Pray before you die! (a friendly public service anouncement...)

or for the less morbidly inclined...


this one is ALWAYS playing on TV, and i actually kind of like it...

enjoy!

internet-less

1. Internet access in Egypt (and the rest of the Middle East) has been reduced by 80 percent.
2. An Alexandria schoolteacher is going to trial this week for beating a student to death over missing homework.
3. Riot police dispersed hundreds of protesters in Alexandria this week after a carriage driver lit himself on fire when given a traffic ticket.
I'd post links, but its a miracle i'm able to post at all.

(Abstract expressions of waning hegemony in the passive voice)

Who throws a shoe?
At whom is a shoe thrown?

Three days later, the shoe-throwing incident is still big news in Egypt.
It seems that American coverage of the event has focused primarily on two aspects.
First, there has been the talk of how Muntader al-Zaidi has become a "folk hero" in the Middle East, inspiring rallies in Iraq, and general admiration from Arabs everywhere.
Second, there is the attempt to impress upon the American public the cultural significance of throwing shoes – how this is more than just Austin Powers slapstick comedy – but a grave insult.

But both of these components, while important, seem to miss the broader significance of the event from a Middle Eastern perspective… namely that it somehow symbolically undermines a perception of American credibility, that it intangibly pierces the 4th wall of American hegemony…

I like to do a grammar exercise with my Advanced English classes where we look at a list of Bushisms and attempt to fix the grammar and usage mistakes. It’s a fun exercise, but the initial reaction from students is inevitably one of disbelief; not only that the American President could have a weaker grasp on the English Language than they do, but also that such a compilation of quotes even exists… that the President of The United States would stray from a carefully orchestrated image enough to say such things, and then that these comments would be publicly viewable – and open to public ridicule.

That kind of thing just doesn’t happen here. This is a country where it’s illegal even to speculate on the legal succession of the 80 year old president. Where the biggest scandal of the year – involving a millionaire murdering a famous singer – is banned from state broadcasting.

It’s not so much that it’s unimaginable that someone would throw a shoe at Mubarak: its unimaginable that Mubarak would have a shoe thrown at him. This is not something that happens to a President. This is not something that happens to people with power.

As much as Egyptians might hate the United States government, there is still a firm appreciation that it is the Government, a separate entity detached from the mistakes and embarrassments that might affect the citizenry. Indeed the general warmth shown to regular Americans here is entirely predicated on the notion that, just as their government is completely separate from what they deem humanly Egyptian, so is ours.

I’m trying to decide how obvious of an observation this is… back home we take for granted that Bush is a Lame Duck, a laughable goofball who's days are numbered. The Middle East, still swarming with US troops, doesn't exactly have the luxury to appreciate this viewpoint.

All this is also directly tied to an alternate understanding of Respect in the Middle East. For better or worse, in America humor is an acceptable - and often effective – way to diffuse potentially embarrassing or disrespectful situations. One’s ability to laugh something off, to show that it has not affected him, is seen as a sign of strength. Indeed, humor seems to be the general response from Americans. Yet as I’ve learned the hard way, this doesn’t really fly in Egypt. I won’t go so far as to say that authority is all that Egyptians understand – an idea that strikes of Barbarism, but I will say that in most cases, a perception of toughness is a prerequisite for respect.

But personally, I’m surprised the coverage hasn’t focused more on the Presidents reflexes... he dodged that shoe fast.

hugging the imaginary Sphinx

blood on the tracks...

my shoes got a little bloody...



yeah!!!!!!!!!

... and then there were bones...

christmas trees vs goats (part 1)

Eid al-Adha was yesterday.

It was hard not to think about New York, and all the christmas trees laid out for the slaughter in the weeks before Christmas. only here, the slaughter is literal.

And now the internet won't let me upload any more pictures, so the streets running red with blood will have to wait another day....

CIB involved in unsafe mating practices.

Aside from the fact that the slogan "confidence breeds success" seems more appropriate for a stable than a bank, its hard for me to trust in Confidence's animal husbandry skills when the bank's entire computer system has been down for 2 consecutive days.

