Safari

by Camille Garcia

I’m stuck in rush-hour traffic on the 110 going north. It’s stop and go, as usual; I’m one of many in the sea of brake lights inching forward along the serpentine freeway.

For a minute, the crawling mass of the glowing lights reminds me of the stream of fire ants I nearly stepped on in a Ugandan jungle while tracking chimpanzees. I was looking up in the trees, hoping to be the first to spot a chimp, forgetting that the real danger was on the ground. My boyfriend Luke yanked me by the backpack—hard. God bless him and his absurdly cat-like reflexes. When I looked down, my foot was suspended an inch above a rushing river of the tiny beasts that could have eaten homegrown ants for breakfast.

A troop of fire ants similar to what we saw in the Ugandan jungle

“Do not anger the fire ants,” our guide had warned before our expedition. Well, leave it to me to come within an inch of getting killed, or at least close enough to incite an onslaught of stinging bites and an excruciating rash. Carefully, slowly, I tiptoed over the line of ants, wiped the sweat from my brow, and pressed on toward the thick of the jungle.

Exactly one year later, I’m stuck in the middle of an urban, concrete jungle, where prowling for a parking spot is as exhausting as prowling for apes, and, where memories of last summer’s journey in Uganda and Kenya have become utterly surreal. If it weren’t for the hundreds of photos I took, and the notes I scribbled on scraps of paper, every detail of those two weeks would have already vanished from memory. But even if names are forgotten and faces are obscured by time, what will endure—in absolute purity, unfettered from the stranglehold of the ticking clock —is the acute sense of freedom and joy that supplanted my fear and nervousness almost as soon as our plane touched down in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in the early morning.

Chimp tracking in Uganda.

The sun was rising above the grassy hills, glinting off the morning dew. The land, the earth, was stunning. Somehow, someway, this city-girl was walking on East African soil.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Our first stop out of Addis Ababa was Nairobi, Kenya where we met up with the rest of our tour group led by Carrie, a free-spirited white woman—who preferred to hike barefoot—who had grown up on a farm in Zimbabwe.

After spending one night in Nairobi, our group embarked on our two-week expedition across Kenya and Uganda. We boarded a chartered bus along with local travelers carrying fruits and wares headed to Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest port-city that sits right on the banks of Lake Victoria. We arrived in the evening, eager to get to our hotel rooms and shower after an 8-hour drive. Of course, once Luke and I got to our room, there was the matter of arranging the mosquito nets and spraying everything down with Deet.

Mosquitoes, bats, and ants, oh my!

We took a nap under the netting, woken up by an unusual squeaking noise we traced to one of the air vents. My boyfriend and I stared at each other perplexed. A trapped mouse? I suggested. A squirrel? he thought. Are there squirrels in Africa? I asked. Maybe it’s a bat. We shuddered at the possibility and decided to leave our room.

On the rooftop of our hotel, we watched the sun set over Lake Victoria.

Orange cocktails and an African sunset

We wanted to drink beers, but because a Muslim family owned the hotel, they only had a type of orange-soda/cocktail for us to drink, which was delicious. The bottle is pictured. That evening, we found a restaurant four blocks from the hotel and stuffed ourselves with American fries, curries, pasta, chicken, and rice. In the mornings, we ate at the hotel’s cafe and chat with the hotel owner, while sipping on tea and nibbling on our toast and jam.

Kisumu for the most part was a peaceful city. The hum of motorbikes and mutatus, the chattering of people lingering in doorways, and children laughing while scratching pictures in the dirt were silenced only by the mosque calls at dusk.

Who would’ve imagined that in less than six months Kisumu would’ve been the epicenter of violent mobs and civil unrest following a controversial presidential election? Who would’ve imagined that this picturesque scene would be torn to shreds—the friendly and curious voices I heard that very moment—would be extinguished and silenced forever by the hands of angry dissidents?

To me, in my memory, Kisumu will always be this: a sunset over one of the world’s largest fresh-water lakes while calls to mosque sliced the air.

Going for a ride a boda boda. Conquering a ride like this—helmet-free—was my first step toward freedom.

fishermen on Lake Victoria

Two days later, we whispered goodbye to our pet bat and to Kisumu and headed back on the road for another eight-hour ride. This time, instead of traveling on a chartered bus, Carrie, our guide, arranged for mutatus to take us into neighboring Uganda—to get the true African experience, no doubt. The mini-vans were packed to maximum capacity, not only with members of our tour, but also with locals our driver insisted on picking up along the way. At one point, 18 people were packed in this mutatu.

Mutatus. I’m not sure if there’s a legal limit to the number of people who can fit into one of these.

And so there we were, Luke and I pinned to our seats, bouncing up and down the unpaved roads. With so many bodies in the van, it was crucial to have the windows down, which meant that the earth from the roads—rich with iron and blood red—would blow into our faces.

We passed through numerous towns, greeted by smiling children. Often they would shout at us and beg for our attention, and when we waved, they would jump up and down and collapse onto the ground. During one of our pit stops, we went to play with children who showed off their perfect cartwheels.

A Ugandan town

A couple of times, we spotted roaming baboons. This was the first wild animal we saw and I took about a hundred pictures of these baboons alone.

