Things written in the week of July 23 to July 29 in previous years.
Mongolia, and then Ulaanbataar to Beijing, day 1.
The thing that strikes me lately about me is how incapable I am of
believing that I have been anywhere else than where I am currently,
and how incapable I am of really foreseeing that I will be anywhere
but where I am currently. I don't mean that I'm oblivious to my travel
schedule, of course, or that I don't imagine things to be different.
Rather, it's that when I'm someplace I'm so very there, so very in the
presently there that I find it hard to imagine myself as anywhere but
there. This is troublesome when buying gifts or souvenirs, for
example, because once I'm there I look at small trinkets that say
MOCKBA and think "why would I get that? I could get it some other
time.." and pass it on. Later, of course, these baubles hold value
regardless, their value comes in their separation from their element,
valence from having-been-displaced, but it's as if I can't realize
that in the moment, I'm not displaced from myself currently. I can't
foresee myself being there, looking back at me having-been here. As
such, I really haven't bought anything from Moscow, a few things from
Mongolia. What I do have are the receipts, the cast-off residues of
plastic bags and scraps of signed paper that mean so little but are so
very rare, unobtainable. How else would I find a Russian receipt from
a decrepit corner store in Irkutsk, now that I'm in China? When I'll
be in Korea, Japan, New York?
Back to this sense of displacement -- I can think of cases when I moved or traveled from place to place, and having-just-arrived would walk around for a week in a daze, thinking: 'I am not there? I am not there.' Eventually things would set in, and I would walk around being present. In my skin. Maybe it's the train that makes these transitions so graceful, so natural. Maybe.
Currently the train is at the Mongolia-China border, on the China side. We've been here for a few hours, now, changing the gauge of the trains, as the Mongolian/Russian train axle width and the Chinese axle widths are different. It's quite the complicated operation, separating the train into two, then separating each car from each other, lifting each train car up in the air, pushing all of the axles/carriages out of the way, bringing new carriages in, lowering each suspended car back down, and then finally connecting all the cars together. Everyone's been peering out of windows, craning their necks, taking photos. It's a fun sight to see a car full of people hovering six feet above the ground.
This car is full of tourists, about 80% tourists maybe. It makes sense, as it's relatively expensive and time-consuming -- I think there's a cheaper way that costs about 50 USD (a fourth of the price) that involves taking multiple trains and buses across the border. Or, if you're adventurous, you can hitchhike part of the way. Anyways, not surprisingly, my willingness to talk to people/other tourists is inversely proportional to the amount of tourists on the train. Moscow-Irkutsk was fun, because there was about one tourist per twenty locals, but this is a little different, feels a little bit contrived, maybe. Or maybe it's that going from car to car saying "where are you from?" gets tiring when there's about 40 groups of people all doing their own thing. Again, not surprising, but it makes me turn more inward, be more content with reading, typing, thinking. There are two groups of people on the train, though, A and P, and J and E, both from the Irkutsk - Ulaanbataar train, and so I've been wandering around and having beers with the former, playing cards with the latter. It's nice to have these points of contact, they're there if I want to, and they're all wonderful people. At the same time, of course, it's good to have my own time. And so I do, because time's all there is..
The train started from Ulaanbataar and made its way down south-east towards the Mongolian-Chinese border. We passed through (or skirted) the Gobi, which was miles and miles of sandy grass, or grassy sand, as far as the eye could see. After this axle-changing operation we'll keep on going a bit more eastward. Apparently, a few hours before Beijing, we'll get an engine attached at the rear that will push the train up and down steep hills, and we might get a sight of the Great Wall, which will be fun.
---
So, Mongolia.
Mongolia was interesting, in that I had too little time there, and I feel like I would need maybe two more weeks to get a better grasp of the country; one more week to see the place, another to understand it a bit more.
From the train from Irkutsk to Ulaanbataar I I got into the station at 6:30 am, in the early morning. There were throngs of people milling around asking for the usual taxi rides and offering tours, pushing cards into my hands. I didn't have any reservations, and had figured that I'd play it by ear when I arrived, and would probably have walked to one of the guesthouses that I had looked up. A and P were staying at a guesthouse, through, and there's nothing like a personal recommendation, so I tagged along on the van that came to pick them up (how convenient!) and got to the guesthouse that way.
Idre's guest house was okay, located on the side of a dusty road, and the atmosphere was a little funny, as if Idre himself was a businessman, rather than a hotel owner, but it was fine and friendly and worked out okay. I dropped my bags, and asked him for any tours; he thought a bit and told me that there was a tour going for two days and three nights, leaving in an hour at 7:30. After mulling it over I said sure, so I repacked my bag and left my large backpack in the storage room, checked my email, sent out some urgent replies, and by then it was time to go. I didn't take a shower though, but I should have. (So, it turns out, email takes precedence over personal hygiene) By the time the van jumped on the roads heading out of Ulaanbataar, there was an woman in her 60s from Holland, who seemed reservedly excited and amused, and a very friendly guy in his early 20s from Kentucky with bushy eyebrows, a monkey printed on his tshirt, and jeans that were in danger of becoming shorts. After talking a bit (she's a sculptor/interior designer, he's an English teacher in Korea), everyone sort of fell quiet as we watched the dusty and trafficky roads of UB slide away to the outskirts of the city, then less dusty fields, then grassy fields, then grassy fields with mountains, blue skies, and herds of horses, sheep, camels, cows. None of us had really seen anything like this before, and so we spent most of the ride looking at things, craning our necks, turning around, left, right, peering out of windows, looking out at the sky, and so on.
-
Interestingly enough, the outskirts of the city had a poor-ish area, where people lived crowded together in yurt/gers. It's interesting how gers are traditional and absolutely practical nomadic housing systems, and at the same time within the setting of an urban 'slum' operate as cheap semi-permanent housing. To my understanding, a ger in its nomadic usage (just under half of the country is still nomadic) is moved around about four times a year, and it'd be impractical to use anything other than a ger on the plains. Practicality aside, it's very traditional, operates as a symbol of Mongolia, and I imagine there's a certain degree of 'respect' or esteem accorded to the ger in its nomadic usage. At the same time, in a urban setting, a semi-slum, with tiny yards cordoned off with panels, the ger operates as cheap housing, is belittled, almost. It's strange to have this conflation of traditional-nomadic-ger and cheap-housing-system align together: in one setting, it's a wonderful system of living; in another, it's a poor city dwelling. Or is it? And it's all too easy to read into this a narrative of 'the nomad, chained at home, loses some sense of 'nobility', tradition', etc. Part of me wonders if this story isn't the conflict in Mongolia's economic and social growth in general, and part of me is so very aware of the dangers inherent in generating this sort of narrative, of treating this country as an aesthetic object that loses some of its charm in progress, and so on.
And that's what I mean by wanting to have more time to grasp an understanding of the country. There was a surprising amount of underpinning conflict that I felt about the country, or how things operated, and I wanted to know more, but it was just too quick, too short, to know anything but the most superficial of tastes, a quick bite, a short taste test. Mongolia's appeal for outsiders is its vastness, the traditional nomadic life, supposedly, but at the same time on the other side of the see-saw of this this appeal lies a lack of infrastructure, few paved roads, and so on. There's very little production that happens there; in a supermarket I saw tissues(!) imported from Germany, for example. There's a rich, rich history that Mongolia lives in the shadow of -- when I went to a temple that was the biggest temple of its time in the 13th century, everything felt a little worn, a little weary, as if the palace walls were ready to say "well, come on, let's try something new." But then, see, here I am again, reading into things. What I mean to say is that there's a lot going on here, a lot of tension, a lot of concerns, a lot of interesting things at play.
For example: what to do with a country trying to modernize itself, that knows that its appeal for outsiders is its untouched vastness? Or is this at all a conflict? Now, herders use motorcycles, have cell phones, use solar panels and have satellite TV (sometimes). It's tempting to think of this as somehow incongruous with the idea of herdsmen, still herding on horses, milking cows and horses, drinking airag (fermented mare's milk), dealing without refrigeration. Or maybe it's not, and it's a productive and positive syncretism. And to continue this syncretism further -- what is it to be a modern nomad? Is nomadism compatible with modern progress? And what will 'modern progress' be for Mongolia? The nomad system is both a lifestyle and an economic process -- but the process is undeniably economically 'inefficient' (compared to the horrific meat farms of the US), while the lifestyle is traditional, cherished, respected. How to deal with these two sides of being a nomad? How to channel the economic process into a powerful force for Mongolia -- yet at the same time continue to uphold or support the lifestyle that also provides a great draw for tourism? Mongolia must be aware of its projected image of nomads living under a large blue sky, herding livestock in peace and wonder, and to know that the attractiveness of this image is synonymous with a 'lack' that is also romanticized by more developed countries... Lack of hurry, lack of social constraints, lack of property, lack of hierarchy, and all of these combining to create a dream of independent, 'simple' living...
-
After five hours of a jittery, jumping, bucking, rocking car ride, the unpaved dirt roads gave way to unpaved grassy roads, and we traveled like that, through the countryside, like in a car commercial: suspensions-a-working, cylinders-a-firing. Plumes of dust billowing out from behind the car, bouncing up and down. Eventually we rode up to a ger, and we met two friendly French girls from Paris, had lunch, chatted a bit. And there it turned out that everyone (except for me) was going on a eight-day tour of Mongolia, and realized that this two night, three day tour of mine was a little bit non-existent.
