Roses strewn across the bed– they mean business in Cap Est and they have a flock of robed attendants waiting to seat you in the cool, open lobby and serve you a glass of sweet iced-tea. The mint leaf kept getting stuck in my mouth and I gave up trying to surreptitiously get it back in the glass with my tongue, swallowing it instead. This is not the kind of place where you pick at your teeth. This is the kind of place where they carry your bags to your room and serve you iced-tea. We had been led around the grounds by a young man who spoke English but who seemed slightly embarrassed either at his communication abilities or his station. There was a door leading to the spa where massages, soaks and steams took place. There was an open bar quietly being stocked. There was a koi pond, then a restaurant where breakfast would be served in the morning, dinner at night. Along the infinity pool, ringed with deck chairs upon which the most elite of Europe’s elite must lounge in their unwholesome swim-wear must sit, across a grand expanse of grass and under a line of palm trees. The Atlantic shimmers off into the horizon, the water glacial blue like something you’d paint in elementary school with water-colors. There was a detached building off to one side, the lesser restaurant for lighter fare. We were led around the a series of bungalows that sat above the pool, then through a tunnel made of hanging vines and stopped at the edge of a small pier. Another entry to the Atlantic, with a couple floating decks drifting about bearing more lounge chairs. We were led back towards the lobby, past the small fleet of cleaning carts where each worker nodded respectfully or dutifully as we passed. A customer had been locked out of his suite and one of the women would take care of him, take his hand and open his door again. We were led to our own. The tour continued, taking in the front room which led out to the private deck, next to the private plunge pool. There was a couch, a mini-bar, a table and upholstered chairs. The next room had a plasma screen TV with DVD player and, of course, the big gay honeymoon suite bed. With roses all over it. The remainder of the tour, the bath and outdoor shower, remained a blur.

We had unpacked, or at least rifled through our bags wondering if we should bother using the drawers available and examined the quarters. Luxurious was a word that sprang readily to mind, and this caused some minor confusion. What do you do with luxury? We changed into swim trunks and tried not be be embarrassed. Aaron sat in the plunge pool and tried to convince me it wasn’t cold. I stood on the steps leading down and shivered but he claimed once immersion was complete it wasn’t cold at all. I plunged and realized he was lying– my chest hurt it was so cold. But we sat in the plunge pool for a spell until the luxury ran out, then changed into more appropriate clothes and wandered back to the lobby, said bonjour to all the girls in their flowing robes which elicited a uniform choral response, then into the attached library. There was a selection of DVDs to borrow, rows of books in French, and a computer. Aaron discovered wi-fi and took his laptop out into the lobby. It seemed like a lot of trouble to download the new episode of “Lost”.

World Traveler

A consistent theme, tho. The day before Aaron was to fly down from Seattle in the morning, hang out with his parents for several hours, then they would pick me up and we would return to SFO for our flight to LAX. My answering machine had a message, however, relaying that his flight had been delayed and was now being re-routed to Oakland. Not an auspicious start to our vacation, but according to the internet only arriving flights were being delayed because of a low ceiling (fog), unless you were flying out to Chicago. Hours later he was in California, and hours afterwards his parents drove over to pick me up. We checked in at the automatic kiosk which was originally under the impression that my name was 210 Texas, then was concerned that I was using a passport to check in. An attendant came over to verify that I was me, then we shuffled off to security where I was resoundingly guilted for attempting to smuggle hummus onto an airplane. Actually I was ridiculed for trying to smuggle the hummus and then guilted by security because I would take the hummus out into the unsecure portion of the airport to give it away. “We’re going to have to throw it away,” he said to me. “You can have it,” I suggested, but he again insisted I was starving the Africans and Chinese by not unburdening the offending food on hapless strangers. Eventually I walked away from the situation and we made out way to the Admiral’s Club which, despite the name, is a cramped collection of cut-rate motel furniture crammed into a stifling airport room that has its own bar, free snacks and wi-fi. Aaron turned the thermostat down and began to download “Lost” and I began to practice my “je vous drais” a million times. He would laugh periodically.

When they began paging people to the Admiral’s Club desk our curiosity to piqued and since our flight was showing delayed Aaron went to investigate. Through my valium dosage I watched while he kept excitedly turning around to regard me while conversing with the staff, then watched as he hurried back. “We have to go now” and we were grabbing our bags and heading out the door. The flight we were on would land too late to catch our connection so we were being put on the previously delayed flight that was finishing boarding; the people working in the Admiral’s Club were pissed that the boarding gate hadn’t paged us. We were the last ones on, walking through the seated masses, and found whatever was available. Upon take-off I realized that perhaps I should have taken two valium.