Baboons in our path

By the time we arrived in Jinja—a one-night stop on our way to Murchison Falls—our faces were caked with soil. It was everywhere: under our fingernails, in our ears, in our hair. A shower never sounded so good. I assume several of the older members of our group complained about the mutatus because for the rest of the trip, Carrie had us ride in a private bus/Winnebago.

Five showers and one night later, we proceeded northbound to Murchison Falls where we would embark on our first safari. We didn’t have an exact idea of where we would be staying, but Carrie assured us it would be the most pleasant stay yet. Several hours into the trip, we went off road, heading deeper into open fields and toward the sun.

The sun was already beginning to set, as we pulled into the gravel driveway of the Nile Safari Lodge. Carrie hadn’t done the place justice. Each traveling pair had their own cabin overlooking the Nile River, and we had arrived just in time to watch the indigo light envelope the sun.

view of the Nile River from our cabin deck

The night of our arrival, our tour group ate a luxurious dinner outdoors beneath a canopy. Afterward, we took our beers to the campfire and continued to chat while Carrie played her guitar. I was mystified by the velvet black sky, glowing with a million stars. I knew it was the same sky as in Los Angeles, but in Africa, it was unlike any sky that I had ever seen.

One by one, everyone retreated to their cabins. A family of monkeys lived in the trees surrounding our cabin. At night we laid awake, listening to them scamper on the railings of the deck, along with the croaking of frogs and the grunting of hippos below us at the riverbank. This is what life sounded like away from the cities, in the pure heart of Mother Nature.

It occurred to me then that I hadn’t checked my e-mail in days. I shrugged, and wiggled further into my sleeping bag. Two weeks in the wilderness, two weeks spent reveling in the simplicity of the earth, was the remedy I had been seeking to ten years spent on the go. I moved slower. I breathed easier. I felt that I could take my time.

Everyone was bustling with excitement the next morning as we prepared to head out on our first safari. We drove into Uganda’s national park, where we picked up one of the park’s rangers who led us on the safari.

At first, we saw nothing but the usual antelopes and gazelles. But then…

This safari beat any old trip to the zoo; especially the Los Angeles Zoo, where most of the animals are either hidden from view, behind bars, or too lethargic to move or do anything interesting.

As I watched the giraffes saunter majestically from tree to tree, I couldn’t help but hum the theme song to The Lion King. Pretty soon, we were humming “Circle of Life.”

Most of us weren’t satisfied, however. We were still waiting to witness the great wildebeest migration and track lions in the Masai Mara. And for that, we’d have to wait a few more days.

After two days on safari in Murchison Falls, we braced ourselves for city life. Destination: Kampala, Uganda’s capital where plainclothes officers carry AK-47’s like they were briefcases.

Driving into Kampala, Uganda.

Kampala is a buzzing city. There are tons of outdoor markets where people sell fresh meat and poultry, vegetables, and grains; mutatus hastily weave around each other on the roads; boda bodas speed by pedestrians without any discretion; and at night, American hip-hop (and if you’re lucky, Reggaeton) can be heard streaming outside hidden nightclubs.

Most of the people kept to themselves, save for the few we met while walking around the souvenir markets who were eager to hear about where we came from and how we liked Kampala. The best part of Kampala, we had to admit, was finding a fast food joint where Luke and I indulged in fried chicken. We ate everything we were given. Fried chicken just sounded so good by then.

We made out like bandits at the local souvenir shops, trying to pick out stuff that looked the least mass-produced. Probably made in China, someone suggested. I’d spent the entire summer in Asia, studying China’s history, politics, and economy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had found a market in Africa for souvenirs.

After Kampala, it was back to Jinja, where our tour group would go white-water rafting on the Nile River. At this announcement, I looked over at my boyfriend, my face contorted with the urge to cry.

I consider myself adventurous up to a certain point: I like to keep my feet on stable ground. Where was my say? I’d sooner go horseback riding, or visit an orphanage. Luke reassured me that we’d be going on the Level 3 rapids. Then he kissed my forehead. I reluctantly agreed.

On the day of the big excursion, not only did I find out that we’d be rafting along 26km of the Nile River, but that we weren’t talking about Level 3 baby waves. Somehow, I got sucked into the Level 5 group—one step below Level 6, which only kayaks can maneuver. My boyfriend knew this all along. I didn’t talk to him for about twenty minutes until our rafting guides played a video for us. The pounding water, the soundtrack of heavy metal, the whole badass-ness of it all got me pumped. My heart was racing with anticipation. Flipping over was not a question. I wanted to flip over into the roaring waves.

“If I die, you can have my iPod, honey.”

Twelve rapids (including one waterfall), five flips, one near-death experience, one excruciating sunburn, and 26km later, I was back on solid land and already making plans to go again and try skydiving when I got back home.

The seven of us couldn’t stay still. To celebrate our safe return, we drank more than enough beers to ease our sore muscles while being jostled about in the bed of a truck. We headed back to the launch site where other tourists were hanging out, eating dinner, and waiting for nightfall. When the DJ blasted “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, we couldn’t help but dance and sing our hearts out.

We had already spent a week and a half in Africa at this point, and our trip was winding down. The day after we conquered the Nile River, our group headed back to Kenya for our final safari.