Before I could really ask the guide about this all, though, I was whisked onto a camel ride about five minutes after finishing lunch, so everyone clambered out of the ger and watched people to try to get the camel to sit. The camel kept on spitting rudely (and very deliberately) and being very obstinate, which fulfilled all of my stereotypes about camel personalities, and I found myself liking the idea of a domesticated animal (with a steel rod piercing its nose) being feisty and independent enough to resist all attempts to make it behave. Eventually, after enough tries, and this girl walked off into the distance to a camel herd about five minutes away to swap camels. Ten minutes later, she came back with the herder, who brought a different camel -- but instead to everyone's amusement the original camel sat down quite promptly at his urging.
I got the new camel, anyways, and hopped on. (Camels have two stages of movement when getting up: the back legs, which tumbles you forward, and then the front legs straighten, which rights you again.) This girl, Soda, led me around, and in the barest of English we talked and I learned that she was fifteen, played volleyball, her boyfriend was seventeen and drove a motorbike, she goes back to school in Ulaanbataar in the fall, and she asked me questions likewise. All in all, though, I was content to walk on sand dunes and cross small rivers, and was really very content just feeling the gait of the camel, being grateful to it, and having the world pass me by.
By the time we circled around to the gers, about an hour had passed, and none of the other travelers were there. They offered me a giant bowl of mare's milk, which was sour and sour and milky. Not really pleasant at first taste, but interesting indeed, and out of politeness I tried to down the whole thing -- until I realized that I didn't have to, that the bowl wasn't 'my own serving' but simply a way to drink. Another calibration, readjustment here: bowls not necessarily as individual servings but as simply mechanisms of serving, and I read into this (only slightly) the family-oriented culture of Mongolian life.
And then just as soon as I put down my bowl a van pulled up. I hopped in, and for another hour: dirt roads, unpaved, rocky movement, green grass, a blue sky, unyielding sun: and I inevitably fell fast asleep to the rocking motion of the world.
-
After that ride, I joined onto the last day of a four-day tour with some other people.
My new tour-mates were four friends from Switzerland, and I won't talk about them too much save to say that they were certainly friendly but mostly aloof, and altogether too close-minded for anything to be of any interest to them. I felt a little bit sorry and mostly exasperated at their limpid presence, their insolent gaze, and I couldn't stop but think inwardly: why are you traveling? I wonder what it must be like, to travel so clustered, so helplessly and desperately together. The world sliding away underneath, maybe. They told me that they'd been to Iran a bit before last year, and I couldn't really believe it, wondered if they went out of a flippant whim, clambered up into the simulation chamber titled 'Iran' and watched the world projected onto all six walls/floors/ceilings, and walked out after the credits. They didn't eat milk, cheese, didn't like yogurt, and that's pretty devastating in Mongolia, especially. They ate everything Mongolian with a grimace and the barest amount of gratitude. It turns out that the tour guide also does all the cooking on any of these tours, and most anyone I care to be friends with has more thankfulness towards a waiter than they had towards the guide who stayed with them, slept nearby, and cooked the food for seven people herself. But they would wait impatiently for the food, then eat half-heartedly with forks dangling from their fingers as if the food had been sitting on the table all along, sit back, and would wait for the next thing to happen.
Here's an anecdote: we were in a temple, and the local guide was explaining to us the history of a few paintings, eight or so, painted in the eighteenth century with natural colors, depicting different deities. Ornately decorated, deliberate palette of colors, fantastically detailed. And one of them steps forward, and with a pretty shitty streak of mischievousness, says in front of the local guide, in a temple that's the pride of the country: "Ah, it's ugly!" And right then, I knew that the day would not be fun. Later that day, we had some boiled milk for the dinner's dessert, which turned to take the shape of a semi-solid pancake. The four kids ventured in with pronounced grimaces, and it tasted like sweet (and very goaty) goat cheese, but nothing completely out of the blue. No-one else liked it, and that's fine, but one of them said (after much grimacing and laughing at the food) "I'm not used to eating things like this," and I snapped back, "well, that's why you travel in the first place." I think food pickiness gets at me more than an anything, that and music pickiness, when people can have the gall to look at each other and say, "this music is so weird", 'this is so bad'. It made me want to punch them in the face, right then and there.
But really, I got the sense that this all happened out of a certain... passivity, more than anything. One goes, and one sees things. There's the travel where you're the intact self and you go to see things, monuments, landmarks; and then there's the travel where you manage to let the world in and you talk to people, find out what they're like. They were headed to Russia, and secretly I hoped that they would find it hard, impenetrable, that they would encounter interactions that they found rude -- more than anything because those interactions would be punctures in the little enclave of their moving zeppelin, detached, hovering above travel and movement and actually being anywhere. I have this image of them slowly crashing to the ground and emerging, dazed, with a few skid marks here and there, eventually having to deal with real people. Reprimanded, lost, frowned at, stabbing at maps, finally asking people, learning how to use the language, approaching the world with a little bit less of a sneer. Maybe.
I say passivity because they were passive, yes, but also because maybe the origin of the sneer is an over-solidity of self, a too-sureness of the relation of things in the world ('they eat dog, they eat snails, they will eat everything, can you believe that, they eat things which are not food', as if 'food' is not one of the most fluidly bounded definitions ever, etc) and comes from an unwillingness to participate in the creation of the self actively, maybe. Or, maybe I have to check myself to make sure I'm not just laughing at provinciality, their not being-used-to not-being-used-to things, and maybe I'm the one who's used to things enough that I can comfortably be used to these things because they're not that new. Maybe. Maybe not.
-
On a completely different note, I have this sudden image of wandering in Chinatown in NYC, somewhere around Grand and Chrystie, buying fish and greens, everyone gazing at piles of greens, iced styrofoam boxes piled with fish, and that image feels like home.
-
With the aforementioned group we went to a dusty temple, walked around for a little bit, went back to the ger camp. There were other tourists there, and I was glad to go and talk and meet other people, walk around. I talked to two Mongolian guides who were practicing on a Mongolian harp-like instrument with a local musician. They were 22 and 24, and were working as guides during the summer, having studied English and tourism in university in Ulaanbataar. I watched two cats play with each other, mother and kitten, walked around and found a makeshift basketball hoop, watched the sun set.
After dinner we piled into a ger with everyone else at the ger camp and listened to the musician play; he was a former air traffic controller who became devoted to traditional Mongolian music, he said. Part salesman, part musician, he started playing, and it was actually quite nice to have this end my first night in Mongolia, a little bit of the horse-hair fiddle, a little bit of throat singing, a little bit touristy but necessary and nice nonetheless. After we clapped and said our thank-yous I went back to the ger, brushed my teeth and went to bed, trembling in the cold.
-
The next day we were all slated to head back to Ulaanbataar, which would have meant a very uneventful one-night trip for me (especially since the drive was six bumpy hours both ways), so I asked Alta, the guide, if she could call Idre and explain the situation. She did, and after a few calls, she told me that I could stay at a nomadic family's ger; however, they didn't usually receive visitors, and I wouldn't have a guide, so would be on my own! She was very very apologetic, while I was more than delighted.
After breakfast we drove to the ger, about two hours away. We stopped here and there to ask people for directions -- more accurately, we stopped to ask nearby people if they knew the ___ family, and each time they would either shrug or point to a group of gers far in the distance. Eventually we found our way, pulled up. Alta (our guide) started cooking us lunch, and I dropped off my stuff. After a quick hike to a nearby mountain and down, lunch was ready, and we ate. Alta then worriedly wrote me a list of Mongolian words, gave me her cell number, and then they all left (the four friends, Alta, and the driver) and I was on my own.
The family I was staying with was friendly, but reserved, as they normally didn't really receive any guests. In fact, as it turned out, I was sleeping in their own ger, and so pushed out by me, the mother and the daughter had to sleep in the kitchen ger, which I felt supremely apologetic for. The daughter spoke a bit of English, and she asked me if I wanted to ride horses? And for how long? And I said yes, sure, for however long. So the son rode off on a horse, brought a horse back from the herd, and saddled it up for me, then gestured, 'hop on'. No lesson, or guide, or anything.
Hoping that the experience would be like the only other time I had ridden horses (in Iceland; and there, they were very docile and patient) I got on, and immediately the horse started almost-galloping. "Whoa!" I yelped automatically, but of course that didn't work, as horses aren't trained to 'stop' in Mongolian, only to go ("Chu!"), and so I scrambled at the reins and pulled the horse in, and turned around. I got the horse to trot along, but the horse would stop and start at its own accord, move around, and was a little obstinate. Here and there it would bend down to eat some grass. Eventually I got the right mix of tension and distance on the reins, and found a better balance on the saddle, and all was well. I felt that I had reached an understanding with the horse. It's kind of a strange wonder to ride a horse, to know that you're sitting on an intelligent animal, that avoids holes, steps around obstacles, is surefooted and aware. Initially I kept on trying to micro-steer the horse, but then I realized -- it knows the vague direction in which I want to go; I'll leave part of the path to it, and everything was fine. And I found myself enjoying everything hugely.
-
More to come, later. We are in the mountains of China, two hours away from Beijing. August 1st, 12:16pm.
Back to this sense of displacement -- I can think of cases when I moved or traveled from place to place, and having-just-arrived would walk around for a week in a daze, thinking: 'I am not there? I am not there.' Eventually things would set in, and I would walk around being present. In my skin. Maybe it's the train that makes these transitions so graceful, so natural. Maybe.
Currently the train is at the Mongolia-China border, on the China side. We've been here for a few hours, now, changing the gauge of the trains, as the Mongolian/Russian train axle width and the Chinese axle widths are different. It's quite the complicated operation, separating the train into two, then separating each car from each other, lifting each train car up in the air, pushing all of the axles/carriages out of the way, bringing new carriages in, lowering each suspended car back down, and then finally connecting all the cars together. Everyone's been peering out of windows, craning their necks, taking photos. It's a fun sight to see a car full of people hovering six feet above the ground.