After landing in LAX we followed a group of Kiwis off the plane, then turned the corner and walked right into the next gate that had just begun boarding. Since we were flying first class we had every right to step on the pregnant mothers, children and elderly they were trying to squeeze in the door. The passengers collected in the terminal watched with utter disgust as we kicked the needy to the curb and were treated with utter veneration by the flight staff. Back up in the air I ordered a scotch (I’d had one on the previous flight but it had cost me so I was making up for it) and received something that looked and smelled suspiciously like vodka. The stewardess who was serving me insisted that despite the clarity of the liquor and the ice I had specifically asked not to be included it was my drink. “She made a double” she encouraged, and so I drank a double vodka on the rocks. Then I had a beer. Dinner was served in courses and the flight coasted towards Miami. I might have taken another valium, then a tylenol as I realized that when someone had mentioned “air-pressure” and “fillings” I should have paid attention.

Passenger Collapses En Route

The flight was marred by an ugly incident: a woman sitting near the front in coach had gotten up to go to the bathroom and collapsed in the aisle. I suddenly found it very difficult to get more scotch and turned to realize what was going on. Calls for a doctor were made (I don’t actually remember that part but Aaron says so) and one of the stewardesses did get the oxygen tank down at one point. A group of people stood clustered over the woman for quite some time as Aaron and I debated whether this would translate into an emergency landing in Texas. The rest of first class less involved in their self-interest, not even bothering to look up from their magazines. Eventually the woman was coaxed back from the brink of death and seated; Aaron and I drank ourselves into a light slumber for an hour or so, then awoke as we neared Miami.

We located the Admiral’s Club and Aaron began to download more “Lost” while I socialized with a cruise-bound group of blue-hairs and experimented with the two automatic espresso machines and the breakfast snack buffet before taking another valium for the next leg of the journey. Although it was a short flight we were served breakfast before landing in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We checked in at the Admiral’s Club there and were informed that while we didn’t qualify for free entry (there is no first or business class when flying to Martinique) she would allow us to stay because we’d been flying for so long. This was exceptionally sweet because it allowed us to hide our bags for a while and leave the airport, right into a sweltering mid-morning sun. Good thing I had this cool new hat. After a very brief discussion about cabbing into town for food we wandered the grounds of the airport and then returned to the Admiral’s Club to download “Lost” and engage the free snacks. As the last flight loomed I tried out the private bar which, it turns out, is as expensive as the bar available to everyone in the rest of the airport, and took my last valium of the day. Despite the cost it was a wise move– they didn’t serve alcohol on the flight to Martinique.

Still, the hour and a half wasn’t time enough to clear my head before trying to clear customs. I sat on the flight trying to focus my eyes on the page specifically designed to get through customs without a cavity search and kept mumbling the same two phrases over and over again. Walking up to the immigration gate I could barely carry everything because I was clutching the book so tightly. Bonjour! I screamed at the guard. He didn’t look at me, just my passport, which he stamped and returned without a word. Bienvenue!

A ride had been arranged by the luxurious Cap Est Resort and I had been terrified of being greeted at the gate by a white-gloved house-negro bearing a name placard. The fact that this didn’t happen would have been an immediate relief had someone been there, but it was just a small airport lobby with all the signs in the wrong language. We wandered up and down wondering how exactly we should proceed and I tried to extort money from an ATM which spit a receipt at me without any money. Ah, yes. We stepped outside into even more sweltering sun and looked around. Aaron went back to the gate to see if we had someone how missed the driver. I stood outside with our bags trying my best to look like a tourist. Theory one proved to be true and I was introduced to the cab driver who most certainly would never be seen in white gloves pandering to anyone. He had, in fact, spent ten years in the military. He tossed out bags in the back of the minivan serving as our cab and we took off. Aaron told me that the sign had read: “Mr. and Mrs. Tuller”. Where are you from? San Francisco.