Yes, we followed those arrows right upstairs into a room that looked like it belong in Aladdin’s palace.

We spent 11 hours on the road this time, spending one night in Narok. Luckily, rooms were available right above this butchery. Meat hooks and beef hanging in the windows, the stench of blood, and flies is all I have to say about Narok.

Finally, we made it to the border of the Masai Mara where we spotted Masai warriors on patrol along with children herding cows.

Our camping site was a ways in. Naturally, baboon and wild boar loitered around our tents. We unloaded our gear before catching a ride in the safari vehicles to track lions. This safari was unlike our first safari…

I felt my own insignificance beneath this sky. I felt an air of purity. I let my fingers sink into the soft, undefiled earth.

We found our lions. This one is resting on a full stomach of wildebeest, the remains of which we spotted a few feet away.

Graceful and proud.

It takes extreme experiences to reawaken our wonder of this place we call Earth, and it’s important that we don’t lose that sense of intrigue. Without it we cease to be human.

We met with the Masai warriors the following day. The chief’s son, a boy of about 17 years, explained their customs and showed us around his village. This would be our last day in the Masai Mara before we headed back to Nairobi for our last night in Africa. We made sure to buy those colorful blankets before we left.

Exactly one year later, I am here now, stuck in traffic. Africa seems like such a faraway place now.

It’s difficult to fight the city and the way it sucks you into its cold grasp. I’ve resumed my daily rituals and bad habits: checking email every minute or two, browsing Facebook, making plans, spending too much time tethered to my computer desk, and driving—confined in my capsule—to and fro, back and forth, here and there.

I adjust my rearview mirror, the cluster of skyscrapers come into view. There isn’t a hint of mystery to enthrall me, only the superficial beauty of the iconic Los Angeles skyline, shimmering in the orange glow of the setting sun. It sparkles. It dazzles. The phone rings. Cars honk. Hip-hop thumps out of rolled down car windows. The memory of Africa fades for the time being.

But if I can help it, I try to retain that sense of freedom, balance, and peace I experienced for two weeks in Africa. I roll down all the windows, open the sunroof, blast my music as loud as I can stand, and sing until all the city noise fades away and there’s only me—a speck beneath the sky, heading home.

Camille Garcia is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. Camille is a writer living in Los Angeles. She spends her free time reading travel magazines and discussing choices for their next destination with Luke.

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The counter levels.

Tsukiji

by Brian DeLeeuw

The tuna auctions at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market start around 5:30AM, but the market’s already been active for hours. The bluefin carcasses are displayed on raised pallets, six or seven to a pallet, about thirty pallets lined up across the frigid hall’s concrete floor. And these are inarguably carcasses, dead animals not yet refigured as food, their bellies slit, their tails chopped off and stuffed into their open mouths. Licensed buyers stroll through the rows in the hour before the auction starts, prying open the bellies with long-shafted hooks and peering inside with industrial flashlights. An especially thorough buyer swabs at a severed tail with his forefinger and samples the goods, chewing thoughtfully, and then, just as at the NYSE or any other heavyweight site of exchange, the opening bell rings and it begins.

Auctioneers lead their customers from fish to fish, business conducted through rapid-fire yelling and coded hand-signals, the buyer’s ID slapped up on each tuna’s flank with blood-red ink.

Workers cart purchases out to the labyrinthine city of stalls sprawling beyond the auction hall, where – amongst sea slugs, tiger prawns, giant scallops, fugu (blowfish), and hundreds of other species – they will be dismantled with three-foot long magurobocho knives or, for the frozen torsos, massive band saws.

The tuna have arrived from as close as Hokkaido and as far as Boston; they could be headed to a sushi bar on the other side of the parking lot or back across two oceans to New York City. Over fifty tons of tuna have changed hands. The whole process takes less than half an hour.

There is no one way of looking at Tsukiji; even familiar binaries – tradition vs. modernization, overt chaos vs. hidden order, the local vs. the global, the grotesque vs. the beautiful – oversimplify despite their modicum of truth.

Also a simplification, but one I will stand by, is that Tsukiji is a triumph of the visceral and the immediate over the denatured and the vague. Its panoply of sea creatures – circling in fish tanks, flopping in sawdust, or diced and filleted on steel platters – annihilate our often abstracted relationship to what we eat.

The original meaning of the word “market” – an actual physical place for the exchange of goods, rather than a vast and nebulous system of pricing – declares itself in every puddle of brine, every mouthful of diesel fuel and secondhand smoke.

But before we go any further, the facts. (All statistics taken from Theodore C. Bestor’s excellent Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (University of California Press, 2004).) About $19.4 million worth of seafood is traded here every day, adding up to a yearly total that’s usually around $5 billion.

Each working day sees well over two million kilograms (almost five million pounds) of goods change hands – that’s roughly 600 kilograms per year. This is more than seven times the volume and five times the value of trade at New York’s Fulton Fish Market, the world’s second largest seafood market. (At least in the one year in recent times – 1996 – that Fulton’s normally closed books were opened, due to Mob-related federal racketeering charges.)