This would be the point in the post where i link to an article explaining Confidence's apparent inability to coax Success into fruitful copulation, but that would require a newspaper to consider this an important enough setback to write about.

I mean, shouldn't this be a vaguely big deal? Considering that Egypt is an almost exclusively cash economy - with major transactions literally being conducted with paper money - the inability of the largest private sector bank in Egypt to dole out cash ought to be news. What if i was supposed to buy a house today? I'd be fucked, that's what.

Whatever, i guess if your vision is as concise as "To be the best financial institution in the Middle East and Africa by 2020," you needn't worry too much about the small details of actually being able to give people their money.

nomadic misopaidea

Ugh. I want to write about Egypt, i really do. But there's a problem.

In Korea, i had nothing to lose by fixating on the bizarre and the different. Korea was not my home.

But home intimates normalcy, and if i want to 'live' in Egypt, to actually unpack, (if only for a while) - it means ignoring the differences that before would have intrigued, upset, and infuriated me. i can stay here as an abject foreigner, observant but uncomfortable, or i can try and let a little go, for the sake of actually living somewhere in the present for once.

Basically, its hard for me to justify expressing all the subjectively peculiar things i see without accepting that I'm just a nomadic misopaidean, (a 'hater of cultures', if my Wikipedian Greek serves me correctly) or an accursed nostaphile...

This is, I've realized, why i had such a hard time writing after returning to New York City. It wasn't that i didn't have anything to say, but rather that the admittedly acerbic humors of differentiation began to feel a lot less funny or meaningful as they began to hit closer to 'home.'

Or to put it another way, i began to appreciate the sentiment behind the phrase "don't shit where you sleep."


That being said, i would like to briefly point out that Egyptians seem to sweat a lot...

from their butts.
Maybe everyone does this. Maybe the real story here is that i notice it. Clearly it's irrelevant to anything, and even i can't come up with a good way to make this representative of some broader cultural distinction.

But you know, its been on my mind. And its good to be back.

Alexandria Zoo

This tiger was not happy... i'm still trying to decide if the handlers were genuinely nervous, or whether this was some sort of elaborate show meant to edge on the tiger for the sake of onlookers. Wouldn't be too surprised either way...

Can someone please tell me why the video quality always sucks once i upload to youtube??? i have more, but i'm too disheartened by the degradation of quality (the degradation of the animals, not so much.)

what $361.50 can get you in Alex...

not exactly the most profound of returns...

Egypt hasn't changed. Lee and i went back to my old neighborhood last night. They're building some sort of amphitheater on the grounds of the old ruins next to my house, and my old doorman was nice enough to sneak me in.

more to come...

destroying the Home-myth

Let us approach travel as dualistic, defining it by what it is not. Travel is, most importantly, not being home. This is to say, travel can be differentiated from Nomadism in that there always exists a 'home' from which one has left, and to which one will presumably return.

(In the modern world, travel is usually Defined by Home; one leaves for a set, usually predetermined, period of time, wherein one is 'traveling,' and then returns.)

It is clear that Travels' significance derives from it's foreignness. One can only recognize foreignness (and therefore travel) by having a frame of reference - here 'Home'- for which to make comparisons. Like movement in general, foreignness is relative; we need the fixed road to determine speed, we need Home to determine Other.

But here we reach a problem, because Home is conceptual, a thing we carry with us in our heads.

Whereas velocity is measured by fixed, physical constants, in travel we are comparing the experienced with the remembered - two unstable and subjective sources of comparison.

A concept of Home is multi-faceted and holistic- it is composed not only of location, but of relationships, smells, events, memories, - in short, a collection of unverifiable 'feelings.'

Travel has always been viewed as an opportunity to evaluate and take stock of these collected Feelings, which together may be said to compose a "Home-myth." Travel, simply by putting distance between oneself and the Home-myth, changes it's dynamic, forges doubt and introspection. Like seeing a map of a familiar place for the first time, The Home-myth from a distance reveals previously unknown problems, values, and truths.

In small doses this distancing is inarguably healthy. While the lucid nature of the Home-myth
makes it fragile, a week or month of traveling is hardly enough time to force a shattering.