The countryside between the airport, which sits towards the center of the island, and Cap Est grew from rolling hills into fairly mountainous terrain. After clearing the populated regions we sped through copses of sugar cane and past old plantations. The houses dotting the hillsides, every building in fact, looked like they had co-starred in any expose on Colombian drug-wars. Everything looked lush, aged and burdened with heat. Meanwhile the cab driver is asking about the Democratic primaries (which were just about to hit California at the time) and I tried to figure out how to explain why I wouldn’t vote for either front-runner were I to vote for any Democrat. In the end I let the conversation drop by staring out the window and young banana groves, the fruit bundled in blue plastic. “To protect the bananas” he said, alluding to the recent hurricane. And then we were pulling through a gate and up into the roundabout, met at the curb by beautiful smiling island people.

I walked back through the lobby, bonjour’d the girls again, and stood out front in the roundabout to smoke a cigarette. Down the driveway the shuttered gate began to trembled, then open. Monsieur Daily forced his way through the portal, cab behind him. Somehow it just made sense, all of a sudden, standing on the expansive grounds of a resort on a tropical island in the middle of the Caribbean; it was really just a trip to see Daily who walked up with his bike messenger bag slung over a shoulder. We walked into the lobby and collected Aaron, taking Daily to the bungalow to unload his shit. Then we cruised around the grounds showing off all the things we had just learned, hanging out on the small pier beyond the hanging vines as the sun sank from the skies.

After the charm of dusk had faded we cruised down through the lobby, bonsoir!, and to the bar where a couple sat secluded in quiet conversation. I insisted, in my sleep-deprived and heavily medicated state, on handling the first order of the evening and strode unsteadily to the counter where my French was immediately repelled by a barrage of English. Alright, I conceded, ordering three ti-punch, but next time this is happening in French. He smiled and agreed, but refused to let me stand there waiting for the drinks to me made. We found a table and waited, surprised when the bartender walked up bearing a plate of pate’ on bread and a glass full of battered cod. Shortly thereafter the three glasses of ti-punch arrived, the drink of Martinique. It turned out to be much less refreshing than a mojito: Ti-punch is a splash of cane-syrup, a measure of white rum and a lime. It burns the throat and spins your head around and sits smoldering in your stomach daring you to argue. We polished off the snacks and chatted as another couple of patrons arrived, including a couple with a toddler in a carriage. It seems a funny place to bring the kids, but then again the three of us must have seemed quite odd to everyone else. At some point, immediately following one of the random heavy downpours that float overhead and disappear within minutes, I went back to the room and discovered a cat keening outside the sliding door. I let the animal inside, wondering if it was a lost pet, and since it was quite accustomed to people I picked it up on my way out and walked to the lobby. The beautiful girl working behind the counter (I insist that she looks like Thandie Newton in “Flirting”) who had the tendency to giggle whenever I attempted French watched as the cat immediately savaged my arm, then began to giggle as I asked the best I could if the cat was okay to be here. The girl didn’t seem at all perturbed by the little bastard’s presence so I let it gently down and it scampered off– I bid au revoir to the both of them and returned to the bar.

Courtesy of Cap Est

The next round was ordered in French but it consisted of two Biere Lorraine and some sort of champagne cocktail Aaron thought sounded good. I’m not sure if the bartender could actually understand what I was saying but the transaction was completed, as was my paying with my card which, thankfully, worked. After the incident with the airport ATM I had my doubts I would have any access to money at all. By now the restaurant down along the water had opened for dinner and we walked across the lawn to inspect. While this may have been the lesser of the two on-site restaurants you would never know by the service or the fare. Aaron and Daily split an entree of Tuna Tartar and a campari a piece, then lamb over roasted vegetables and seared tuna steak over roasted peppers, respectively. I enjoyed a multiple-cheese panini over frites and another Biere Lorraine, feeling a little under-class for all the finery. By the end of the meal they were asking for the dessert menu and I was wondering where the top of my head had gone. I can remember getting the key for the bungalow but not getting back to it, nor do I remember passing out on the couch. After 36 hours awake, four flights over twenty hours, four valium and the contents of your mom’s liquor cabinet was suddenly awakened after Daily had been forced to crawl through some bushes and come through the sliding door leading to the deck. Their knocking could not wake me.

If you just want to see embarrassing pictures we pooled them on flickr. They’re unfortunately not in great order (each chunk is by one of us) but almost all of them have clever little descriptions so we expect you to look at each one. Otherwise, please carry on: (more…)

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Map of Martinique, by the CIA.