Seven large auction houses employing approximately 700 auctioneers sell 450 “major” species and varieties of seafood – over 2,000 if you count sub-varieties – to about 900 licensed wholesalers and 375 authorized traders.

The traders buy in bulk for outside customers like restaurant chains and supermarkets, while the wholesalers operate 1,667 stalls lined up cheek-to-jowl along narrow, manically-trafficked alleys, selling on the spot to sushi chefs, restaurateurs, fishmongers, and assorted other regulars.

The market occupies over two-million square feet of mostly landfill (Tsukiji literally means “built land”) on the banks of the Sumida River in central Tokyo. About 50,000 people come to the market six mornings a week, and nobody there cares if you are number 50,001.

The basic indifference to your presence as an interloper feels both polite and remarkable. The obvious reason is that people are too busy to be either solicitous or hostile; there is much to do and very little time in which to do it. I was only spoken to when a workman accidentally knocked a twenty-foot tower of thankfully empty Styrofoam containers onto my head.

He gave a brief bark of a laugh, then said something probably along the lines of “That’s not a good place to stand.” But there is no good place to stand because everywhere, no matter how narrow the passageway or remote the corner, is fair game for the “turrets,” three-wheeled motorized carts with a vertical, cylindrical steering column (hence the name) at which drivers stand, squinting through cigarette smoke as they execute NASCAR-caliber maneuvers in the clotted cobblestone alleys.

The clearances between carts and stalls, carts and pedestrians, and, especially, carts and other carts are rarely more than a few inches. The visitor’s primary responsibility is to eschew unpredictable swerves and pauses; travel straight lines or just stand stock-still as the turrets zip pass, and you’ll be fine.

What you’ll survive to see among Tsukiji’s 1,667 stalls is the mind of an ichthyologist (or malacologist – look it up, I had to) turned inside out, flaunting its wild knowledge to the world. Clutches of boiled octopi float in bins like red, angry brains in formaldehyde. Dried squids are stacked like dirty laundry. Sardines shimmer in tightly-packed cartons, and lobsters squirm around in sawdust like toddlers in a sandpit. At one of the countless eel stalls, a wholesaler slaps each writhing specimen onto the cutting board, impales it through the eye with a hook, and deposits it into a bin to rest with its brethren in a soup of their own blood.

But the most impressive sight must be the slicing up of the bluefin tuna fresh from auction. The wholesalers wielding their magurobocho – knives in name only, these look more like samurai swords – are highly trained, and how could they not be? One false cut could ruin the fish, and this is expensive shit, sometimes reaching up to $52 per pound for a particularly excellent bluefin. The knives glide through the thick flesh as though it were tofu, and in a few strokes dead fish are transformed into slabs and strips of ruby-red food, priced and displayed under glass like precious jewels.

It’s a brutal scene, but the careful ritual of this transformation from animal to food complicates any ethically-minded vegetarian crusade, a cause for which the mantras of disrespect for animals and environmental degradation are often invoked. It is easy to say we are behaving callously, perhaps even immorally, towards chickens forced to live out their short lives in cramped cages full of their own shit or dolphins drowned for having the nerve to get caught up in albacore tuna nets.

(Although any Japanese whaler would argue that the moral difference between the West’s aggressively anthropomorphic dolphin and our dull lump of a tuna is largely a culturally constructed one.)

It is less easy to accuse a free-range pig farmer or a devoted elk hunter of animal abuse or ignorance, and it is less easy still to direct these charges at Tsukiji’s tuna wholesalers, who describe the very act of cutting the flesh as maguro no kaiwa (“the conversation of the tuna”), or at the auction buyers, who can assess a bluefin’s health and much of its history with a few glances and gentle palpations.

In short, no one loves fish more than a fisherman. One reason for this is the daily intimacy that leads, in most cases, not to contempt but to appreciation. Another reason, of course, is that everyone in the business depends upon the continuing sustainability of seafood for their livelihoods, which is the impetus for a kind of pragmatic environmentalism.

Two years ago, while doing research for a magazine article, I interviewed the head chefs of a few of Manhattan’s priciest seafood-centric restaurants. (No one fetishizes fish more than a French chef.) The ostensible purpose of the interviews was to identify the factors that produce the “trendy” fish of a given moment – the Chilean sea bass of the 90s or the miso-glazed black cod of the early 2000s – but all they wanted to talk about was preservation and responsible fishing. Most thought mandated fishing bans were often too little, too late, and instead they opted to self-police.

As one put it, we can have unlimited red snapper now and none at all very soon, or we can fish it responsibly now and eat it sparingly forever.

To argue that all fishermen or restaurateurs are as committed to the long-term good would be naïve, but here at Tsukiji a recognition of at least the karmic cost of fishing is evident in the six stone monuments at the Nami-yoke Shrine, just outside the marketplace’s Kaiko Bridge entrance. These monuments honor the sacrifice of fish in the service of human cuisine. (Well, five do; the last is for the eggs that are also used in some sushi preparations).

As Bestor writes of the memorials in his authoritative study of the market: “People in the seafood trade know full well that fish die so that humans may eat, and Japanese Buddhism and folk belief not only posit a consequence of this (that the innocent dead may harm the living) but also provide a means to atone and avoid retribution.”