This car is full of tourists, about 80% tourists maybe. It makes sense, as it's relatively expensive and time-consuming -- I think there's a cheaper way that costs about 50 USD (a fourth of the price) that involves taking multiple trains and buses across the border. Or, if you're adventurous, you can hitchhike part of the way. Anyways, not surprisingly, my willingness to talk to people/other tourists is inversely proportional to the amount of tourists on the train. Moscow-Irkutsk was fun, because there was about one tourist per twenty locals, but this is a little different, feels a little bit contrived, maybe. Or maybe it's that going from car to car saying "where are you from?" gets tiring when there's about 40 groups of people all doing their own thing. Again, not surprising, but it makes me turn more inward, be more content with reading, typing, thinking. There are two groups of people on the train, though, A and P, and J and E, both from the Irkutsk - Ulaanbataar train, and so I've been wandering around and having beers with the former, playing cards with the latter. It's nice to have these points of contact, they're there if I want to, and they're all wonderful people. At the same time, of course, it's good to have my own time. And so I do, because time's all there is..
The train started from Ulaanbataar and made its way down south-east towards the Mongolian-Chinese border. We passed through (or skirted) the Gobi, which was miles and miles of sandy grass, or grassy sand, as far as the eye could see. After this axle-changing operation we'll keep on going a bit more eastward. Apparently, a few hours before Beijing, we'll get an engine attached at the rear that will push the train up and down steep hills, and we might get a sight of the Great Wall, which will be fun.
---
So, Mongolia.
Mongolia was interesting, in that I had too little time there, and I feel like I would need maybe two more weeks to get a better grasp of the country; one more week to see the place, another to understand it a bit more.
From the train from Irkutsk to Ulaanbataar I I got into the station at 6:30 am, in the early morning. There were throngs of people milling around asking for the usual taxi rides and offering tours, pushing cards into my hands. I didn't have any reservations, and had figured that I'd play it by ear when I arrived, and would probably have walked to one of the guesthouses that I had looked up. A and P were staying at a guesthouse, through, and there's nothing like a personal recommendation, so I tagged along on the van that came to pick them up (how convenient!) and got to the guesthouse that way.
Idre's guest house was okay, located on the side of a dusty road, and the atmosphere was a little funny, as if Idre himself was a businessman, rather than a hotel owner, but it was fine and friendly and worked out okay. I dropped my bags, and asked him for any tours; he thought a bit and told me that there was a tour going for two days and three nights, leaving in an hour at 7:30. After mulling it over I said sure, so I repacked my bag and left my large backpack in the storage room, checked my email, sent out some urgent replies, and by then it was time to go. I didn't take a shower though, but I should have. (So, it turns out, email takes precedence over personal hygiene) By the time the van jumped on the roads heading out of Ulaanbataar, there was an woman in her 60s from Holland, who seemed reservedly excited and amused, and a very friendly guy in his early 20s from Kentucky with bushy eyebrows, a monkey printed on his tshirt, and jeans that were in danger of becoming shorts. After talking a bit (she's a sculptor/interior designer, he's an English teacher in Korea), everyone sort of fell quiet as we watched the dusty and trafficky roads of UB slide away to the outskirts of the city, then less dusty fields, then grassy fields, then grassy fields with mountains, blue skies, and herds of horses, sheep, camels, cows. None of us had really seen anything like this before, and so we spent most of the ride looking at things, craning our necks, turning around, left, right, peering out of windows, looking out at the sky, and so on.
-
Interestingly enough, the outskirts of the city had a poor-ish area, where people lived crowded together in yurt/gers. It's interesting how gers are traditional and absolutely practical nomadic housing systems, and at the same time within the setting of an urban 'slum' operate as cheap semi-permanent housing. To my understanding, a ger in its nomadic usage (just under half of the country is still nomadic) is moved around about four times a year, and it'd be impractical to use anything other than a ger on the plains. Practicality aside, it's very traditional, operates as a symbol of Mongolia, and I imagine there's a certain degree of 'respect' or esteem accorded to the ger in its nomadic usage. At the same time, in a urban setting, a semi-slum, with tiny yards cordoned off with panels, the ger operates as cheap housing, is belittled, almost. It's strange to have this conflation of traditional-nomadic-ger and cheap-housing-system align together: in one setting, it's a wonderful system of living; in another, it's a poor city dwelling. Or is it? And it's all too easy to read into this a narrative of 'the nomad, chained at home, loses some sense of 'nobility', tradition', etc. Part of me wonders if this story isn't the conflict in Mongolia's economic and social growth in general, and part of me is so very aware of the dangers inherent in generating this sort of narrative, of treating this country as an aesthetic object that loses some of its charm in progress, and so on.
And that's what I mean by wanting to have more time to grasp an understanding of the country. There was a surprising amount of underpinning conflict that I felt about the country, or how things operated, and I wanted to know more, but it was just too quick, too short, to know anything but the most superficial of tastes, a quick bite, a short taste test. Mongolia's appeal for outsiders is its vastness, the traditional nomadic life, supposedly, but at the same time on the other side of the see-saw of this this appeal lies a lack of infrastructure, few paved roads, and so on. There's very little production that happens there; in a supermarket I saw tissues(!) imported from Germany, for example. There's a rich, rich history that Mongolia lives in the shadow of -- when I went to a temple that was the biggest temple of its time in the 13th century, everything felt a little worn, a little weary, as if the palace walls were ready to say "well, come on, let's try something new." But then, see, here I am again, reading into things. What I mean to say is that there's a lot going on here, a lot of tension, a lot of concerns, a lot of interesting things at play.
For example: what to do with a country trying to modernize itself, that knows that its appeal for outsiders is its untouched vastness? Or is this at all a conflict? Now, herders use motorcycles, have cell phones, use solar panels and have satellite TV (sometimes). It's tempting to think of this as somehow incongruous with the idea of herdsmen, still herding on horses, milking cows and horses, drinking airag (fermented mare's milk), dealing without refrigeration. Or maybe it's not, and it's a productive and positive syncretism. And to continue this syncretism further -- what is it to be a modern nomad? Is nomadism compatible with modern progress? And what will 'modern progress' be for Mongolia? The nomad system is both a lifestyle and an economic process -- but the process is undeniably economically 'inefficient' (compared to the horrific meat farms of the US), while the lifestyle is traditional, cherished, respected. How to deal with these two sides of being a nomad? How to channel the economic process into a powerful force for Mongolia -- yet at the same time continue to uphold or support the lifestyle that also provides a great draw for tourism? Mongolia must be aware of its projected image of nomads living under a large blue sky, herding livestock in peace and wonder, and to know that the attractiveness of this image is synonymous with a 'lack' that is also romanticized by more developed countries... Lack of hurry, lack of social constraints, lack of property, lack of hierarchy, and all of these combining to create a dream of independent, 'simple' living...
-
After five hours of a jittery, jumping, bucking, rocking car ride, the unpaved dirt roads gave way to unpaved grassy roads, and we traveled like that, through the countryside, like in a car commercial: suspensions-a-working, cylinders-a-firing. Plumes of dust billowing out from behind the car, bouncing up and down. Eventually we rode up to a ger, and we met two friendly French girls from Paris, had lunch, chatted a bit. And there it turned out that everyone (except for me) was going on a eight-day tour of Mongolia, and realized that this two night, three day tour of mine was a little bit non-existent.
Before I could really ask the guide about this all, though, I was whisked onto a camel ride about five minutes after finishing lunch, so everyone clambered out of the ger and watched people to try to get the camel to sit. The camel kept on spitting rudely (and very deliberately) and being very obstinate, which fulfilled all of my stereotypes about camel personalities, and I found myself liking the idea of a domesticated animal (with a steel rod piercing its nose) being feisty and independent enough to resist all attempts to make it behave. Eventually, after enough tries, and this girl walked off into the distance to a camel herd about five minutes away to swap camels. Ten minutes later, she came back with the herder, who brought a different camel -- but instead to everyone's amusement the original camel sat down quite promptly at his urging.
I got the new camel, anyways, and hopped on. (Camels have two stages of movement when getting up: the back legs, which tumbles you forward, and then the front legs straighten, which rights you again.) This girl, Soda, led me around, and in the barest of English we talked and I learned that she was fifteen, played volleyball, her boyfriend was seventeen and drove a motorbike, she goes back to school in Ulaanbataar in the fall, and she asked me questions likewise. All in all, though, I was content to walk on sand dunes and cross small rivers, and was really very content just feeling the gait of the camel, being grateful to it, and having the world pass me by.
By the time we circled around to the gers, about an hour had passed, and none of the other travelers were there. They offered me a giant bowl of mare's milk, which was sour and sour and milky. Not really pleasant at first taste, but interesting indeed, and out of politeness I tried to down the whole thing -- until I realized that I didn't have to, that the bowl wasn't 'my own serving' but simply a way to drink. Another calibration, readjustment here: bowls not necessarily as individual servings but as simply mechanisms of serving, and I read into this (only slightly) the family-oriented culture of Mongolian life.
And then just as soon as I put down my bowl a van pulled up. I hopped in, and for another hour: dirt roads, unpaved, rocky movement, green grass, a blue sky, unyielding sun: and I inevitably fell fast asleep to the rocking motion of the world.
-
After that ride, I joined onto the last day of a four-day tour with some other people.