But prolonged travel causes something else to happen. First, the concept of Home, like anything held in the head, becomes faded, altered, changed. Second, people back home die, get married, and grow in ways that render the concept flawed, no longer a representation of the still-there, but rather a memory of the left-behind.

Time and distance make the Home-concept cloudy, while change renders it inaccurate.

And here the problems begin.

With the original Home-concept fading, the constantly traveled person struggles to find new frames of reference... new ways to judge the newly foreign he encounters. Suddenly, the references for locating foreign become prior foreigns, and travel takes a step towards Nomadism.

But if travel has the effect of unveiling the Home-myth, then further travel acts to paradoxicaly unveil the Foreign-myth without displacing one from the foreign. The effect is a forced state of detachment. Foreignness gives unfamiliar objects meaning - it defines them as other and lets us relate to them, whether that be in joy or disgust. But unmasked objects just present themselves, like photos without captions. The constant travel cannot judge what he sees, and so travel degrades to mere movement.

This loss of the Home-concept is neither tangible nor abrupt. It is an inevitable, gradual forgetting, a process where the familiarity of the original Home-myth is replaced by a familiarity with the foreign, but without the motivation (or ability) to internalize it, to transform it into un-foreign. TO accept the foreign as normal is to accept a new home.

But travel, as we have already said, always has a return in mind The foreign must remain foreign, internalization prevents return. What could be worse than returning to that faintly flickering memory of Home, only to find that YOU, that YOUR concepts of normal, changed more than hers?

Internalization in movement equals Nomadism, in stagnation it is expatriateism. There is no middle ground.

what have we learned?

...next question.

end of days...

tomorrow morning i leave for china, by way of FORTY EIGHT HOUR FERRY!!!!
I'm not sure if i'll be able to blog from China, because supposedly they block everything blog-related. But check back, because i will have lots of time to write in between bouts of seasickness and baccarat, and hopefully i'll find some sort of workaround. (if you can find a workaround for posting -even if its only text - from china, let me know.
oh, and i went to a sumo championship today in osaka.




bye japan...

nine and a half hours on local trains. (round 2)

Also, because i don't feel like devoting yet another post to unoriginal pictures i have nothing to say about, this pavilion is made of GOLD!!!!

so thats what Meg Ryan's been up to

(she's been selling shitty vending machine coffee in Japan.)

update: woah, she's also selling navigation systems.

japanese design and aesthetics blah blah blah

whatever. Tokyo is making me feel disgustingly inadequate and unoriginal. I went to an after show party for this guy last night, and i felt uncomfortable, self-righteous, and very small. (psychologically speaking - physically i felt enormous, because Japanese people are TINY, and all the foreigners do their best to emulate this via eating disorders.)
But I will say that Japan does have an amazing, hypnotic design sense, almost as if it taps into this primal need for control and order, so that even buying this toy made me feel like maybe my life will be a little bit more in control.


(and yes, it comes with replaceable arms and head, so she can eat ice cream or carry a gun, depending on your mood.)
Where does this attraction to simplistic perfection come from? Is it really primal, or is it a subconscious backlash against modernity? And how come the Japanese are so fucking good at it?
While the aesthetics of food and architecture are amazing, its the toys that i can't get over.... its not just that they're 'cool'... but that they're a form of salvation. Live a life of insecurities and failed expectations, go to work at a job you have no control over - and then come home to tangible, compartmentalized perfection.
What separates toys from food, electronics, or architecture is that from an adult perspective, they are 'function-less.' Or rather, their functionality is limited completely to symbols of order and perfection: you don't play with them, you don't use them in any way at all. They sit their and emit cosmic simplicity, universal order.

i wish i made this video...

It's almost like it was scripted... everyone is so happy and unique and AHHH, Japan is amazing.

kyoto walk

i'll post writing soon, really.

How to invade japan

take local trains.

celebrity sightings

hiroshima

bleh. Hiroshima was overwhelming, and i don't know what to say about it.
How do you approach the impossible?


...clock stopped at the moment of impact.


