

The change comes over me all of a sudden, almost imperceptibly and without warning. One minute everything’s fine; then the next minute I’m losing it, my health, that is. First it’s just a funny feeling of myself being divided and separated with an ensuing lag time between the two halves, and then a little chill and involuntary shudder as my body tries to create some artificial warmth for itself through motion. Or maybe my body is simply trying to shake it off, deny the existence of the other now inside me. But it’s too little too late. I have no choice but to ride it out now, let it run its course. But what is it? It’s not some drug I voluntarily ingested and now I’ve changed my mind while waiting for it to ‘kick in’. It’s another being, another life form that’s found its home in me, whether by accident or design, sitting in the driver’s seat and taking over the wheel. They say the worst virus the world has ever seen, Ebola, still lives in some cave in Africa, just biding its time… in expectation. What’s found its home in me? Whatever it is, it’s wicked, splitting me apart, twisting my view of the world to its own diseased perspective “as all seems yellow to the jaundiced eye.” But I’ve already had HepA, so I should be knock-ulated for life. No matter, the important thing now is to stay warm, drink lots of liquids… and take a vitamin pill.

Some cold weather in Cuba is one thing; that’s not even the Caribbean proper. That’s only a stone’s throw from Miami and subject to major cold fronts coming down over the plains from Canada, one after the other, like planes taking their turns on the runway. Most don’t make it to Jamaica of course, nor Cuba either, running out of steam at around Orlando, maybe leaving a little patina of frost on the fruit crop at worst. But when you stay in your room in Jamaica to stay warm, not cool, and the AC takes a full day off, then you know you’ve got some bad weather. The East Coast has been getting battered all season, so I hear, while California has been getting fried, basking in record winter highs, so I tell my wife. This is good to remember, because I got chills to the point of going to bed early and getting under the covers. That’s not normal; I generally like cool weather. But it makes no difference when something’s got you in its grips, a bug or virus or something. I hate that feeling, that out-of-body experience that puts you beside yourself with fear and anxiety, not to mention unease and disease. The weather actually serves as something of a consolation, not just that I’m not missing anything, but that the chill is not only internal. It’s almost like the front came to Jamaica through me.

It’s no big deal I think, probably just a 24-hour bug, but it’s probably enough to keep me close to home for the remainder of my stay in Jamaica. So that means I spent three weeks in Jamaica total and never got out of Montego Bay. Oh, well. I did the same in Port-of-Spain for a week when I also had wi-fi and a cheap (by Caribbean standards) room. At least here I don’t have to piss in the sink. Actually that’s one of my favorite things while traveling, to actually put down roots in a place for a while. For me traveling is not merely an end in itself; it’s the background against which my life happens. It would’ve been nice to tour the island, but taxis in Jamaica are not cheap, with prices that would make a New York cabbie blush. How about $10 for the five-minute ride from the airport into town? Or $100 for the one hour ride to Negril? Prices might be negotiable as long as you’re not at the airport already, and depending on how well you speak patois. Hating pretentiousness I try to remember black Southern US dialect, complete without conjugations nor declensions and frequent use of the word pickaninny. Given the similarities, it just may be possible that this was the marshalling yard for African diaspora culture, given that slaves were typically ‘seasoned’ in the Caribbean before moving on to the big time in the US. When transcribed to Roman alphabet, Creole is easily understandable, so hardly qualifies as its own language as far as I’m concerned. Dem belly no full wit bacon fi dey only be talkin Jamaican. You neva git dat trip to Rio talking dat Krio. Dem mullah dey no issue no fatwa talkin dat patwa.

There’s local mini-van transport here, but they look pretty cramped and crowded, and seem to only do about thirty minute runs, so for Negril you’d have to transfer at Lucea. That’s a lot of hassle just to go look at another geek-ass tourist resort. What am I going to do with seven miles of beach? If I could run naked down it that’d be different, but I doubt that’s the case. That’s the first thing I did the very first out-of-country trip I took over thirty years ago to Yucatan. I ran down a deserted beach naked. The rest is history; now I look for simpler pleasures. That’s the nice thing about Montego Bay; it’s been surpassed by upstart cousins Negril and Ocho Rios and their $500/nt resorts. So I got lucky here, less than $50/nt and wi-fi coming in my window from next door. But now I have other health issues also, which I won’t go into at any depth. Suffice it to say don’t despair if you get an attack of hemorrhoids at the beach. Jump right in; the salt water works wonders. Who needs Epsom salts?