My life was untroubled by the existence of Martinique until Daily announced his intentions of living there for eight months in order to research his dissertation. As his degree relates to French Colonial History the presumption was that Martinique was formerly a French Colony, which is correct, but it never would have occurred to me that it remains an actual part of France to this day. Like its Caribbean neighbor Guadeloupe, Guiana (not where Jonestown was) in South America and Reunion (which produced Miss France) near Madagascar, Martinique belongs to the Overseas Department of France. Each place is treated, to my understanding achieved through little effort, similar to various states here in the U.S., with direct representation in France’s government. Unfortunately this also means that they use the Euro which, if you haven’t noticed, is kicking the dollar’s ass these days.

Understanding that our friend was stranding himself in a foreign country where he knew no one Aaron and I began to discuss the possibility of selflessly throwing ourselves into the tropics in the dead of winter to visit. Phone calls to the MVP Gold representatives of Alaska Airlines were made, long slogs discussing logistics complex enough to cause mere calculators to explode in confusion, and a flurry of modern communication ensued between the States and the tiny island of Martinique. Miracles were performed and so it was set in stone that Aaron and I would journey from our comfortable northern climes and descend into the sun-soaked paradise at the beginning of February. Then the flights were changed and we accrued an additional leg and a couple of extra hours.

Suddenly I had gone from a routine entrenched spoil-sport to a globe-trotting member of the international jet-set. This required renewing my passport and finding some way of ensuring I would not be fired or evicted from my home. The gears were set in motion and the pieces fell into place as effortlessly as, eh, whatever the metaphor would be in this case. I even went so far as to borrow a French phrase book from a co-worker who jabbered foreign at me one afternoon without any provocation, assuming that she owed me for this grievous offense. The fact that I hardly cracked the book open during the first couple months of its occupation in my life can only be explained by revealing a complicated series of tragedies and misadventures inspired by Greek myths. With time running out I began mumbling phrases in mixed company and adjusting to the red-hue my cheeks assumed.

However feeble my attempts at incorporating a second (or third, I suppose) language, my research into the place I would ultimately see was first-rate. Martinique subsists on the French government but this economic aid does not mean there is no industry on the island. Tourism accounts for most employment as it requires a large service sector, and there are agricultural exports such as sugar-cane and bananas; the former is mostly dedicated to to the production of rum, for which Martinique is renowned. During the hurricane season of last year, tho, the island lost its entire banana crop. This disaster was followed closely by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake which caused one death (heart attack, I believe) and some destruction. Statistics available were slightly out of date and deviated slightly source by source but unemployment seemed to hover around 28%– higher perhaps this year due to the bananas being destroyed. So far as I understood it I would soon be traipsing through a tropical wonderland where they make a lot of booze and no one has a job, standing out like an albino, speaking the wrong language and probably wearing some garish garb with the mistaken idea that everyone on the island thinks hawaiian shirts and linen pants are the best way to combat the heat and humidity. The only available evidence that Martinique was not an impoverished death-trap like Haiti or Jamaica was that my pale-face friend was able to wander around on his own with no horror stories beyond every yard in his neighborhood being patrolled incessantly by enraged guard-dogs.

After being disappointed with the available literature on the internet (the Martinican tourist site focuses mainly on rum and food) I found a blog written by a British woman named Lindsay who is currently living on the eastern side of the island teaching English to school-children. Her experiences furthered my understanding of what was to come: flying cockroaches the size of baby birds; Dengue Fever. Fortunately she did vouch for the existence of food in supermarkets which could be stir-fried which implied that, were I to escape any untimely demise by insects, disease and kidney-thieves, I might be able to eat; that there would be seafood available (I’m that kind of vegetarian) was a given. Didn’t check into the mercury content of the Caribbean, tho. Her travails with cat-calling lecherous old-men in town seemed unlikely to cause me any problems, for which I was grateful. Maybe if I were blond.

Mount Pelee Erupts, 1902

There are also volcanoes, or at least one. Mount Pelee sits above the town of Saint-Pierre along the northern coast. The city had been the original capital of the island, referred to historically as the Paris of the West Indies, until 1902 when an eruption obliterated the town along with close to 30,000 inhabitants. In under ten minutes. Despite the tears it was exciting to be able to travel to the rebuilt Saint-Pierre where excavations allow you to poke around ruins looking for petrified babies and heads.