It’s doubtful that a carved slab of stone and a pragmatic – some would say selfish – interest in seafood sustainability is enough for the hard-line vegetarian or environmentalist. But such gestures at least indicate an awareness of the source and, for lack of a less squishy term, spirit of our food, something citizens of the post-industrial world often lack.

I, however, am not one of those hard-line vegetarians, and so it would have been madness to have left Tsukiji without sampling the product of all this complicated interplay between cultural traditions, economic imperatives, and environmental concerns.

In other words, I wanted to eat sushi for breakfast. This wasn’t a problem: a narrow street on the far side of an endless, buzzing parking lot houses at least half a dozen tiny sushi bars, all already packed and some with two-hour waits at 7:30 a.m.

It was also Saturday, which meant that many of the patrons were young and either still drunk or newly hungover, here direct from the glitzy nightspots of the neighboring Ginza district. The bitter February cold quickly drove me and my girlfriend into one of the less trafficked establishments offering only a fifteen minute wait for seats at the ten-person bar.

Freezing and shipping technologies have discredited the seafood maxim that freshness requires proximity to the catch, as the globalized selection at Tsukiji itself demonstrates. However, doing your daily sushi business in the market’s shadow does ensure quality connections, as well as the necessity of pleasing a demanding clientele.

Our breakfast proved it: the omakase of toro (tuna belly), tuna, salmon, octopus, squid, tamago (sweet egg omelet), sweet shrimp, “normal” shrimp, salmon roe, scallop, mackerel, and an unidentifiable white fish that sounded like hake but wasn’t, all washed down with miso soup and green tea, was truly excellent and, at ¥2,800, less than half of what it would cost in New York.

Authenticity is a concept almost always invoked by an outsider, an inauthentic person. So for me to expound upon the virtues of eating sushi at the world’s biggest fish market surrounded by happy drunks, sushi snobs, and Korean tourists, with those crazy turret carts whizzing by and the early-morning sun shining through the window, and to frame the event as some sort of authentic echt-Japanese experience: this would be naïve, probably a bit patronizing, and definitely the sentiments of a typical golly-gee gaijin. Well, fuck it. The market was singular and astonishing. The sushi breakfast was delicious. I loved every minute of that morning, and, like any good tourist, I have the digital photos to prove it.

Brian DeLeeuw is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his previous work here, here, here, here, and here. He writes frequently on travel and food for CITY magazine. His writing has also appeared in New York, Tin House, and New York Press. His novel In This Way I Was Saved is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in the spring of next year.

All original photography by Brian DeLeeuw and Alex Cooley.

YOUR FISH MARKET SOUNDTRACK

"Mer Du Japon (Teenagers remix)" - Air (mp3)

"Fisherman" - The Congos (mp3)

"Girl and the Sea (Cut Copy remix)" - The Presets (mp3)

"Girl and the Sea" - The Presets (mp3)

"Please" - Ikonika (mp3)

"Life's a Beach! (Todd Terje remix)" - Studio (mp3)

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Some Out of The Way Corner of the Universe

by Alex Carnevale

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Times standards editor (you wouldn't even know they had one) wrote an e-mail to Times staffers requesting reporters not display the paraphernalia of any candidate in this November's election.

Since we cannot imagine any reason a conservative would work at the only newspaper more liberal than the Daily Worker, they meant Obama stickers.

Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous.

Instead of correcting the serious problem of total homogenity in their newsroom, they just fire more Dems and hire more Dems. "The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon," Stalin once said.

By keeping their affiliations private, reporters bring shameful cowardice to the fore instead of honesty and openness. The public should have the choice, not the paper.

For one of the most important newspapers in the world - a paper whose correction rate is slightly lower than Mad magazine - there is the shining monument to their newspeak: Pravda. The Times admires, wishes to be Pravda. It served the cause well, and that is the best that can be said about it. Howell Raines' description of the institution he led makes it sound even more repressive than Pravda in its heyday. (He fought for more Britney, if you were wondering.)

We should only wish the editors of the Times were as free-thinking as the editors of Pravda when Joseph Stalin led the editorial board.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls hard for cash money here.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

ENJOY STALIN'S FAV

shostakovich and stalin

We think that powerful and lifeful movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.

"Eyes Wide Shut" - Dmitri Shostakovich (mp3)

STAMP OUT THE REVOLUTION BEFORE IT STARTS

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"Teardrop" - Jose Gonzalez (mp3)

"Cycling Trivialities" - Jose Gonzalez (mp3)

"How Low" - Jose Gonzalez (mp3)

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Look How Happy They Were

by GEORGIA HARDSTARK

For the first few years of my parents' marriage, from about 1970 until 1975, they lived in a small one-bedroom apartment off San Vicente Blvd. behind Pioneer Chicken, in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. My mother had grown up in a duplex a stones' throw from their new apartment, and my parents had met while attending Fairfax High, a mere five minutes drive. In case you were wondering, that Pioneer Chicken on Olympic Blvd. has been a Pioneer Chicken forever...at least for as long as my mother can remember.

When they were both 29 years old, they decided to move to Israel. I'm sure it was more than just deciding to up and move to Israel - but from my perspective, and from the stories I've heard since I was a small child, that's how I always envisioned it.