So I spend my last ten days of this trip getting as domestic as an old mother hen, even buying a rice cooker, so I can cook brown rice and pumpkin squash and callaloo and ‘ground provisions’ like yams and sweet potatoes, supposedly the secret to Jamaican runners’ success. Aahh… real food. Supermarkets here aren’t great, but I bet they’re better than Negril or Ocho Rios. Of course anything that boils water can also make coffee, and Jamaica’s got some of that too. It’s almost like home. I can make a drip coffee maker out of anything, but Styrofoam cups are the preferred raw material. So life takes on a certain regularity, taking a walk on the beach or a swim, walking into town for provisions, but mostly sitting right here in my room with my Internet and Cable TV and MySpace and Sype, doing business and talking to my wife and writing and reading and… just living, almost like the real thing. The big excitement was when I thought there was a Seinfeld episode that I hadn’t seen yet, but it was a false alarm.

Jamaica of course is old news in travel and music circles, reggae music pretty much single-handedly spawning the world music industry after Bob Marley’s death. Jamaica is now so dependent on tourism that I doubt they could do without it. This spawns a certain dependency, both economic and psychological. Though famous for its ‘friendly natives’, which is true, that’s not to be confused with the scads of hustlers pretending to be your instant friend. Aside from the simple offering of goods for sale, including ganja, they have a couple of interesting come-on lines I haven’t encountered elsewhere. One starts “I can see you’re not a racist” and the other “Hey! Remember me?” at which point the hustler claims to be the cook at a restaurant he assumes you’ve frequented or security at your hotel, i.e. everyone’s hotel. What, do they go to scam school? They’re still groveling, trying to get in the back door when the front door’s wide open, at least to any legitimate product of reasonably good quality that I actually need.

Michael Phelps would probably love it here. He could toke up all he wants and there’d be almost no place to upload a video to YouTube. It’s funny though. I smell ganja here all the time, literally ALL the time, but I’ve only rarely actually seen someone smoking it. The Phelps hubbub is ridiculous, though. If somebody wants to rag on him, why not blast him for doing a Rosetta Stone ad and never speaking a word of Chinese in the process, not a ni hao nor a wo ai ni nor even a simple chi fan ma? It’s a joke, but maybe appropriate for Rosetta Stone, which I consider to be almost a consumer fraud in addition to bogus linguistics. We all wish there were some magic way to simply Chomsky-like absorb a language, and Rosetta Stone plays and preys on that philosophy, but I don’t believe it. If you want to learn a language, crack the book. I didn’t notice Chomsky speaking perfect Spanish on Havana TV. He spoke English. Actually you don’t need a book now, much less a dozen. You just need a laptop and internet, ditto for guide books. You can shift my paradigm anytime, baby. To be continued…

WELCOME TO CUBA #4 of 4- LIFE BEHIND THE IRONIC CURTAIN

Sundays are not bad here, more to see and do than many places in Latin America. I run across an active cathedral while walking the old city, so decide to stick around for Sunday mass, my first ever. That’s typical me, waiting to attend my first mass in a Communist country. Before this I’ve only attended a small one in Gualupita, Mexico, up in the mountains close to Toluca, where my sweaters used to be made, maybe still are. There we slit chickens’ throats and made mole’ and paraded through town with an image of the virgin of Guadalupe just like the most normal thing in the world. This one on Sunday is a little more involved. It drags on so long I’m getting really hungry towards the end. So when everyone goes up for their holy wafer I sneak out to go look for a holy hot dog. My stomach rumblings threatened to disrupt the service. Aqui estoy, Senor, para hacer tu voluntad.

It’s good to finally get out into the countryside. This whole trip has had too little of that, and too much city. This is something of a life’s thesis for me, that civilization is not limited to cities, and northern European cultures have proved that, they the barbarians of the Roman outback who eventually superceded and surpassed it oh, say, around 1700. The larger synthesis of course is that cities CAN be very nice places, green and clean and not so mean. My current life thesis is similar but with a different emphasis- that nomadism (nomadicism?) is not only normal but healthy, put of our psychological and biological makeup, of vast frontiers and open skies. We didn’t just accidentally disperse all over the globe- we were driven, by the powerful engines of our imagination. Obesity is not much of a problem with this lifestyle, nor are mortgages. True, cities are a great repository of great art and the great artifacts of culture; let the clerks handle that. This is dialectical materialism in real time- thesis, antithesis, followed by a more complete synthesis, hopefully.