Except transportation seemed to be a tricky deal. The towns are separated by large swaths of heavily forested mountains. Car rentals seemed pretty cheap but testimonials suggested attempting to drive alongside the locals was invitation to heart attack because they are all insane. There’s no railroad and the country seems to lack a cohesive transit system beyond an unofficial bus known as a taxico: Large vans or small buses that run normal routes between two cities and just picks people up on the side of the road– you scream in foreign to get out wherever you need to get out and the driver decides how much you’ve cost him.

So what I knew before going: A small island populated by French speaking blacks, guard dogs, mosquitoes, giant flying cockroaches and my friend Daily. It would average 85 degrees during the day and maybe 75 at night with a breeze and the humidity would be high. It would be expensive due to the fact that not only is the island on the Euro but almost everything has to be imported. We would be at the mercy of a ramshackle public transportation system or mercenary cab drivers. If the hurricanes don’t kill you the next earthquake or volcanic eruption probably will. There may be thousands of impoverished people whetting knives waiting for feckless whitey. Then we found out we had booked our trip for Carnaval week.

At least this was more than many people knew when conversation came round to my imminent leaving. Of those who had any idea the place existed most could only recall it floated around somewhere in the Caribbean: It’s one of the lower islands in the Lesser Antilles which cut the Atlantic from the Caribbean close (geographically speaking) to Venezuela. Fewer understood that it was French, not just culturally but politically. One person, I discovered days before taking off, had actually been there before and suggested I take a rum distillery tour. The idea of being hung-over in a tropical climate made less sense than me being in a tropical climate.

None of this really explains how a small island in the Caribbean close to Venezuela became an overseas department of the French Republic, but since my return I’ve asked some questions and done some reading. Wrong order of events, of course, but something of the history: (more…)

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Berkeley has its problems, exemplified best by a recent attempt to score another 12-pack of beer as the evening dragged on. Come ten o’clock most stores, regardless of their wares, are locked up and vacant; liquor stores, not nearly as omnipresent as in most cities, are no exception. It took nearly forty-five minutes in a car to pick up beer, rum and cigarettes. The cigarettes we found in an open store which didn’t sell beer or rum.

After our wild success a couple of us took advantage of the warm night and strolled through the streets. A couple blocks up from any major avenues and you may as well have been in small-town USA. Quiet, peaceful, clean. You could walk a couple blocks before passing anyone and no one seemed concerned or uptight about being out. The dog running after thrown sticks probably caused more sound pollution than anything else that night; our open containers and conversation probably presented the neighborhood with its most dramatic criminal incidents of the evening. It was nice, as nice as an evening’s walk can be, and something I’m not normally accustomed to experiencing.

Walking down my street after Saturday night you’ll find ample evidence that San Francisco is lacking in small town pleasures such as quiet evening strolls. On any given night there’s a bitter chill blown in off the Pacific which, regardless of your lefts and rights in any neighborhood, cannot be avoided. This doesn’t keep people from the sidewalks, not on a weekend bender. The cement has scars, stains from every bodily fluid ever spilled. The Sunday morning sun alights on drying pools of piss, crusting heaps of puke, hardening piles of shit. The shopkeepers are out with buckets and hoses, washing the remnants of revelry from their doorstep. Thank Christ they are– the number of times I’ve had to step carefully into my own gate are innumerable. The bar next door is shuttered and dim but the woman held hostage by the coin-op downstairs is out in her trademark yellow rubber gloves doing us all a favor.

I’d swear that I’ve never been much for the weekends. Crowds are not my thing, fun is not my thing, seeing people live their lives in this vapid manner is not my thing. Maybe if I hadn’t spent most of my Friday and Saturday nights working it would have been a habit I’d have fallen into but the time has passed and now I just bob and weave trough the assembled teenagers ten years past their prime. They say that 30 is the new 20 but I’d say this adjustment still lends people too much credit in the maturity department. It’s amazing to see people who’ve never learned the lessons of countless nights leaning against a wall, the trunk of a car, a tree or a lamp-post. The same staggering clusters of twenty-somethings screaming shrilly on Friday night return to work Monday morning in their business casual attire. No more fish on Friday for this era, there’s an art-school graduate spinning rehashed disco down the street and everyone has enough money for another shot, no matter how much they complain about being poor.