As it turns out, my father wanted to make an Aliyah, which is basically a return to the 'promised land'...a sort of pilgrimage.

As for my mother, when I asked her why she went, she shrugged and said "I wanted an adventure...and I believed in your father's dream." Did I detect a hint of bitterness in her voice? It's hard to say. While we were flipping through the photo albums last night, trying to find a few good pictures for this story, she was nothing but thoughtful sighs and "look at how happy we were"s.

From their home in Los Angeles, where both their families lived, where they had jobs and friends and lives and history, they moved to the Negev desert and onto a moshav (a cooperative agricultural community) called Sde Nitzan. There, they had a house, as well as their own glasshouse for growing tomatoes, which were combined with those grown by the other community members and sold in the city.

After two years of living in Israel, and a year and a half of trying but failing to get pregnant with their first child, my parents took two steps to increase their chances of reproducing.

The first logical thing was to go to a doctor that came highly recommended by a neighbor on the moshav. The doctor was an Australian woman practicing in Beersheba, and she prescribed them a series of “exercises” aimed at increasing fertility.

As their child, I am forced to conclude that those exercises weren’t anything other than push-ups and some light weight lifting, and not any kind of “exercises” that constituted being naked with each other…shudder.

In the three months between being prescribed these exercises, and becoming pregnant with my brother, my parents made an Aliyah to Jerusalem for Passover.

During the long drive, my mother tells me, my parents spotted a lone stork while driving through the desert. Once in Jerusalem, my father put a prayer in the Wailing Wall (a traditional practice among Jews who visit) asking God for a child.

Enter my brother, Asher (which means “blessing” in Hebrew).

We sat together in her living room last night, looking through old photo albums and periodically peeling a photograph from the pages with the intention of scanning it into the computer later. I had my shoes off with my legs tucked underneath me, and I would occasionally scribble furiously in my notebook when she answered a question that popped into my head. She absentmindedly flipped through an old album whose pictures were yellowing and stuck to the pages with glue that was older than I am.

I asked her if she thought moving to Israel had made her and my father closer. Having been divorced from my father since I was five years old, after 15 years of marriage, I don’t know how I expected her to answer.

Was that question asked by my five year old self, who still hoped her parents would realize how silly they were being, and get back together?

Or was it asked by the somewhat jaded girl I’ve become, who had returned from her own failed pilgrimage (albeit to a much less intimidating location than Israel) only a year before, and now knew that moving somewhere isolated with the man you love is more apt to put strain on the relationship than it is to bring you closer.

She was quiet for a long time. At first I thought she was contemplating the question. She’s always been the type of person to think before she speaks, but enough time had elapsed that I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me, and I was about to ask again when she let out one of her familiar sighs.

Having inherited this trait from her, I knew that she had just conjured up, from the very depths of her psyche, all that she felt those 30 years ago, and was now audibly releasing it before answering my question.

"There were angry moments…and there were especially endearing moments." She was crying just a little.

Her parents came to visit after Asher was born. My mother was the baby of the family, the youngest daughter out of four, and important enough that, although terrified, my grandparents took their first transatlantic flight to meet their new grandchild…the first time either had been overseas since escaping Eastern Europe as children.

What my mother couldn’t know was that this would be the last time she would see her father…my grandfather, the man I’m named after.

A little over two years after moving to living in Israel, my parents decided to go home. According to my mom, they preferred the 'American way of life', and that’s what they wanted to provide to their new son. My mother also missed her family, and after my grandparents' visit, she saw the benefits of having them close by.

So with a seven month old baby in tow, my parents took a 4 day ride on a Greek ferry from Haifa through the Mediterranean, ending in Venice.

From there they drove through Italy, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and finally flew to New York out of Belgium.

They stayed with one of my mother’s older sisters (my aunt Heb) in New York. When I was little, my mom told me that late one night, while getting into bed in the guest room of my aunt’s house, my mother heard her father yell out her name. She demonstrated how he sounded, and it gave me chills. This was impossible, of course, as my grandfather was at home in Los Angeles, but she ran to the window anyway and looked onto the street for him. She shrugged it off as her imagination, and went to bed.

My grandpa George died that night in Los Angeles. They returned to Los Angeles for good after that.

Georgia Hardstark is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find more of her accomplished musings at The State That I Am In. She also tumbls here.

55,000's a Crowd

by Alex Carnevale

Sometimes in a crowd there is an eye of the storm, where you are coexisting equitably with the rest of the world.

But for the most part we seem intent on being closer together to one another than common decency dictates.

My friend Bernard is planning on dumping his new roommates, an unsightly couple. Apparently they correct his behavior.

For the past year I've commuted two hours each day to my job. For three more weeks anyway, I'll ride a bus, an N train, an E train, a LIRR train, and a small shuttle to work. It's a maddening ritual which I have broken down into a caffeine fueled descent into the farthest depths of empathy one can imagine.

At times I have drifted deep into the plight of a woman and her recurring retarded son. A man gets on at Forest Hills and off at Woodside, a short journey, but why? I have seen Long Island trash sparkle in its infinite human and garbagey variety. I've seen a man's balls, a woman asleep on the ground, and more Ranger fans that one can reasonably stomach.