There’s nothing spectacular about the Cuban countryside, but still it’s nice, rolling fields with agricultural plantations and the occasional wilderness. We pass through Cienfuegos, a small city on the western coast, where half the passengers, mostly backpacker types, disembark. I notice scads of touts hawking rooms on the periphery. I breathe a sigh of relief. As much as I prefer to avoid touts, I prefer to avoid expensive hotel rooms even more. I assume the situation may be similar elsewhere. When we finally pull into Trinidad an hour and a half later, I gulp audibly. Uh-oh, I’ve been here before, not here exactly, but many other places like it, most recently San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. The rot sets in first where the fruit is ripest. It’s too small, a tourist enclave and little else. A lady on the sidewalk holds up a sign reading “ROOMS $15”, looking for all the world like a cute little webcam ‘performer’ with a sign across her bare midriff reading something like “$.99 min.” They swarm me like flies on shit, even though I explain that I’ve already booked a room. The problem is that my place knows nothing of it, even though I’ve paid a deposit.

So now I need the barkers and their colored balloons and their cheap cheap rooms. That’s no problem, but I immediately book onward transportation, just two nights and one full day here. That should be enough, considering there’s no food, or should I say ‘only expensive food’. The street scene in Havana, limited though it is, at least has some variety. Here there’s pretty much only pizza and sandwiches, though still only a quarter US a pop. Then prices for Gringo food go straight up from there, $8-10 a plate and on into the stratosphere. It’s no wonder everybody wants your lunch money, as if I spend money like that every meal every day for something as common as fried chicken. But that’s the big deal here, hawking you to come to their house to eat. I tire of the routine quickly. “Open a restaurant!” I bark back. There is some good music here, though, just like the Hemingway quarter of Havana. That’ll soothe frayed nerves. There are good deals to be had, too, it just takes time to familiarize myself with them, the guy with the coffee, the old lady with the fruit, etc. I went crazy when I found coconut custards and cakes for a dime a pop, buying a bag full for the onward journey.

All in all Trinidad’s okay, with a lively little late-night music scene, though I can think of probably a dozen places in Mexico just as colonially charming without a UN plaque. But this ain’t Mexico; this is Cuba. I travel onward to Santa Clara. This gives me not only another view of Cuba, but also a different route back to Havana, so as to avoid backtracking. It certainly doesn’t have the charm of Trinidad, but compensates with diversity, lots of local theatre, and I even manage to catch a concert. At least neither’s got the bombed-out feel of much of Havana. Comparisons to Hanoi are okay; comparisons to Phnom Penh are not. Only problem is that buses stop through on their way between Santiago and Havana, so the availability of seats depends on how many people get off. Ouch! This is what happens when you don’t have Internet, but they don’t seem to know that, or care. Long distance taxis do good biz in Cuba btw, claiming prices no more than the buses for foreigners, but I haven’t tested them yet.

The only guaranteed seat leaves at 3am the next day so I take it, figuring to save a night’s rent, too, since I don’t usually sleep too well anyway. This whole trip’s way over budget thanks to that flippin’ ferry in Suriname and the generally high cost of rooms in the Caribbean in high season. Thank God for the low-budget Melbourne Inn chain in Barbados and Port-of-Spain! If Cuba had wi-fi I could balance my budget here over the next three weeks, but I can’t go incommunicado for that long. That’s not negotiable. Cuba’s starting to get on my nerves anyway, and I’m sick to death of pizza, so that’s good. Otherwise I might feel some regret. Too short of a travel time gives false impressions, too. I’ll try to find something cheaper than Montego Bay in Jamaica, with wi-fi hopefully too, maybe Negril. At least I finally get through to Thailand on my world phone. I’m not behind an iron curtain after all, just an ironic one.

What else do I need to tell you about Cuba? Oh yeah, they’ve got $3 bills, both local currency and convertibles. That’s notable, especially the local ones with Che’s picture. What else? There seems to be very little racism in Cuba, blacks and whites freely intermixing and seemingly unconscious of it. That’s good. What else? Travel is easy, plenty of hostales and casas privadas outside the capital, so nothing to worry about there. They’ll find you. These people also smoke a lot, especially cigars, though cigarettes, too. Going to a concert in an auditorium? No problem. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. They drink a lot, too, mostly rum, available almost any time almost any place. The analogy to the Russian’s vodka is too obvious to ignore. My most communistic friends back home are usually the most pharmaceutically experimental also. Religion’s far from perfect but it’s better than all that I reckon. The three most common items at any street stall are: cigarettes, rum, and condoms, in no certain order, whatever gets you through the night. Now that sounds like my kind of dialectical materialism.