So I step gingerly over their unwillingness to grow the fuck up. Sunday morning sunlight and the streets are deserted except for the miserable wage-earners who had to be in bed by ten to punch the clock at seven. Trash cans outside of the latest art-show/hair-salon have spilled out into the street but soon the DPW will come along and play mommy for everyone. Someone’s kicked over all the recycling bins the length of the sidewalk but soon people will drag them back into their garages. When we were sixteen we used to bike down Market Street in the middle of the night and kick shit over, stone-cold sober and laughing like Leprechauns. Sixteen seems, in so many ways, a very long time ago.

That’s Haight Street, of course, where bars and traffic are more exaggerated than most other places. It draws from outside the neighborhood, outside the city even. I mostly walk along Waller when I’m heading towards work– collision of residential and urban. Saturday mornings the Church of Whatever hosts spaghetti meals for the down-and-out so they’re sprawled along the side of the building waiting for room, or waiting for a reason to sprawl somewhere else. I pass late sleepers tucked under blankets that carried small-pox over the Atlantic, shopping carts full of trash, dogs looking bored and hopeful, or bored and hateful. A couple blocks down and the Haight-Ashbury soup kitchen has an even greater audience. People are screaming across the street at one another, someone’s cutting through the intersection wearing no shoes. There’s one guy I see almost every day if I’m up early enough. He sits slumped against the wall rubbing his temples maniacally– his hairline has receded from this constant assault. I pass him and I don’t bother trying to make some sort of compassionate-light eye-contact, to view him as a human being. It never worked. A collection of late-comers pass on their way to the free meal asking what’s being served. I buy coffee and maybe a day-old if there is any on the counter.

I like Page Street better because it’s less prone to moments of urban interference. There’s a library which doesn’t seem to attract the amount of idlers found downtown. People walk up to front doors and disappear inside without looking like rejects from a studio “indie” film’s open casting call. There’s an ambulance up ahead, paramedics haunched over a frail looking grey-hair. I pass without staring, thinking about how embarrassing it would be to wear her shoes today. A neighbor has called it in and is standing there trying to assure the woman that they know one another. Pass the school for rich kids with their own cross-walk that lights up, pass the stately homes, down the hill, past the grocery. Just watch your step because no one picks up after their dogs. Real dogs, mind you, none of those shivering rats you see on Haight Street. When these fucking people breed I hope their children get a little more rearing then what these show-dogs are forced to endure.

No street kids, no trash, no puke, no piss you’d notice. One block down and you’re almost in Berkeley. Trees. Houses. Normal people. You’d guess. More normal than me, probably.

One evening on Page after work I found myself behind a sharply-dressed couple walking silent and rigid. They were probably in their late twenties, which seemed like a good time to be an adult when I was sixteen but now… The impression was that I had just interrupted, or perhaps caught the end of, some marital argument which satisfied neither party. No holding hands, but they were too close to one another for anything serious. It was curious to me, something was off. They stopped suddenly and the male removed from his coat a stick which he handed to the female. She silently accepted the stick and, gravely, bent to a fresh patch of cement drying without supervision. I passed as she began her immortalization and I didn’t bother looking for any signs of life happening on the pavement.

Stencils, clever little bastards, crawl along the sidewalks throughout town. They’re rebellious in a Betty Crocker fashion. Technically vandalism but the odds of being caught or imperiled pale in comparison to spray-painting a wall. There’s a bit of fission around here, some perplexing cultural divide which accepts sidewalk stencils as intelligent and right, graffiti as stupid and immature. The most popular stencil messages are quips seemingly stolen from some maudlin indie-pop love song, manipulative one-liners that anyone breathing can find some connection to. Basically it’s the same effect as any successful marketing campaign or platinum pop single– the resonance appeals to our common ground. There’s no imagination behind them and no actual craft in their design. You’ll find other stencils on the ground with little pictures and slogans but they’re just billboards– in fact the guerilla art was so menacing even IBM, the granddaddy of white collar business, co-opted the principle. Perhaps this lack of menace is why the sidewalk stencil has been accepted as adult and acceptable while tagging has been snubbed as juvenile.

Traces of life on every block. The puke and piss and shit get hosed off, bleached, scrubbed and run out into the gutter. The clever stencils, the mash notes carved in drying cement, remain slowly fading and losing their definition. Another weekend appears on the horizon to begin the cycle again and come Monday everyone takes their work clothes out of the closet and catches the bus downtown.