I find myself violating the treaty of peace from time to time. And I'm also useful as a target for directions, and also outright sympathy. "I understand." Someone is always apologizing to me, and I am never sure quite why.

Since I am always test engaging with everything, it chooses to engage me back.

Coming back from Yankee Stadium on Friday night, we stood in line to pack it in. I've never stayed to the bare end of a baseball game before, and I couldn't imagine why the ample crowd would want to. We stood in line to stand in line. An older man handed a younger man $10 for his seat. I told the younger man he was unethical and he and the older man exchanged eskimo kisses.

Ahead of me was my friend Jeff who is getting married to a lovely young woman.

I poked my head throught the cars to tell him, "I won't be going home with you."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

WISDOM OF THE MASSES

Jewish American sagas

alanis morrisette a plastic surgery victim?

gail collins is a tool

nfl player IQ by position played

kirsten wii in GQ:

celebrating Danish's birthday

Viral bait, a video you shld see

it's torture seriously you guys

libeskind not manly enough

gillian reagan on moustaches

The upside of album leaks

i think i love my wife

tess in the future

a-rod madonne sex tape

lambo's aquarium

how mccain could win

alexis bledel is killin' it

stage names in the new york times

who gawks at the gawkers?

living alone: a study

kay ryan named poet laureate

the color line online

ellenclare

why batman could exist

cage:

On one occasion, Schoenberg asked a girl in his class to go to the piano and play the first movement of a Beethoven sonata, which was afterwards to be analyzed. She said, “It is too difficult. I can’t play it.” Schoenberg said, “You’re a pianist, aren’t you?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Then go to the piano.” She did. She had no sooner begun playing than he stopped her to say that she was not playing at the proper tempo. She said that if she played at the proper tempo, she would make mistakes. He said, “Play at the proper tempo and do not make mistakes.” She began again, and he stopped her immediately to say that she was making mistakes. She then burst into tears and between sobs explained that she had gone to the dentist earlier that day and that she’d had a tooth pulled out. He said, “Do you have to have a tooth pulled out in order to make mistakes?”

pitchfork's overlooked albums of 2008

is barack in charge of campaign obama?

crossing 7th avenue at 3am

britt @ pitchfork

thumbwrestlinginbaltimore

ten things to know about murakami

interpreter speaks up for migrants

jessicalouise

alex balk on nonsociety

creepy militarization

claire danes lookin' good in a bikini

MUSIC FOR STANDING OUT IN CROWDS

"Free Money" - Patti Smith (mp3)

"Gloria" - Patti Smith (mp3)

"Kimberly" - Patti Smith (mp3)

"Reminders of Then" - Kimya Dawson (mp3)

"Stinky Stuff" - Kimya Dawson (mp3)

"Rocks with Holes" - Kimya Dawson (mp3)

"That's All For Everyone" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"Sara" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

"Save Me a Place" - Fleetwood Mac (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.

Me keeping Danish and Molly happy.

The blue streak.

Are You My Granddaughter?

by YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG

Right now I feel like am sitting in my grandmother’s living room, looking at the world through her lace curtains. From time to time, a gentle wind blows the curtains and changes the patterns through which I see the world. There are large knots in the curtains, and I cannot see through them.

– Richard Taylor, Alzheimer’s From The Inside Out

Right now I am sitting in my grandmother’s living room. Her curtains are mossy green; her picture window looks out onto an afternoon lush with Houston spring. She watches Cardinals and Blue Jays peck at seed in the grass. My grandmother, Gerda, is lovely. Her skin, olive, still smooth, belies her age. Her hands are strong, her eyes clear, her laugh charming and high, and we are losing her.

My grandmother, Oma as we call her, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease last year. It would, however, be difficult to know this, sitting beside her in her living room, watching her admire the birds. The disease grips her in subtle ways today, in perhaps less subtle ways tomorrow.

She still knows who I am, of course. She knows the family, the basic facts. Details come and go. What she cannot retain are the immediacies, and what she asks me each time I arrive at her door is, why are you here? Where is Mommy?

“California,” I say. “I’m in town to spend time with you this week.”

She grips her forehead, asks me when my mom is coming back.

“Tuesday,” I say, again. “She’ll be back Tuesday morning.”

I cannot know how deep this disease will pull her, and how fast. For now I am grateful for having only to remind her of the little things, and we flip through photo albums, side by side on the couch, her fat, white cat named Tootie asleep in the space between us. Doctors say old photographs are good for the Alzheimer’s mind.

Her childhood remains vivid: holidays atop jungle mountains, resorts shrouded in clouds, trans-Atlantic ocean liners, flowing gowns the colors of which I must imagine through black and white. Oma was raised between Holland and the island of Java, in Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies. For the Dutch, it was a prosperous time. Hers was a childhood spent in rooms without walls, with lounging cats and idle breezes.

Here now in Houston, her accent still pronounced after five decades in Texas, Oma recalls the names of cute boys in old-fashioned bathing suits, the details of her favorite outfits (“Oh, this one was brown,” she says, smiling. “So cute!” we squeal in unison), and the opening moments of her dance revues. Oma loved to dance. “I would dance by myself in an empty house,” she says, and closes her eyes. “I see myself dance.”