My new tour-mates were four friends from Switzerland, and I won't talk about them too much save to say that they were certainly friendly but mostly aloof, and altogether too close-minded for anything to be of any interest to them. I felt a little bit sorry and mostly exasperated at their limpid presence, their insolent gaze, and I couldn't stop but think inwardly: why are you traveling? I wonder what it must be like, to travel so clustered, so helplessly and desperately together. The world sliding away underneath, maybe. They told me that they'd been to Iran a bit before last year, and I couldn't really believe it, wondered if they went out of a flippant whim, clambered up into the simulation chamber titled 'Iran' and watched the world projected onto all six walls/floors/ceilings, and walked out after the credits. They didn't eat milk, cheese, didn't like yogurt, and that's pretty devastating in Mongolia, especially. They ate everything Mongolian with a grimace and the barest amount of gratitude. It turns out that the tour guide also does all the cooking on any of these tours, and most anyone I care to be friends with has more thankfulness towards a waiter than they had towards the guide who stayed with them, slept nearby, and cooked the food for seven people herself. But they would wait impatiently for the food, then eat half-heartedly with forks dangling from their fingers as if the food had been sitting on the table all along, sit back, and would wait for the next thing to happen.
Here's an anecdote: we were in a temple, and the local guide was explaining to us the history of a few paintings, eight or so, painted in the eighteenth century with natural colors, depicting different deities. Ornately decorated, deliberate palette of colors, fantastically detailed. And one of them steps forward, and with a pretty shitty streak of mischievousness, says in front of the local guide, in a temple that's the pride of the country: "Ah, it's ugly!" And right then, I knew that the day would not be fun. Later that day, we had some boiled milk for the dinner's dessert, which turned to take the shape of a semi-solid pancake. The four kids ventured in with pronounced grimaces, and it tasted like sweet (and very goaty) goat cheese, but nothing completely out of the blue. No-one else liked it, and that's fine, but one of them said (after much grimacing and laughing at the food) "I'm not used to eating things like this," and I snapped back, "well, that's why you travel in the first place." I think food pickiness gets at me more than an anything, that and music pickiness, when people can have the gall to look at each other and say, "this music is so weird", 'this is so bad'. It made me want to punch them in the face, right then and there.
But really, I got the sense that this all happened out of a certain... passivity, more than anything. One goes, and one sees things. There's the travel where you're the intact self and you go to see things, monuments, landmarks; and then there's the travel where you manage to let the world in and you talk to people, find out what they're like. They were headed to Russia, and secretly I hoped that they would find it hard, impenetrable, that they would encounter interactions that they found rude -- more than anything because those interactions would be punctures in the little enclave of their moving zeppelin, detached, hovering above travel and movement and actually being anywhere. I have this image of them slowly crashing to the ground and emerging, dazed, with a few skid marks here and there, eventually having to deal with real people. Reprimanded, lost, frowned at, stabbing at maps, finally asking people, learning how to use the language, approaching the world with a little bit less of a sneer. Maybe.
I say passivity because they were passive, yes, but also because maybe the origin of the sneer is an over-solidity of self, a too-sureness of the relation of things in the world ('they eat dog, they eat snails, they will eat everything, can you believe that, they eat things which are not food', as if 'food' is not one of the most fluidly bounded definitions ever, etc) and comes from an unwillingness to participate in the creation of the self actively, maybe. Or, maybe I have to check myself to make sure I'm not just laughing at provinciality, their not being-used-to not-being-used-to things, and maybe I'm the one who's used to things enough that I can comfortably be used to these things because they're not that new. Maybe. Maybe not.
-
On a completely different note, I have this sudden image of wandering in Chinatown in NYC, somewhere around Grand and Chrystie, buying fish and greens, everyone gazing at piles of greens, iced styrofoam boxes piled with fish, and that image feels like home.
-
With the aforementioned group we went to a dusty temple, walked around for a little bit, went back to the ger camp. There were other tourists there, and I was glad to go and talk and meet other people, walk around. I talked to two Mongolian guides who were practicing on a Mongolian harp-like instrument with a local musician. They were 22 and 24, and were working as guides during the summer, having studied English and tourism in university in Ulaanbataar. I watched two cats play with each other, mother and kitten, walked around and found a makeshift basketball hoop, watched the sun set.
After dinner we piled into a ger with everyone else at the ger camp and listened to the musician play; he was a former air traffic controller who became devoted to traditional Mongolian music, he said. Part salesman, part musician, he started playing, and it was actually quite nice to have this end my first night in Mongolia, a little bit of the horse-hair fiddle, a little bit of throat singing, a little bit touristy but necessary and nice nonetheless. After we clapped and said our thank-yous I went back to the ger, brushed my teeth and went to bed, trembling in the cold.
-
The next day we were all slated to head back to Ulaanbataar, which would have meant a very uneventful one-night trip for me (especially since the drive was six bumpy hours both ways), so I asked Alta, the guide, if she could call Idre and explain the situation. She did, and after a few calls, she told me that I could stay at a nomadic family's ger; however, they didn't usually receive visitors, and I wouldn't have a guide, so would be on my own! She was very very apologetic, while I was more than delighted.
After breakfast we drove to the ger, about two hours away. We stopped here and there to ask people for directions -- more accurately, we stopped to ask nearby people if they knew the ___ family, and each time they would either shrug or point to a group of gers far in the distance. Eventually we found our way, pulled up. Alta (our guide) started cooking us lunch, and I dropped off my stuff. After a quick hike to a nearby mountain and down, lunch was ready, and we ate. Alta then worriedly wrote me a list of Mongolian words, gave me her cell number, and then they all left (the four friends, Alta, and the driver) and I was on my own.
The family I was staying with was friendly, but reserved, as they normally didn't really receive any guests. In fact, as it turned out, I was sleeping in their own ger, and so pushed out by me, the mother and the daughter had to sleep in the kitchen ger, which I felt supremely apologetic for. The daughter spoke a bit of English, and she asked me if I wanted to ride horses? And for how long? And I said yes, sure, for however long. So the son rode off on a horse, brought a horse back from the herd, and saddled it up for me, then gestured, 'hop on'. No lesson, or guide, or anything.
Hoping that the experience would be like the only other time I had ridden horses (in Iceland; and there, they were very docile and patient) I got on, and immediately the horse started almost-galloping. "Whoa!" I yelped automatically, but of course that didn't work, as horses aren't trained to 'stop' in Mongolian, only to go ("Chu!"), and so I scrambled at the reins and pulled the horse in, and turned around. I got the horse to trot along, but the horse would stop and start at its own accord, move around, and was a little obstinate. Here and there it would bend down to eat some grass. Eventually I got the right mix of tension and distance on the reins, and found a better balance on the saddle, and all was well. I felt that I had reached an understanding with the horse. It's kind of a strange wonder to ride a horse, to know that you're sitting on an intelligent animal, that avoids holes, steps around obstacles, is surefooted and aware. Initially I kept on trying to micro-steer the horse, but then I realized -- it knows the vague direction in which I want to go; I'll leave part of the path to it, and everything was fine. And I found myself enjoying everything hugely.
-
More to come, later. We are in the mountains of China, two hours away from Beijing. August 1st, 12:16pm.
posted by provolot on August 2, 2010 2:08 am |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
irkutsk to ulan bator, day
irkutsk to ulan bator, day 2.
(from a letter)
Today we crossed the border from Mongolia to China. The crossing took nine hours all in all: Six hours on the Russia side, three hours on the Mongolia side. The Russia side was a lot of waiting around, a lot of being unsure of what was going on. The Mongolia side was spent half in a card game with Jon and Eli, and half at a small (but surprisingly wonderful) restaurant with Aurelie and Philip.
It turns out that the two cars that started in Irkutsk are filled mostly with travelers. I hesitate to describe them with their nationality but that's really how introductions how done here: where are you from? And it all spirals out from there. I'm not complaining at all, but it's true that nationality or locale is the defining center out of which everything starts; I suppose that's not so surprising for a bunch of people who have met specifically because they're devoted to traveling on a slow and inefficient train. So here we go.
There's the French couple: the guy a guitar teacher from Lyon, and his Ukrainian-French wife who will soon be a teacher's assistant. There's the four people from the Basque country. There are the two Californians teaching in Dalian, China. The guy from Cologne, Germany, and another guy from Dusseldorf who studies product design. There's the two German girls, one of which is doing a doctorate on agricultural byproducts and bioengineering in Tanzania. There's the American refugee/immigration law expert working for a campaign manager in Colorado, having come back from Egypt. There's the Quebecois Harvard student studying 20th century intellectual history. There's the two English women, one of which works at SAP and travels often, the other one who quit her job at conservation to go teach in Vietnam, on her train journey there.
I am so eager, so so eager to meet people. It's surprising to me.
-
On the Mongolian side, I changed my currency from rubles to togrog. I watched them say "how much?", then type in on a calculator, '40', and that was the going rate for togrog per ruble. So I walked to one of the less equipped ones further away and typed in '45', and she shook her head and punched in '40', and I pointed over to other people and pushed '45', and she said '42', and I said '44', and she said '43', and I gave in. And then so we did the calculation. She handed me bills, then, but tried to give me less togrog than the calculation came out to, and I shook my head, and then she gave me a few extra, which still wasn't right. And then finally she caved in and gave me the right amount, with the air of rueful acknowledgement, like 'oh, okay, fine, whatever you want.' Needless to say (as you can probably tell) I walked away, feeling very pleased with myself.