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Here in the west coast, the youngest outpost of civilization the world knows, there is no collision of the past and the future. It is undeniably a modern place where the culture, the technology and the culture operate in a particular harmony of now. You would have to travel east to find any example of the gulf of time, to Boston where Paul Revere lies at the Granary Burial Ground down the street from a Radio Shack improbably manhandled into the basement of a three hundred year old brick building. Philadelphia is home to Elfreth’s Alley, the longest continuously inhabited street in America. You can walk down the cobbled street lined with narrow homes before turning the corner onto a busy street lined by boutique galleries. Travel farther east and you find the most severe dissonance of all, Japan, where the most advanced vending machine ever developed will sell hot coffee and cold soda to people living in houses that have stood since the middle ages.

But that’s just part of why Japan is a curiosity for the world. Somehow the ancient and the modern blend into a mysterious whole of wafer-thin cell phones and shinto shrines. Just as in San Francisco where internet use in coffee shops in as ubiquitous now as seeing two old men silently wage war across a chess-board once was ten years ago. Cafes have long been a place for the cutting edge, from the social rejects who became Bohemians to the folkies and art-fags who exhibited their talents and personalities in the corners and on the walls. Somehow it’s less an surprise to see two people sharing a table yet completely absorbed in the separate world of their laptops then seeing a cluster of people debate the merits of cubism or a person quietly reading a book of poems over a cappuccino. If advertisements are hip to the trend laptops are flooding the world, leveling the playing field for people everywhere, but it’s still hard to imagine the saffron-robed Dali Lama checking e-mail.

Odd as it may seem recent efforts by a disparate cluster of people have made the internet a reality for an ancient people normally considered to shun the modern era and the trappings that come along with it. Since the Chinese absorbed Tibet in 1950 a large immigrant population has found homes in the northern mountains of India. Many found placement in Dharamsala where a population of over 100,000 Tibetan exiles now live and who have been working to rebuild their shattered community since the Dali Lama arrived at the end of the 50’s. It’s a small city in the harsh frontier where running water and electricity can’t be relied on so much as hoped for on any given day. Yet somehow it is here that a major technological coup has taken place.

Israeli ex-patriot Yahel Ben-David came to visit a friend who was on a spiritual quest and found himself leaving behind his high-paying position with a Silicon Valley linux firm to begin life anew among the refugee population. Finding the plight of the Tibetan people unconscionable Ben-David began to formulate a method of providing some service to help them advance beyond subsistence. He knew networking so he scoured the city for old computers, fax machines, modems, phones– anything linux oriented that he could take apart to rebuild. Over time he began to have prototypes which he would have to take back to Israel in order to test; India originally forbid open wireless networks. He introduced his ideas to others, he accepted donations of old parts from abroad, he waited.

And when India finally opened a limited amount of bandwidth for WiFi he was ready, manually placing his first antennae that same day. They sprung up in trees, off balconies, from the spires of buildings and the roofs of temples. Adjustments, repairs, re-placement, checks, tests– day by day searching for the signal and trying to keep the monkeys from fucking everything up. Then there was the wireless mesh. From his efforts there is now a grid of over thirty satellite relays spreading a blanket of connection over Dharamsala, reserved exclusively for the Tibetan people. Temples and schools host the server computers and the antennae and a small fee for maintenance, everything operated from the Tibetan Technology Center, housed by the venerable and long-standing charity the Tibetan Children’s Village. Now the kids, some of whom are third generation exiles, can learn network administration and web design along with their culture, traditions and history.

It’s not perfect– they had to block porn sites almost immediately because the network couldn’t support the interest and Tibetan script isn’t something that keyboards recognize just yet– but the Wireless Mesh Project has effectively provided internet access to over two thousand computers in Dharamsala alone by recycling technology and sharing knowledge. The relays operate on solar panels making them more reliable then any of the utilities provided by the local government. When one tower drops there are others all around keeping the signal strong. Something has been created in a rural Indian mountain town that hasn’t been effectively achieved in the heart of Silicon Valley by industry leaders. There’s been efforts to improve upon the technology- a telephony expert has travelled from Australia to work on incorporating VoIP connecting settlements spread out along the Indian/Tibetan border- and it has spread to other refugee communities. The Dharamsala mesh has been joined by three others all built and maintained by a team of Tibetan and foreign geeks. The exiles hope this window to the outside world can help them grow economically (there’s unfortunately talk of developing call-centers like in other Indian cities as well as online cultural curiosities for sale ala’ arrowhead necklaces and turquoise statues off the res) while strengthening their connection to their history and displaced communities. As the Chinese have repeatedly made attempts to destroy anything historically Tibetan in the occupied land ancient texts have been smuggled out where they’re being preserved digitally and passed from computer to computer. There’s hope that becoming a presence online can help bring the plight of the Tibetans back into the public-eye and exert pressure politically without having to deal with any Beastie Boys. The hard work seemed to pay off with Boingboing writer and globe-trotting internet personality Xeni Jardin introducing the world of NPR to the world of Tibet online.