...and this one floored me.

black guy + talking dog = comedy

they're a big happy family...
who said Japan was xenophobic?

um... cute

the toilette as philosophical muse (zizek shall go unmentioned)

Post #1
Its pretty common to see ashtrays in bathroom stalls outside the US, but Korea is the only place i've been with ubiquitous urinal ashtrays. What's more, they often have lighters in them, suggesting a need to light up directly after (before) taking a piss.


Post #2
I'd like to see a cross-cultural study on the average number of post-urinary 'shakes' among adult males. I'd anecdotally peg it at 1-2 for Americans, 6-8 for Koreans.

Post #3
From Japan, this is truly brilliant...

It directs the fresh toilette water through a faucet atop the tank, so when you flush you can use the clean water to wash your hands before it drains into the reserve tank. Saves water and 2 knob turns.

yet another sign of impending danger

I guess un-calming warning ads aren't an exclusively Korean practice after all...
(tears/flop sweat are apparently mandatory.)

japan day 1

After all my talk about the failure of Korea's restoration/preservation projects, i've been a bit nervous about Japan... I mean, Japan holds such a large place in our mythification of Asia that I'm not sure if one can truly remove themselves from the experienced knowledge that they're seeing JAPAN. Will i be able to "objectively judge" (i.e. judge from my subjective aesthetic values) what i see? Or will i be so psyched about how cool Japan is that i'll just fawn away, much like a reporter covering the Obama campaign? (i try hard to keep my material fresh and topical, fyi.)

SO, with that out of the way, i will say that Dazaifu certainly felt a lot more authentic than almost anything in Korea.



Maybe it was the plum blossoms? Or is it a stone vs wood thing? Or maybe its just a "this ain't Korea so Hell Yeah" sort of thing.

One clear difference is the quality/style of things you can buy around the shrines. In Korea the stalls around historical sights were limited to street food and children's toys like battle axes and squeaky hammers. Random.
But in Dazaifu there were stores with enormous beautiful 3000 dollar hand carved wooden sculptures. There were hand made tea pots and intricate tiny cloth dioramas depicting traditional Japanese life. And these weren't kitsch or tchotchke or anything... at least i can't imagine a handcrafted doll the size of my thumb, meant for a home shrine and costing 45 dollars, being considered 'kitsch.'
In Korea, I found the lack of anything worth buying with a 'cultural personality' strange, but i didn't really hold it against the place. I'm ready to do that now.

Also, Japan has this:


btw, that giant Luke Skywalker riding the Tauntaun is only $29... ebay anyone?

so long k town

... and on to japan.
But theres so much i never got around to blogging about! Like the obsession with the word 'story,' or how flashers are called 'burberry men,' or how you can use hongul to make a picture of a man praying or crying. sigh...
At least i got paid and made my ferry.
AND,
look what i found at the ferry terminal, in a vending machine past customs, literally a foot away from the point of no return...

... and you know what? it wasn't even that good.

Jewelry, you're no wondergirls...

damn.

really though, this song is pretty catchy.

its like if every pop star in America came together in some sort of Asian fetish super group... (Alicia Keys, what?)
which frankly, might not be a bad idea.

But how the hell are you going to knock Wonder Girls out of the top spot unless you have an infectious dance to go with the song? What were they thinking????
(i've become way to involved in this... which is why it's good that i'm leaving in THREE DAYS.)

Also note when "alicia keys" says "together" and drops the "th" sound... so good.

Travel as a study of The Trajectory of Pop Music in a Globalized World

Once I sat in a Pizza Hut in Nizwa and they were playing White Town's "Never Be Your Woman."
40 years ago Nizwa was a rebel Omani city without paved roads or electricity. Now... White Town (...and pizza.)

Last week i heard Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on a public bus into Pusan.

I don't know how many times i had to defend my distaste for Michael Bolton/Phil Collins/George Michael while living in Egypt.