After that A and P and I went to a small restaurant, that was quite cozy and homey, and the waitress smiled, and we picked out dishes that she liked, and they were wonderful, and delicious, and hot, and soupy, and just what I wanted. My box of instant doshirak (yes, korean) ramen sat unloved in the train compartment, and I am happy for that. We ate, and talked, and later went to the train, waited around on the tracks for our train to be attached to the end of another one. While we were there a dog came up to us, sat at our feet, watched a worker drain the gray-water tanks of the train. There was a wonderfully cool breeze, and the sky looked as if it was about to rain, or thunder, and the sun was setting and throwing every single high cloud into marvelous relief. For some reason that small period of waiting, that half an hour of sitting around and waiting for the train really stuck in my mind, just nothing but train tracks, a dog, many many clouds, a cool breeze, time to pass the day with, because we're going somewhere and waiting to do so. I'm here, waiting to go, wanting to be here so I can be there, okay with being both here and there. Transition, itinerant-ness, nomad-ness is my desire and I'm doing that whether moving or not.
(One thing that the ramen reminds me of: I was in Irkutsk, when I saw the most amazing sight: A bus pulled into the front of the train station, and as clear as day the bus said, in Korean, "Seoul Station", and so on, with a full list of stations (in Korea) the bus was running to. I almost rubbed my eyes, fulfilled the cliche gesture, but I was mindboggled. It turns out (and I'm assuming this, but I don't think I'm wrong) that many used buses from Korea are sold to countries, including Russia -- and clearly Irkutsk's bus company hasn't bothered to scrape the sign off the window. And since most, if not all Irktuskians can't read Korean, they probably ignore the sign and focus on the Russian signs. Meanwhile, the bus is this strange object, clearly for Russian use but bearing all the hallmarks of its former self -- and not only that, it's that everybody looks at the Korean and ignores it that is absolutely mind-blowing, language differences taken quite literally, unreadability turning those symbols into abstraction, maybe, maybe to a non-Korean reader it's so easy to gloss over those symbols, look at the Russian only. A bunch of lines at right angles to each other, and Russian. Which is even more amazing because those signs and words were designed to be so visually accessible, the first thing you see on a bus, to pop out at you and to let you know where it's going. And all the while I'm pondering this and getting the strange sense that this bus could be going anywhere, that I could get on it and fall asleep and arrive at Seoul Station, indeed....
-
This train, while a bit smellier and older than the previous one, is quite nicer, more train-like, more lullaby-like in the way it rocks me to sleep. Each train I take is successively nicer. The first train from St. Petersburg to Moscow was quite boring: I stepped into the compartment, and two half-naked Russian businessmen were sleeping; I climbed in and peeled off my shirt and and fell to sleep as well. Woke up in Moscow.
But this train, this one is full of errant laughter that floats down the aisle, and the sound of train tracks so well defined, and the smell of green coming in through the window, and there's faraway lightning and you can see that it's raining on the mountains over there, over there (gestures with arm). For a good hour I stood at the window looking out, out at the clouds and some mountains and the sky with such clouds, clouds, clouds. There was this one cloud far away that stretched out and down in such a way that it looked like another mountain in of itself; and if you pretended to follow its contour down to the side of the mountain/cloud, it looked as if the mountain narrowed and disappeared into the sea, and so all of a sudden it was as if the faraway ground was curving upwards and I was looking down from a high valley into a faraway sea, with islands, streaks of white foam, small fishing boats, water turning orange, reflecting the setting sun. Sea in the sky.
I am so eager to be here, I am so happy to be here. On one hand part of me is so in New York, so thinking about home and more, but as we slip into Mongolia and I hurl the window down and shove away the curtains and breathe this air in more and more of it slips away until I'm just at the window, breathing in, not thinking. I have my time, all of it, and it is so wonderful. I slide into presentness.
12:16 in the morning, on my way to Ulaanbaatar. July 29, 2010.
(from a letter)
Today we crossed the border from Mongolia to China. The crossing took nine hours all in all: Six hours on the Russia side, three hours on the Mongolia side. The Russia side was a lot of waiting around, a lot of being unsure of what was going on. The Mongolia side was spent half in a card game with Jon and Eli, and half at a small (but surprisingly wonderful) restaurant with Aurelie and Philip.
It turns out that the two cars that started in Irkutsk are filled mostly with travelers. I hesitate to describe them with their nationality but that's really how introductions how done here: where are you from? And it all spirals out from there. I'm not complaining at all, but it's true that nationality or locale is the defining center out of which everything starts; I suppose that's not so surprising for a bunch of people who have met specifically because they're devoted to traveling on a slow and inefficient train. So here we go.
There's the French couple: the guy a guitar teacher from Lyon, and his Ukrainian-French wife who will soon be a teacher's assistant. There's the four people from the Basque country. There are the two Californians teaching in Dalian, China. The guy from Cologne, Germany, and another guy from Dusseldorf who studies product design. There's the two German girls, one of which is doing a doctorate on agricultural byproducts and bioengineering in Tanzania. There's the American refugee/immigration law expert working for a campaign manager in Colorado, having come back from Egypt. There's the Quebecois Harvard student studying 20th century intellectual history. There's the two English women, one of which works at SAP and travels often, the other one who quit her job at conservation to go teach in Vietnam, on her train journey there.
I am so eager, so so eager to meet people. It's surprising to me.
-
On the Mongolian side, I changed my currency from rubles to togrog. I watched them say "how much?", then type in on a calculator, '40', and that was the going rate for togrog per ruble. So I walked to one of the less equipped ones further away and typed in '45', and she shook her head and punched in '40', and I pointed over to other people and pushed '45', and she said '42', and I said '44', and she said '43', and I gave in. And then so we did the calculation. She handed me bills, then, but tried to give me less togrog than the calculation came out to, and I shook my head, and then she gave me a few extra, which still wasn't right. And then finally she caved in and gave me the right amount, with the air of rueful acknowledgement, like 'oh, okay, fine, whatever you want.' Needless to say (as you can probably tell) I walked away, feeling very pleased with myself.
After that A and P and I went to a small restaurant, that was quite cozy and homey, and the waitress smiled, and we picked out dishes that she liked, and they were wonderful, and delicious, and hot, and soupy, and just what I wanted. My box of instant doshirak (yes, korean) ramen sat unloved in the train compartment, and I am happy for that. We ate, and talked, and later went to the train, waited around on the tracks for our train to be attached to the end of another one. While we were there a dog came up to us, sat at our feet, watched a worker drain the gray-water tanks of the train. There was a wonderfully cool breeze, and the sky looked as if it was about to rain, or thunder, and the sun was setting and throwing every single high cloud into marvelous relief. For some reason that small period of waiting, that half an hour of sitting around and waiting for the train really stuck in my mind, just nothing but train tracks, a dog, many many clouds, a cool breeze, time to pass the day with, because we're going somewhere and waiting to do so. I'm here, waiting to go, wanting to be here so I can be there, okay with being both here and there. Transition, itinerant-ness, nomad-ness is my desire and I'm doing that whether moving or not.
(One thing that the ramen reminds me of: I was in Irkutsk, when I saw the most amazing sight: A bus pulled into the front of the train station, and as clear as day the bus said, in Korean, "Seoul Station", and so on, with a full list of stations (in Korea) the bus was running to. I almost rubbed my eyes, fulfilled the cliche gesture, but I was mindboggled. It turns out (and I'm assuming this, but I don't think I'm wrong) that many used buses from Korea are sold to countries, including Russia -- and clearly Irkutsk's bus company hasn't bothered to scrape the sign off the window. And since most, if not all Irktuskians can't read Korean, they probably ignore the sign and focus on the Russian signs. Meanwhile, the bus is this strange object, clearly for Russian use but bearing all the hallmarks of its former self -- and not only that, it's that everybody looks at the Korean and ignores it that is absolutely mind-blowing, language differences taken quite literally, unreadability turning those symbols into abstraction, maybe, maybe to a non-Korean reader it's so easy to gloss over those symbols, look at the Russian only. A bunch of lines at right angles to each other, and Russian. Which is even more amazing because those signs and words were designed to be so visually accessible, the first thing you see on a bus, to pop out at you and to let you know where it's going. And all the while I'm pondering this and getting the strange sense that this bus could be going anywhere, that I could get on it and fall asleep and arrive at Seoul Station, indeed....
-
This train, while a bit smellier and older than the previous one, is quite nicer, more train-like, more lullaby-like in the way it rocks me to sleep. Each train I take is successively nicer. The first train from St. Petersburg to Moscow was quite boring: I stepped into the compartment, and two half-naked Russian businessmen were sleeping; I climbed in and peeled off my shirt and and fell to sleep as well. Woke up in Moscow.
But this train, this one is full of errant laughter that floats down the aisle, and the sound of train tracks so well defined, and the smell of green coming in through the window, and there's faraway lightning and you can see that it's raining on the mountains over there, over there (gestures with arm). For a good hour I stood at the window looking out, out at the clouds and some mountains and the sky with such clouds, clouds, clouds. There was this one cloud far away that stretched out and down in such a way that it looked like another mountain in of itself; and if you pretended to follow its contour down to the side of the mountain/cloud, it looked as if the mountain narrowed and disappeared into the sea, and so all of a sudden it was as if the faraway ground was curving upwards and I was looking down from a high valley into a faraway sea, with islands, streaks of white foam, small fishing boats, water turning orange, reflecting the setting sun. Sea in the sky.
I am so eager to be here, I am so happy to be here. On one hand part of me is so in New York, so thinking about home and more, but as we slip into Mongolia and I hurl the window down and shove away the curtains and breathe this air in more and more of it slips away until I'm just at the window, breathing in, not thinking. I have my time, all of it, and it is so wonderful. I slide into presentness.
12:16 in the morning, on my way to Ulaanbaatar. July 29, 2010.
posted by provolot on July 28, 2010 6:07 pm |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
irktusk to ulan bator, night 1
6:32 Moscow time, 11:32 Irkutsk time.
Today morning I said goodbye to Sasha and Vanya and Tanya. Last night Sasha made some attempts to talk to me, us passing the russian-english dictionary back and forth, and I learned that they had actually gone to Moscow for a relative's wedding, and that Vanya was one of seven children, and that they were returning home to Angarsk. I told him to wake me up in the morning when they left.