Not everyone is pleased. Soon after an article was published about the wireless mesh project a DDoS attack temporarily disabled the network; although the evidence wouldn’t stand up in court (or courts without executions taking place on the roof) it does suggest the attack originated in China. So after struggling with bitter cold, savage mountain winds, poverty, out-dated technology and primates Ben-David and his band squared off with monkeys of another breed. Fortunately friends have been made around the world, the global computing community seems pretty on board.

If we were still living in a world where Tibet was like the opening of “The Golden Child” you would have trouble believing someone named Oxblood Ruffin installed encryption software for the Dali Lama but we’ve left that and debates about Cubism behind. Hackers and phreaks have found common cause and it seems the roots of Hacktivism can be traced to the implementation of The Great Firewall of China. In addition to helping set-up and secure the Tibetan grid there have been concerted efforts to tackle the Chinese directly. Applications such as Torpark, which randomizes the IP address visible to a network administrator while encrypting the user end of the signal, and methods of encryption such as steganography which hides sensitive data within, eh, insensitive data are now out there helping people achieve something very basic– an unrestricted access to information. In the states this is some big-money shit, this is an entire industry that works with budgets that use the world billions. In Tibet it took a sense of what was right, some left-of-center thinking and a way of keeping the damn monkeys from fucking shit up.

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When did heroin chic begin? In the early 70s with the gaunt, affected expressions of New York and London waifs? Or was it Kate Moss’ pointy shoulders and Nan Goldin’s photographs in the late 80s? I would guess that heroin chic has always been about, just never labeled. Whatever, Terry Richardson exploited our naive fascination with sleaze by photographing drugged up nymphs and getting hired by Gucci. The mid nineties sucked. The noughties sucked. Today sucks. Our society loves nothing more than a starved wench to gawp at. Regardless, when marketing got hold of it, it really got dirty, deplorably dirty. It got the magazine gloss treatment - nothing short of an abomination, and Nan Goldin agrees. The phrase has now passed into our vernacular and out our arses. No shock. It doesn’t even register.

Why don’t we give a shit about substances and conditions that send humans to rack, ruin, and flaky organs? Why are we so eager to sweep the dirt and the decay of humanity into our mainstream media? I am concerned about tweenager mags here, not vice magazine. I came to think of this because I came upon Dionisio Gonzalez’ work. I’ve never seen constructions like his before. I refer to it as Shanty-Chic, well aware of the unstomachable connotations the label might conjure and the gross misunderstandings it may unleash. Needless to say, this is art - heavily photoshopped art - and not yet usurped by the ravenous ad agencies. It’s good art, not shit art.

Dionisio is renowned in Europe and particularly his native Spain, but he hasn’t made it past the Chelsea galleries stateside. He has an impressive track history of exhibitions and collaborative activities, and spent months compiling his Favelas project back in 2003. Dionisio has the ability to manufacture the ludicrous in his modernist shanty without really jarring the viewer. This is as much an indictment of our lack of shock and egregious consumption of fake-image as it is a celebration of his visionary approach. Nonetheless, these are structures not skeletons. He and we are looking at wrecked buildings, not wrecked humans.

The dilapidated facades mixed with corporate green-tinted glazing tells us its all false. We are not being sold an idea here, or even a pair of boxer briefs. We are being asked to look at a fiction that is depressingly plausible. Does Dionisio want us to reconcile the ingenuity of man with the wastefulness of man? The technicolour largess of these false favelas is made all the more galling because they stand below blue skies. The last time I saw a pristine sapphire sky like that was in an Indonesia Airlines advertisement.

It is rare I see something new that I return to again and again, and I’ve been meaning to post about Dionisio for six months. Or maybe I just want to make this humble note before Shanty-Chic becomes a common expression amongst unscrupulous creative directors.

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