IN OT Meta-blog 7th day [sunday] wtf

Maybe this is a painfully banal and obvious post topic, but I've been thinking about how the process and value of thinking something is a lot different than saying it out loud. How you can imagine 'conversations' in your head that couldn't possibly pan out in real life, which points to not just a 'disconnect' but more precisely the existence of two distinct separate entities of personality. And if they are maybe 2 separate and distinct entities than maybe its also best for us to name them as such.

labels:
Internal Narrator (IN) and Outgoing Talker (OT).

examples:
1a. The way when you're at home later and replaying a conversation in your head it sometimes sounds horribly stupid.
(IN has different values/ideas from OT)

1b. The way 'conversations in your head' can never be replicated in real life and always sound trite/grandiose/staged when attempted.
(conflict of IN attempting to 'put words into the mouth' of OT.)

2a. The way most communication is focused around one Personality Half sharing the experiences of itself i.e. we talk about conversations we had/things we did (OT on OT) and write about our ideas^[*] (IN on IN) and when we do try to have some sort of cross over and say 'talk about our feelings' (OT on IN) it 'comes out all wrong' or scares someone away or is 'a downer' or 'cliché' or see 1b. (likewise when we try and imagine dialog or write fiction (IN on OT) it similarly sounds trite or contrived because what the hell does the IN know about what the OT would say anyway. see 1b.

3a. The way when you are alone extendedly and interacting rather exclusively with one sided stimuli (like movies/books/music/old diary entries) the character of that stimuli and its effect becomes noticeable to the point where reading can be seen as a dialog-al opportunity for the IN and 'watching' the corresponding opportunity for the OT. So that sometimes when you're alone, reading is counterproductive because it grows the IN making it harder for the OT to function properly if/when it is [will be] used again. So that sometimes watching TV is healthy not because 'it makes you feel less alone' but because it nurtures the OT/shuts up the IN.

3b. The way when you read something profound but also maybe painfully sad/nostalgic it is effecting because the 'reading' has handed it directly to the IN, but if you were actually taking part in same said situation you might write it off as phony or whatever. [This thought experiment might suggest a descriptive labeling of the IN as sappy/emotional with the OT being sociopathic/unreasoned. I dunno.]

4. The way using someone as a 'sounding board' to 'bounce ideas off of' is just a safe way for the IN to communicate or share with the OT.

5. The way you can catch mistakes in writing by reading out loud.
(OT can sometimes serve as copy editor for IN.)

other thoughts:
There has to be communication and balance.
If the IN is given autonomy (either due to circumstance (like living in a country where you can't communicate with almost anyone/ where all background chatter is white noise and therefore completely undistracting) or due to choice (person is a recluse anti-social) ) then the situation snowballs and you can get 'trapped in your head' and then when you do finally get to talk to someone the OT is so starved and pent up that he just spews his [your] fucking guts and won't shut up and talks about himself forever until its boring and you^[†][‡] wish you could stop but really have no say anyway.
Or maybe the dominant IN causes the opposite to happen and you start to live in the IN and see the OT as epiphenominal and become so detached from your experiences that you don't even notice that you're distant or needy or anything, in which case the effect becomes indistinguishable from the reverse situation of dominant OT dormant IN,
which is when if for whatever reason the OT is so strong as to eclipse the IN then you become unhinged and unable(unwilling) to moderate yourself as projected through interactions to the point where you are repetitive and shallow stagnant boring but also possibly more entertaining in small doses.

Thats all for today

^[*]Of course some people use their journals only to record conversations/experiences and not to offer commentary in which case the diary is just a police blotter or archive and no real interaction between OT and IN takes place anyway. And does this mean that people who keep these sorts of journals have dominant OT's since even writing which should be the domain of the IN is instead used as an extension of the OT?

^[†]I (as a Person with an imbalanced heightened IN who can't help but think of Myself as The IN, with the OT being a possibly External Interloper/foreign agent/savior) wonder if someone with a reverse imbalanced heightened OT when they do think worries that it is the 'thinking' that is off kilter and feels more comfortable/'Himself' only when talking.