In the morning I woke up, everything full of fog, sun not yet risen, moon not yet set. Maybe it was the latitude here or such, but in the daze of sleepiness it seemed to me that the sun was rising before the moon was setting. In that quiet hushed tones that are so particular to early mornings, we got up, packed our bags. I helped Sasha and Tanya move their bags to the train door, and then we spent fifteen minutes looking out of the car into the distance. I tried to play this game where I would look for the reflection of the train in the windows of opposing shacks, houses, and every once in a while I would succeed, would see a row of rectangular yellow squares suddenly jump out at me out of the window of someone's home, windows glaring, like the rows of a spider's eyes, and then gone as quickly as they had appeared.
After fifteen such minutes the train stopped. Vanya gave me his lighter. Having nothing else to give I gave him my card, and he looked at it and gestured 'language difficulties', and I shrugged and smiled and felt sort of sad because obviously his gift was a gift and my gift was the signifier of a gift, like "here this is sort of a gift", or maybe his gift was a signifier of a gift and my gift signified a signifier of a gift. But then I rubbed it all out like an eraser on paper and smiled and said bye, dobrizeh, I think, I could be wrong, but said it anyways and waved, and went back to my compartment to wait for my own stop, half an hour later.
On the platform at Irkutsk I met most of the people I had met on the train, and shook hands and said bye, take care, have fun on your trip. And then I went to the station ticket counter (KACCA), realized it opened at 8am, and went to the service center to sleep for an hour, but couldn't, so I watched the sun rise through the city of Irkutsk in a quiet room full of sleeping travelers, listened more to a train mix made for me. I looked at the ceiling a lot.
Once thing I've been thinking a lot about the ornamentation of Russian buildings and interiors is that they depend a lot on the obfuscation of immediate understanding, of a quick gestalt, and instead make things complicated. Intricately ornamented chandeliers created as to please the eye because the eye drifts up and down it, isn't sure how to grasp it immediately, and there's this time-taken-to-look that is taken as a valuable function of ornamentation, maybe. As if anything that makes you look at it and try to understand it and in the process take some time is valuable. This happens outdoors, on the exteriors of moldings; this happens inside, in the most mundane of rooms, where the absence of any decoration would have been accepted equally as well.. it's like ornament is this friction force of the eye, drags it, makes it stop. A holder of attention, sticky eye-glue.
(Right now we're passing Lake Baikal as I type this, the deepest lake in the world. It looks unphotographable. Untouchable. And oh my god, the sky. And the moon. And the lake. And the train. I am sitting in a darkened car, all by my self, writing this, and unlike the previous train I was in (the Rossiya) you can open the windows, here, and it's so much better, I can feel the train with every sense of being, the rhythm of the train wheels is so hypnotic. Passing trains are like thunder and lightning, descending onto me all of a sudden, disappearing just as sudden. The moon is so very bright, illuminates the inside of this compartment. This is the train ride I wanted, yes, yes yes yes. It's a cool night, and everything smells like trees and grass and green.)
-
I am struck lately sometimes by the urgent impulse to shout and say something like: "I am here! I am really here!" as if not fully aware of my presence here. I sometimes sit and think: what does it mean to be here? Me, being here, not being there. I was just there. Just there, not there anymore, but here.
I think what especially touches me is that I am so presently here, that I arrived here and am suddenly so here here, that it strikes me as odd that it is so natural for me to be here. What is it about Russia that is so familiar? It's some affinity with old/rural Korea, some infrastructural details that are similar, at the very least. Examples: Apartment buildings, entrances, apartments on either side of the elevator. Painted yellow-and-green mini-fences in apartment yards. Grandmothers sitting around and selling half-useful items in shops that play sped-up tinny pop.
But there's something else too, something that makes me feel so here. Maybe it is that I am so here within myself much more lately and thus when I think of myself as here it is so natural. I'm here more because I can feel myself in me more.
Regardless, there's this constant sense of overwhelming (and thus invisible) presentness. Presentness is grace?
--
After I got a ticket for Ulan Bator from the station I wandered around the city of Irkutsk a bit. Tired from my stomach bug the day before (and not having eaten anything for a day as well) I decided to just half-ponder going to Listvyanka, one of the port towns around Lake Baikal an hour away. And so I drifted around town, bumped into D and R and their three children again, chatted for a little, said goodbye and continued on my way until I found myself at the tram stop that supposedly would take me to the hydrofoil stop. And so I climbed aboard the tram, paid my twelve rubles, and sat down in a seat. The warmth of the sun and the vibration was too much for me, and I fell asleep in the tram and woke up at the end of the stop, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.
I asked the driver, "Raketa station?" and she half-nodded, maybe, and said something which I didn't understand, but I got off anyways, looked around. Some area vaguely seemed to correspond to an area on the map I had, so I started walking south. Why not? Far off in the distance I saw a hill of houses, which could have meant a valley of houses below it, or even better a river, and so I kept on walking, played this game of follow-the-babushka, followed grandmothers, mothers, also fathers, grandfathers. On dirt roads, paved roads, past crumbling Soviet-era apartments, new apartment skeletons barely under construction, graffiti on walls, and so on. Very peaceful, though, very sunny and overgrown weeds and old old old swing sets. Somewhere in the distance the sound of a lone hammer against steel, "klink, klink, klink", and some birds chirping, and again that smell of green, and that was enough to make me keep on going.
Eventually I found myself in the middle of nowhere. The hill I saw, I realized, was just a hill; there was no river, no hydrofoil station, just old gray apartments showing their age and grandmothers hanging sheets on a line out the window and people selling dill and cucumbers on the street and a bus stop station selling thirty varieties of ice cream, and the lone sound of a hammer working away in the distance. Colorless dust accumulating at the corners of everything. Half-ripped posters of last election cycle's candidate, a face looking at you proudly, four-and-a-half times over. Ads for credit, rent, and erotic massage pasted, torn off, new ones pasted, torn off, pasted, torn off, creating geologies of advertisements, depth, strata. And amidst all of this, a strange strange sense of comfort, domesticity, familiarity, home.
Today morning I said goodbye to Sasha and Vanya and Tanya. Last night Sasha made some attempts to talk to me, us passing the russian-english dictionary back and forth, and I learned that they had actually gone to Moscow for a relative's wedding, and that Vanya was one of seven children, and that they were returning home to Angarsk. I told him to wake me up in the morning when they left.
In the morning I woke up, everything full of fog, sun not yet risen, moon not yet set. Maybe it was the latitude here or such, but in the daze of sleepiness it seemed to me that the sun was rising before the moon was setting. In that quiet hushed tones that are so particular to early mornings, we got up, packed our bags. I helped Sasha and Tanya move their bags to the train door, and then we spent fifteen minutes looking out of the car into the distance. I tried to play this game where I would look for the reflection of the train in the windows of opposing shacks, houses, and every once in a while I would succeed, would see a row of rectangular yellow squares suddenly jump out at me out of the window of someone's home, windows glaring, like the rows of a spider's eyes, and then gone as quickly as they had appeared.
After fifteen such minutes the train stopped. Vanya gave me his lighter. Having nothing else to give I gave him my card, and he looked at it and gestured 'language difficulties', and I shrugged and smiled and felt sort of sad because obviously his gift was a gift and my gift was the signifier of a gift, like "here this is sort of a gift", or maybe his gift was a signifier of a gift and my gift signified a signifier of a gift. But then I rubbed it all out like an eraser on paper and smiled and said bye, dobrizeh, I think, I could be wrong, but said it anyways and waved, and went back to my compartment to wait for my own stop, half an hour later.
On the platform at Irkutsk I met most of the people I had met on the train, and shook hands and said bye, take care, have fun on your trip. And then I went to the station ticket counter (KACCA), realized it opened at 8am, and went to the service center to sleep for an hour, but couldn't, so I watched the sun rise through the city of Irkutsk in a quiet room full of sleeping travelers, listened more to a train mix made for me. I looked at the ceiling a lot.
Once thing I've been thinking a lot about the ornamentation of Russian buildings and interiors is that they depend a lot on the obfuscation of immediate understanding, of a quick gestalt, and instead make things complicated. Intricately ornamented chandeliers created as to please the eye because the eye drifts up and down it, isn't sure how to grasp it immediately, and there's this time-taken-to-look that is taken as a valuable function of ornamentation, maybe. As if anything that makes you look at it and try to understand it and in the process take some time is valuable. This happens outdoors, on the exteriors of moldings; this happens inside, in the most mundane of rooms, where the absence of any decoration would have been accepted equally as well.. it's like ornament is this friction force of the eye, drags it, makes it stop. A holder of attention, sticky eye-glue.
(Right now we're passing Lake Baikal as I type this, the deepest lake in the world. It looks unphotographable. Untouchable. And oh my god, the sky. And the moon. And the lake. And the train. I am sitting in a darkened car, all by my self, writing this, and unlike the previous train I was in (the Rossiya) you can open the windows, here, and it's so much better, I can feel the train with every sense of being, the rhythm of the train wheels is so hypnotic. Passing trains are like thunder and lightning, descending onto me all of a sudden, disappearing just as sudden. The moon is so very bright, illuminates the inside of this compartment. This is the train ride I wanted, yes, yes yes yes. It's a cool night, and everything smells like trees and grass and green.)
-
I am struck lately sometimes by the urgent impulse to shout and say something like: "I am here! I am really here!" as if not fully aware of my presence here. I sometimes sit and think: what does it mean to be here? Me, being here, not being there. I was just there. Just there, not there anymore, but here.