For some reason Cuba imports Gallo Beer (that’s a rooster, not an Italian) from Guatemala, reflecting new realities and trade relationships (ssshhh! Don’t tell Uncle) that got severely severed in 1954 the year of my birth and my taxi driver’s car. I thought about trying one for old times’ sake, but… naaah. Beggars here are creative, freely offering to show you their disease, bandaged back, third eye blind, etc. Pragmatic women are not to be outdone. They’ll follow you back to your hotel and THEN approach you, as if proximity implies acceptance. After a quick inconclusive chat in the Paseo del Prado, one even snuck through the door of my apartment complex while I was holding it for a key-less elderly lady. They’re quick, and stubbornly persistent. And oh yeah, Cuba’s got a long hard road ahead. They’re good people, I think, but they’re out of the loop. Some feelings are going to get hurt. Except for North Korea most all the other old Socialist bloc nations have long reverted to market economies with its ensuing growing pains. Their newly capitalist sons and daughters now come to Cuba out of nostalgia. When Cubans go to the US they probably look for lines to stand in, just to feel normal.

Cuba and the US attitude toward it is an anachronism. Communists and capitalists here and there have both fed on polarization and non-rational behavior for far too long to prove points that are no longer even valid, much less necessary. There are other more valid issues facing us today. But for me, this trip’s almost over, seven countries in as many weeks including Jamaica thrice. That’s not bad. Fortunately I got to stay in most of the countries long enough to go through the full range of emotions, in the case of Cuba: surprise, shock, disgust, adaptation, love, hate, and acceptance in that order, the other countries with probably fewer steps. That’s realistic. Always stay long enough to get sick of a place. Anybody who is totally in love with a place probably doesn’t know it very well or doesn’t know many others, or is fooling himself, one. So now I’m off to Jamaica then back to the US then on to Europe while the dollar can still hold its pants up. Life’s a beach, but I persevere.

WELCOME TO CUBA #3 of 4- HELL FREEZES OVER

It’s cold here. Who’d’ve thought I’d be wearing my goose-down vest in Cuba? My taxi driver says he’s never seen it this cold before, at least not this year. There are some cold winds blowing down out of the north, or maybe it’s just George W’s last breath of hot air now turned cold. Nevertheless the tourists out at Varadero are probably clamoring for refunds about now. This isn’t what they paid for. Maybe that’s not surprising considering its location a half degree north of the Tropic of Cancer. Those lines are no joke. In a couple days I’ll be a half degree south so we’ll see if there’s any difference. That’s the same stretch of water that Montego Bay sits on the other side of, and it was plenty warm and sunny the same day I boarded the plane for cold gray Havana. I’ve always thought of communism as cold and gray, but not Cuba. The tourist brochures advertise its luz, color, sabor y alegria, but that’s for you, not them. They get poverty, deprivation, promises… and long lines. Nothing defines Communism like long lines and the lack thereof implied, and the limits and rations therefore imposed. Now that may be very rational, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right.

Communism made a gamble, that the world was already developed fait accompli and that the only problem was one of distribution. Communism never foresaw DVD’s, PC’s, and cell phones, much less FaceBook, MySpace, and TravelPod. They certainly never foresaw that the consumer revolution would be manufactured in Japan first then China, leaving Western ideologies in the dust. Cuba is still there, clucking defiance. It’s sad, Fidel claiming on Obama’s inauguration that the West’s problems are ‘insolvable’. He may be right of course, but you don’t prove it by shutting off all dialog. That’s contrary to the spirit of dialectic. Cuba shows no news of the outside world, zero zip nada- just buddies Venezuela and Bolivia, the club growing ever smaller. If you perceive a world of limits, then the world is limited, admittedly also the mistake of many Western ‘small planet’ ideologists in the Seventies, myself included. I stand corrected.

Cuba’s got a hard adjustment to a market economy ahead and the longer they wait, the harder it’ll be. The dual currency system is only the most graphic illustration of such. China gave their dual currency up long ago, and Laos and Vietnam are slowly moving beyond dual-pricing, though you can expect Vietnamese to overcharge foreigners for as long as they can get away with it. Leaving prices un-marked facilitates this. Even Thailand does it sometimes, trying to overcharge me for something with the price written in Thai, absolutely refusing to believe that I can actually read it, even as I recite it to them word by word. Old notions die hard. At one point Vietnam even had prices for returning Vietnamese, in addition to foreigners and locals. It’s cumbersome to say the least, and subject to much abuse. When Thailand tries such nonsense they never check identification, just apply racial and facial criteria. A flight attendant in South America once explained to me how they’re trained to know what language you speak by looking at your face, Sociolinguistics 401.