^[‡]Of course this suggests that there is actually a Third Person hiding out back who chooses to dwell in/watch from the vantage point of one particular location/mode of interacting [these being either the OT or IN] at any given time, or that OT and IN are more like tools that this Third Person uses to communicate with either the Self^[§] or the Outside World, in which case it is not so much a conscious 'choice' but rather a natural unconscious usage of the most apt tool, like how you hear with your ears and see with your eyes, in which case this entire entry is pointless and stupid.

^[§]which means the Self itself has to be split off again to become a 4th part that the Third Person is communicating with vis a vis the process/instrument of the IN.

(linguistic) insecurities

The first time a student in Egypt explained to me that Arabic contained every phonic sound from every language on earth, i was a little taken aback.
After all, Arabic contains no V, P, or CH sound, nor a grouping of 3 or more consecutive consonants (like in spring).
And this is only the English sounds that Arabic lacks.

But in the Middle East, Arabic is more than just a language. It is first a signifier of purity - the Koran was revealed in poetic Arabic, and unlike the Old or New Testament, it cannot be sacredly translated.
It is also a symbol of unity.
Though the Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are as different as Spanish and French, their definitional sameness acts to represent (maintain/produce?) an analogous unity among Arab countries. When you speak the same language, you implicitly share values and responsibility - and as differences in culture, politics, and economy have decimated any notion of pan-Arabism, Language has remained the one true bond. The exclusion of Shi'a Islam in Iran and 'secular' Islam in Turkey from the broader Middle Eastern concern is no coincidence - they speak a different language.

While living in Egypt, I saw this linguistic myth as nothing more than the language component to a host of myths meant to reify Arabic/Islamic superiority through 'empirical' examples.

And then I came to Korea.

And sure enough, identical story. Only here the claim is expanded to include Hangul, the writing system, which can supposedly reproduce any 'foreign' sound.

While no language can make the claim to umbrella all others, at least Arabic was sort of close. I mean, Egyptians are shockingly fast language learners, and they actually don't have strong accents.

But Korea? Aside from lacking phonemically differentiated L/R, B/P or G/K, there is no F, Z, V, or voiced dental fricative TH (as in 'the'), nor many short vowels. Also, any consonant sound must be followed by a vowel, even if it at the end of the word. (thus max becomes maxuh.) Koreans are shockingly bad language reproducers.

But the 'fact' of Korean lingual superiority is so ingrained (mythified) that it goes completely unchallenged. The adult students i have confronted about this obvious untruth have either laughed in realization, or frozen up, like being told God didn't exist.

But their is more to this bizarre convergence of mythified Linguistic Exceptionalism.
The direction towards which this myth is used varies greatly between the two countries. In Egypt the linguistic superiority myth served to unify a diversified Arabic culture and reify Islamic superiority. Although it was to an extent used as an in-group creating example, (demonstrating superiority over the European out-group) this "in-group" included many countries, and in a sense expanded and defined the group beyond an equally plausible "Egyptian exceptionalism."
But in Korea, the Linguistic Superiority Myth serves an almost opposite purpose. Korea doesn't share its language with a broader region, and so the bolstering effect of the myth does not expand the group. Rather it exclusively serves Korean Nationalism, which unapologetically accepts Korea as the Best Country on Earth.

Of course, there are a billion examples of how this myth is hypocritical. Just as Koreans claim their language is superior, they also rely on English catch phrases as an economy of 'cool' more than anywhere else I've ever been. Korean advertisements regularly use nonsensical English phrases to bolster their images.

(the usage of 'story' in store names will be the subject of another post)

Furthermore, a large portion of the Namdaemun disaster coverage here has focused on Foreign coverage of the incident, to the point where it feels like The Korean Media is over-emphasizing foreign concern as a way to demonstrate the true importance of the disaster. Like the news is saying - "If the New York Times and CNN are covering this, than you know it is important."

As always, i'm not sure what the point of these observations are. In English, I feel like we're more proud of the words we absorb than anything else - knowing the definition of schadenfreude, or that the word for 'tariff' is of Arabic origin, is a sign of sophistication, and any notion of linguistic 'purity' only comes up when confronted with the idea of Ebonics as a legitimate linguistic whole.

But if we weren't so confident about our economic/political/moral superiority, would things like linguistic nationalism start becoming more important?