I think what especially touches me is that I am so presently here, that I arrived here and am suddenly so here here, that it strikes me as odd that it is so natural for me to be here. What is it about Russia that is so familiar? It's some affinity with old/rural Korea, some infrastructural details that are similar, at the very least. Examples: Apartment buildings, entrances, apartments on either side of the elevator. Painted yellow-and-green mini-fences in apartment yards. Grandmothers sitting around and selling half-useful items in shops that play sped-up tinny pop.
But there's something else too, something that makes me feel so here. Maybe it is that I am so here within myself much more lately and thus when I think of myself as here it is so natural. I'm here more because I can feel myself in me more.
Regardless, there's this constant sense of overwhelming (and thus invisible) presentness. Presentness is grace?
--
After I got a ticket for Ulan Bator from the station I wandered around the city of Irkutsk a bit. Tired from my stomach bug the day before (and not having eaten anything for a day as well) I decided to just half-ponder going to Listvyanka, one of the port towns around Lake Baikal an hour away. And so I drifted around town, bumped into D and R and their three children again, chatted for a little, said goodbye and continued on my way until I found myself at the tram stop that supposedly would take me to the hydrofoil stop. And so I climbed aboard the tram, paid my twelve rubles, and sat down in a seat. The warmth of the sun and the vibration was too much for me, and I fell asleep in the tram and woke up at the end of the stop, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.
I asked the driver, "Raketa station?" and she half-nodded, maybe, and said something which I didn't understand, but I got off anyways, looked around. Some area vaguely seemed to correspond to an area on the map I had, so I started walking south. Why not? Far off in the distance I saw a hill of houses, which could have meant a valley of houses below it, or even better a river, and so I kept on walking, played this game of follow-the-babushka, followed grandmothers, mothers, also fathers, grandfathers. On dirt roads, paved roads, past crumbling Soviet-era apartments, new apartment skeletons barely under construction, graffiti on walls, and so on. Very peaceful, though, very sunny and overgrown weeds and old old old swing sets. Somewhere in the distance the sound of a lone hammer against steel, "klink, klink, klink", and some birds chirping, and again that smell of green, and that was enough to make me keep on going.
Eventually I found myself in the middle of nowhere. The hill I saw, I realized, was just a hill; there was no river, no hydrofoil station, just old gray apartments showing their age and grandmothers hanging sheets on a line out the window and people selling dill and cucumbers on the street and a bus stop station selling thirty varieties of ice cream, and the lone sound of a hammer working away in the distance. Colorless dust accumulating at the corners of everything. Half-ripped posters of last election cycle's candidate, a face looking at you proudly, four-and-a-half times over. Ads for credit, rent, and erotic massage pasted, torn off, new ones pasted, torn off, pasted, torn off, creating geologies of advertisements, depth, strata. And amidst all of this, a strange strange sense of comfort, domesticity, familiarity, home.
posted by provolot on July 28, 2010 6:07 pm |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
Sunrise, Irkutsk
Waiting room, high ceilings, the sound of errant footsteps and of
people sleeping.
posted by provolot on July 26, 2010 9:07 pm |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
moscow to irkutsk, day two
(from a letter)
Today I woke up around nine, the same time that the Russian family I'm traveling with woke up. I don't remember how much of my last email I spent talking about my compartment companions (I remember falling asleep writing my email), but they're a family of four: the father, Sasha; the mother, Tanya, the son, Vanya, and the sister/relative, Tanya. They speak very little English, and I little Russian of course, but they're so nice and have been pressing their food onto me, offering me pieces of lard, cucumber, tomato, bread. Just now I came back from the restaurant car and they immediately asked me if I ate already, and I said yes, yes, thanks, at the restaurant wagon ("da, da, spasiba, v ristorant vagon"), and they smiled, and that was that.
Today after I woke up, brushed my teeth and had breakfast, the train stopped at a station for fifteen minutes, and I got out and bought some instant coffee. At the store ('produkti', the sign always says) I overheard a couple talking in Aussie (or so I thought) English about the prices, so I talked to them briefly, said hi.
Afterwards, on the train, I wandered the length of the entire train. After lunch, I made my way to the first wagon (I'm in the second), where I stumbled upon the couple I had met earlier with their three kids. Rose and Davy and their family from New Zealand were very friendly, and we quickly stumbled onto a three hour long conversation about Russian culture, traveling, Facebook privacy, and so on: sprawling but enthused. They had just come from traveling through Iran and Turkey, among other places, and was headed to Beijing, like I am.
Encouraged by this interaction, I made my way to the rear of the train, armed with a camera I bought in St. Petersburg (Lomo Lubitel 166B, from 1982), and tried to peer into compartments to look for anyone reading something that didn't look like Russian. Funnily enough, the blue cover of the Lonely Planet guide to the Trans-Siberian has proved to be a very good indicator of I-am-a-traveler-ness, and so on my way to the back of the train I met a few people who spoke English: John and Sigrut from Belgium, Mutter(?) and Kastina from Germany, Matt and Dave from New Zealand and their Russian compartment-mate Alexander, and a Swedish couple whose names escape me at the moment. I tried to take a photograph of everyone I talked to, which was nice. Everyone has been uniformly interested and involved and friendly, which is wonderful. I guess that makes absolute sense, as anyone going on this trip (especially as a tourist) is so open to newness and interaction, so ready for change. This is so lovely.
The last few wagons are platzkart wagons, or third-class wagons, which means that there are no compartments; it's a little bit more quiet there (counterintuitively) as every sound carries across the corridor, and I didn't find any non-Russians there --- or at least, I think. And the last car at the end of the train opened on to a wonderful smoking spot (not that I've been smoking) that looks onto to the train tracks sliding away into the distance.
After that I made my way back forward, and started reading more of Dostoyevsky's /The Idiot/, which is actually quite wonderful and mesmerizing, and read it until I got tired and fell asleep for a little bit. (If the way I've just been writing to you is a little bit different, with a little bit more long-winded sentences, for example, then it's Dostoyevsky's fault!) After waking up, I drank some water, stretched my legs, and by then it was nearly ten pm.
I decided to go to the restaurant wagon for dinner, instead of having bread with meat and spreads this time, and so made my way back to the wagon. I wasn't expecting this, but the wagon was filled with people, including John, Sigrut, Matt, Dave, and Alexander, and three other people (whose name escape me) and one other guy. Everyone greeted me so very warmly and offered me a beer, and so I sat down, ordered some borscht, drank a few beers, and talked with people. It turns out that the 'one other guy', Andre, was a little creepy and drunk, and so after he left we spent the rest of the next two hours drinking and talking, with a wonderful amount of camaraderie. I bought a bottle of vodka just for the train, and tried to suggest it as an "authentic" trans-Siberian pastime, but nobody was as enthusiastic as I thought they might be. I suspect this might change by the third day, I think.
Time to sleep.
July 24, 1am, between Yekaterinburg and Tumen.
Today I woke up around nine, the same time that the Russian family I'm traveling with woke up. I don't remember how much of my last email I spent talking about my compartment companions (I remember falling asleep writing my email), but they're a family of four: the father, Sasha; the mother, Tanya, the son, Vanya, and the sister/relative, Tanya. They speak very little English, and I little Russian of course, but they're so nice and have been pressing their food onto me, offering me pieces of lard, cucumber, tomato, bread. Just now I came back from the restaurant car and they immediately asked me if I ate already, and I said yes, yes, thanks, at the restaurant wagon ("da, da, spasiba, v ristorant vagon"), and they smiled, and that was that.
Today after I woke up, brushed my teeth and had breakfast, the train stopped at a station for fifteen minutes, and I got out and bought some instant coffee. At the store ('produkti', the sign always says) I overheard a couple talking in Aussie (or so I thought) English about the prices, so I talked to them briefly, said hi.
Afterwards, on the train, I wandered the length of the entire train. After lunch, I made my way to the first wagon (I'm in the second), where I stumbled upon the couple I had met earlier with their three kids. Rose and Davy and their family from New Zealand were very friendly, and we quickly stumbled onto a three hour long conversation about Russian culture, traveling, Facebook privacy, and so on: sprawling but enthused. They had just come from traveling through Iran and Turkey, among other places, and was headed to Beijing, like I am.
Encouraged by this interaction, I made my way to the rear of the train, armed with a camera I bought in St. Petersburg (Lomo Lubitel 166B, from 1982), and tried to peer into compartments to look for anyone reading something that didn't look like Russian. Funnily enough, the blue cover of the Lonely Planet guide to the Trans-Siberian has proved to be a very good indicator of I-am-a-traveler-ness, and so on my way to the back of the train I met a few people who spoke English: John and Sigrut from Belgium, Mutter(?) and Kastina from Germany, Matt and Dave from New Zealand and their Russian compartment-mate Alexander, and a Swedish couple whose names escape me at the moment. I tried to take a photograph of everyone I talked to, which was nice. Everyone has been uniformly interested and involved and friendly, which is wonderful. I guess that makes absolute sense, as anyone going on this trip (especially as a tourist) is so open to newness and interaction, so ready for change. This is so lovely.
The last few wagons are platzkart wagons, or third-class wagons, which means that there are no compartments; it's a little bit more quiet there (counterintuitively) as every sound carries across the corridor, and I didn't find any non-Russians there --- or at least, I think. And the last car at the end of the train opened on to a wonderful smoking spot (not that I've been smoking) that looks onto to the train tracks sliding away into the distance.
After that I made my way back forward, and started reading more of Dostoyevsky's /The Idiot/, which is actually quite wonderful and mesmerizing, and read it until I got tired and fell asleep for a little bit. (If the way I've just been writing to you is a little bit different, with a little bit more long-winded sentences, for example, then it's Dostoyevsky's fault!) After waking up, I drank some water, stretched my legs, and by then it was nearly ten pm.