Nevertheless, there is an emerging middle ground between ‘local’ mn and ‘foreign’ cuc currency, and that means reasonable prices in cuc, something that is slowly occurring in the places designed for upscale Cubans and emerging restaurant chains, such as El Rapido. There an espresso costs $.25-.30, instead of the ridiculously low nickel or overpriced (for Cuba) dollar. That’s still the best price I’ve had since late ‘70s post-devaluation Mexico City, when a good US wage was $4/hour. Good prices draw tourists, but so do simple open systems, such as integrated transportation and a single currency.

Fortunately the war’s over, almost. I thought a policeman might not let me go yesterday, but that was because the guy wouldn’t stop talking when I asked for directions, not because of any imcompatible overt offense (now there’s a trivia question for ya’). The gendarme at the airport weren’t so friendly. First some guy pulls more over straight off the plane and quizzes me about my intentions, presumably because I’m American. Then the nice Immigration lady seemed concerned that I was just ‘going all over’ as if that were suspicious in and of itself, acting as if Cuba were just another country in the Caribbean. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I guess I should be some bright-eyed little wannabe socialist or a fat-bellied tourist, one or the other, just for the sake of clean neat categories. Then the Customs guy started looking at my notes, as if notes imply plans imply covert activity, or so I imagine, and still do.

The big surprise here is that it seems no one’s ever met an American. I thought it was way past all that by now, what with reasonably priced flights from TJ and anywhere in Canada. It’s not.

“I’m fifty-one years old and you’re the first American I’ve ever talked to,” a friend of the house I’m staying in just told me.

“We’re not much different, are we?”

“Not at all, five fingers, two hands, two arms, two legs.”

We trade travel stories, he telling me of his trips to the Warsaw Pact countries and Angola. That sounds like a tour of duty to me. They make no attempt to hide their Communist connections, even a bit nostalgic I sense. I tell him my stories, and he gets excited when I talk about Hanoi. We have common ground. There are people named Hanoi here, or at least one who’s now a celebrity. I guess the Sixties affected everyone differently, we with our Dylans and Elvises, they with their Hanois and… Warsaws maybe? Havana reminds me a lot of Hanoi, similar latitudes and similar attitudes, the same ambience of revolutionary doctrine and military discipline and faded glory and pedicabs and… that edge, that psychological edginess that cuts both ways.

We have more common ground- a history of plantation slavery and resultant cradle of African-American diaspora culture. Cuba gets high marks for maintaining its African traditions, but in fact it’s probably the whitest place I’ve seen in the Caribbean so far, or Latin America either, except for Argentina. I haven’t been to the US Virgin Islands. If my Trinidad theory is correct, the culture defends itself most intently where it’s most threatened. But the ‘traditional’ dress here of Mammy-style pure white and lacy fringe, similar to that of Salvador, Bahia, Brasil, surely refers to the colonial time and place, not Africa itself, doesn’t it? You don’t see such in other predominantly black Caribbean countries. Or maybe it’s a religious thing, with connections to santerismo similar to Brasil’s candomble or N’awlins voodoo. You can see little stalls devoted to such in the back alleys, similar to the hechicerias shops I used to see in Oaxaca, Mexico, some thirty years ago. And of course Cubans are as anxious, and as hopeful, about what Obama’s going to do, as we all are. Still his first impression of an actual American comes from me. Now that’s truly scary.

So I finally bite the bullet and sit down and do some Internet. Sounds easy, right? It’s not. Many hotels have got the machines, but few sell the card with the code you log in with. They tell me any card will work on any machine, so I go buy one at a hotel I know has them, but they also have a waiting line. It turns out the card won’t work anywhere else, so I end up waiting two hours to finally log on. Real Commie queues, just like the old newsreels! Cool… TWO HOURS WAITING FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF USING INTERNET AT THE RATE OF $7 PER HOUR!! And then I can’t even get into my bank account, reserve a room with my credit card, much less Skype anyone. It’s barbarous. My world telephone won’t call through to Thailand either. I’m cut off. I’m glad I shortened my trip. I like Cubans, I think, but this is ridiculous. I get into the queuing aspect, though, becoming the traffic cop for Gringos ‘out of the know’, since lines are not always linear. I even took the pizza out of a local’s mouth after he called his order in over my head. I read him the riot act, and then left casting aspersions on his upbringing. When natives get restless, the tourists get even. Good fun was had by all.