I decided to go to the restaurant wagon for dinner, instead of having bread with meat and spreads this time, and so made my way back to the wagon. I wasn't expecting this, but the wagon was filled with people, including John, Sigrut, Matt, Dave, and Alexander, and three other people (whose name escape me) and one other guy. Everyone greeted me so very warmly and offered me a beer, and so I sat down, ordered some borscht, drank a few beers, and talked with people. It turns out that the 'one other guy', Andre, was a little creepy and drunk, and so after he left we spent the rest of the next two hours drinking and talking, with a wonderful amount of camaraderie. I bought a bottle of vodka just for the train, and tried to suggest it as an "authentic" trans-Siberian pastime, but nobody was as enthusiastic as I thought they might be. I suspect this might change by the third day, I think.
Time to sleep.
July 24, 1am, between Yekaterinburg and Tumen.
posted by provolot on July 26, 2010 9:07 pm |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
Moscow to Irkutsk, the first night.
Moscow was large, and bustling, and New York-like, and unbearably hot.
Moscow was unbearably hot. All I can remember is the sensation of a
full droplet of sweat rolling down the hollow of my back; that
sensation, in the metro, crossing the Red Square, looking at that
famed St. Basil's Cathedral, waiting in line to see an embalmed Lenin,
walking in the Kremlin, stopping in front of the Bolshoi theatre,
walking along the rivers, going into the Metro, looking at the ornate
arches and decorations of each and every stop -- and amidst all of
this, that sensation. The sweat, the heat, the hotness.
That was this unifier, however, everybody sitting down, standing,
eating ice cream, drinking water, flapping their shirts soaked with
sweat, cringing in the sun, sunglasses down as a default. Just earlier
I boarded the train to Irkutsk, and the AC wasn't on while it was in
the station, so I sat there with my compartment-mates, sweating it
out, everyone panting in a daze, too short for words to really greet
each other, and this situation itself mutually acknowledged. Just sit,
pant, sweat, in silence.
In Moscow one night I joined up with some buddies I had first met in
St. Petersburg, and we sat in a car for a second, then had dinner,
walked around to this beautiful ornate decorated supermarket, bought a
matroshka-shaped bottle of vodka, sent A to the airport. V's mother
picked us up afterwards, and we drove back to the hostel, some haze of
a song playing in the background, just ambient enough, and I, content,
watched night-Moscow slide by, all lights and dim infrastructure.
The next day, I went to this area, which was full of small galleries,
graffiti on walls, up-and-coming, a little raw. (Much better than the
Garage, which was a little too slick -- or rather, the issue was that
they were wasting away their space on nothing, clean vinyl, white
walls, paintings on walls, whereas there could be so much more
interesting things going on: site-specific performances,
installations, theater-in-the-round, and so on. Installations
celebrating the size of the space, not operating in spite of it.
Paintings swinging, suspended in air by steel wires from the ceiling
fifty feet above. But instead there was an armed guard with a
semi-automatic at the entrance(!), and a small white-walled-gallery
constructed inside the entire space to showcase a myriad of Rothko
pieces, and I left feeling a little bothered, a little itchy from the
space and potential being yet untouched.) The new space that I saw
unstead was called Winzavod, or Vinzavod, and it was young and new and
growing....
..am falling asleep..
am on the train.
am sharing a compartment with a russian family: sasha, the father,
tanya, the mother, vanya, the son, and vanya, maybe the sister.
will write later.
posted by provolot on July 26, 2010 9:07 pm |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
Excerpt from an email
st. petersburg was wonderful. When I was fourteen I bought this camera off of ebay that came from st. petersburg; it was the LOMO LC-A, and the package came wrapped in brown paper, tied in twine. When I opened it up and picked up the camera, I very vividly remember holding it to my face and inhaling the smell, and there was this dusty, musky, not altogether unpleasant smell. It's still there. As a joke I had thought, "this is what Russia smells like!" But to my utter surprise, walking down the street in St. P, I could catch whiffs of that same smell here and there, next to an elevator, some street corner, and so on.
Right now I'm in Moscow, right next to the Kremlin, looking at St. Basil's cathedral, sitting somewhere and having breakfast. My train got in today at 6:30, and until now I've been checking my baggage in at a train station, as I'm staying at some place a little too south of the city center to lug everything around. I've found this girl, Nadia, on couchsurfing to host me, and so I'll head there later tonight, bring a bottle of wine maybe, eat dinner, say hi and talk to her about her life, what she does, sleep on a couch on the outer edges of a city.
I've made so many friends so far; too many, I almost thought at some point, because I realize how much I like wandering alone, navigating these cities. Walking around I do this thing where every word I see I subvocalize and try to pronounce out loud, roll the syllables in my mouth, swallow it down like the second sip of coffee in the morning: the first one's a test sip, the second one more joyful and thankful..
But yes, friends seem to come everywhere, and I am thankful for that, and joyful for that. I met someone on the plane, and his girlfriend offered to let me stay at their place (which I couldn't; I didn't have time), I met a small friendly trio from russia/germany/thai and we may see each other here in Moscow; I might meet a few people in Mongolia again; I walked around for hours with this guy from St. P, talking about Russian lit..
So far, it's been wonderful.
Right now I'm in Moscow, right next to the Kremlin, looking at St. Basil's cathedral, sitting somewhere and having breakfast. My train got in today at 6:30, and until now I've been checking my baggage in at a train station, as I'm staying at some place a little too south of the city center to lug everything around. I've found this girl, Nadia, on couchsurfing to host me, and so I'll head there later tonight, bring a bottle of wine maybe, eat dinner, say hi and talk to her about her life, what she does, sleep on a couch on the outer edges of a city.
I've made so many friends so far; too many, I almost thought at some point, because I realize how much I like wandering alone, navigating these cities. Walking around I do this thing where every word I see I subvocalize and try to pronounce out loud, roll the syllables in my mouth, swallow it down like the second sip of coffee in the morning: the first one's a test sip, the second one more joyful and thankful..
But yes, friends seem to come everywhere, and I am thankful for that, and joyful for that. I met someone on the plane, and his girlfriend offered to let me stay at their place (which I couldn't; I didn't have time), I met a small friendly trio from russia/germany/thai and we may see each other here in Moscow; I might meet a few people in Mongolia again; I walked around for hours with this guy from St. P, talking about Russian lit..
So far, it's been wonderful.
posted by provolot on July 26, 2010 9:07 pm |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
dream log
another one of those dreams I don't realize that I had dreamt it before until the time comes.
The last time I had this semi-recurring dream was two years ago, maybe.
Metropolis, entangled highways and parking lots, dark and enclosed, high elevators with precarious places to drop and fall endlessly.
Inside, an underground floor with vinyl green floor much like korean underground apartment parking lots. The walls occasionally have the same two-digit story number spray painted on them. The rumble of a monolithic rivulet of cars nearby.
The elevator's large and circular, a room-size platform suspended in the middle of a tube. One wrong step and I fall for who-knows-how-many floors. Someone's looking for me all the while. Am I escaping, or entering? I enter into a hallway where similar elevators exit similarly. Are I running? Beneath I on this platform without guardrails I see a network of cars running and tangling. I go somewhere, and then go somewhere else.
Entering an elevator again the doors close. Inside this space is pure vulnerability -- as I look on in horror, the elevator slides up, down, moves sideways, mockingly denies me access to my chosen floor, starts accelerating upwards endlessly, disappears. Elevators are to be avoided. I take the stairs, which is a rectilinear spiraling strand suspended in empty space. Somehow I reach the end but it's not certain whether this is end is the same end I started from; still uncertain I wake up.
posted by provolot on July 23, 2008 3:07 am |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
Stuffcalendar: found July 27, 2007
Profiling
Until September 9, at the Whitney
"Profiling features two artworks that present a dialogue on issues surrounding surveillance, protection, privacy, and identity by exploring the use of automated systems for tracking and "profiling" people in public spaces. A continuously accumulating history of movements of visitors that is both a statistical plot of gallery activities and a record of each act of each visitor; and a catalog of visitors' head shots with classifying adjectives randomly attributed to them (i.e. unsuspecting, complicit, hungry)"
What the Dormouse Said #2:
Exceptional excursions into the way new and old media should be done
Sunday July 29, 8 & 10:30pm, $7, $10 minimum, MonkeyTown
There's no introduction to this, but the former What the Dormouse Said looks like it was interesting.
Also: Location One Artists-In-Residence exhibition ends on Saturday!
posted by provolot on July 27, 2007 1:07 pm |
show/hide 0 comment(s)
vague
It's too bad. Here there's change, I'm trying to project my mind's eye onto walls and seeing myself twelve months later and full of uncertainty hope and doubt and all that. Touchingly here and there I'm walking back doing these invisible dances in trainful underbellies wondering, thinking.
When I enter someone's home, in the process of this hobby of mine (entering others' homes in search of one of my own) I usually take off my headphones and slip my left arm out of the straps of my backpack and let it hang askew, asymmetricality lending informality to my posture. The weight difference lifts my left foot off the ground slightly. I scan the bookshelves for authors I recognize, sometimes none, sometimes the usual suspects, sartre rushdie marquez plato shakespeare mamet and whatnot.
I'm not sure how this is relevant but I ordered the GPS logger and at the same time I felt myself withdraw and disconnect more. A lack of communication verified, attempted translation into the wanderings of my physical location seen orthogonal to this flat earth, this mortal coil.
change and solitude permeates my summer.
posted by provolot on July 24, 2007 6:07 am |
show/hide 0 comment(s)