”Audrey’s Dance” - Angelo Badalamenti (mp3)

“No. 3 in E Major” - Chopin (mp3)

“Drivin’ on 9″ - The Breeders (mp3)

Oma’s childhood room

I get up to show her my rudimentary and ineptly-executed ballet moves. Tendu, piqué, grand plié.

“No elbows!” she exclaims, positioning her arms, patiently, as if strumming a harp. I try again. She watches, clasps her hands beneath her chin. “Ah,” she sighs, delighted. “Very nice!”

Oma and I have always been close. Her house is two miles from my parents’ house, and my sister and I grew up seeing her every day, pulling up the driveway in her Ford Fairmont, the Omamobile, delivering us strange and delicious Indonesian dishes for dinner.

Of the nine members of my immediate family, I have always felt most like Oma: daydreaming, skeptical, in love with the arts, hostile toward math, quick to judge and then laugh about it, Oma and I are cut from the same passionate and somewhat astringent cloth. We are the only two women in the family who covet jewelry. When something is absurd, we think it’s absurd. I love Oma’s beauty, her wit, her perfection of manners. I see in Oma, unfailingly, the woman like whom I hope to age. But now I think of her mind, and I’m frightened of what her genes imply.

“Arabian Dance” - Tchaikovsky (mp3)

The house on Java

I remind her to take her afternoon pills, to eat. Alzheimer’s makes its sufferers obstinate and irritable. That she resists food is troubling. One must eat everything on one’s plate, she’s always told us. One must try all foods in order to be worldly, refined, poised.

“Don’t boss me,” she replies. “I’m not 100.” Then she asks me if I’m alone at my parents’ house. She remembered they were traveling. When I say yes, she shakes her head in disapproval.

“If you’re not 100,” I say, “then I’m not ten.”

We laugh and decide to play Scrabble. The highlight is my construction of the word “vagina,” followed by Oma’s addition of an “s,” making this bit of plural anatomy the vertical center point and constant amusement of our game.

Today, Oma plays Scrabble with relative ease, but it makes me sad. Tomorrow her memory of this game will have vanished. It will, in fact, never have become a memory. It is my challenge, not hers, to linger in the moment. To enjoy this, and later, to etch it onto my heart. Memories held here seem to cling more firmly to the mind.

I coax her into eating a McDonald’s Asian Chicken Salad, and she settles in with her slokje. Two parts vodka to one part dry vermouth, and ice. In a tall glass. A long drink, she says. Wheel of Fortune flickers on the television, the volume low, the arrows thrumming quietly against the pegs of the wheel. We both used to be so good at this show; it’s our tradition to watch it. But tonight we are terrible, and I have no excuse.

The room is cozy when I switch on a few lamps. Oma, from her spot on the couch, sits across from an antique wooden cabinet boasting twenty-two photographs of cats — my cats, my mom’s cats, my sister’s cats, my cousin’s cats, anonymous greeting card cats. “I looove my toeteladis,” she says. I wonder how I might memorize the sound of her elongated O’s, the beguiling and particular sing-song of her accent when she’s feeling good.

I finish off a McFlurry with M&Ms, and pour a glass of Chardonnay. We marvel at the globularity of Pat Sajak’s head, and move on to discuss the merits of the early-evening cocktail. “My father was suspicious of a man who wouldn’t have a drink,” Oma says. “We should be having this with a little hapje, a little cheese and bread.”

“And salami,” I add, and we both take a sip. The chardonnay is extra-sweet paired with the aftertaste of soft-serve.

“When I was young it seems like we were always drinking and eating,” she says. “Before your evening drink you had tea, with cake, and before that lunch. And you had your wine with dinner.”

“The meals must have been so long,” I say.

Oma scratches the top of Tootie’s head. “Oh yes,” she says, nodding, “and then you had your coffee afterwards of course, and always your dessert.”

Tootie

We are quiet for a few moments now, she with her numbered recollections, me gathering them up into my own reveries, of fine, languid dinners in the Far East. Alzheimer’s takes often, and seldom gives. Today was a gift.

 

Couple on Beach by Alex Colville

Part Two

Hedwig Village, where I grew up in Houston, is not in fact a village.

It is .9 square miles of flat, wooded neighborhood, set among three other similar and indistinguishable “villages.” Oma lives in Piney Point Village. I went to elementary school in Bunker Hill Village. My mother used to teach in Hunter’s Creek Village. I ride my bike to Oma’s house through these “villages” and note, in the eight years I’ve lived away, how little has changed. The woman two doors over still stands in place on her front lawn, watering the St. Augustine and peddling gossip. Teenagers in jacked-up F-150s still run the stop sign outside our house. The parking lot of St. Cecilia Catholic Church down the block remains dutifully at capacity on Sunday morning.

These villages comprise a community where good ol’ boys with questionable Enron ties share property lines with gray-beards in khaki jumpsuits, where quiet modernist gems….

… are leveled in favor of monuments to the marriage of new money and poor taste.

This is not the neighborhood to which Oma and my grandfather, Opa, moved in 1954. This is a place made vulgar by lack of nuance. Oma’s modest brick house, once one of many modest brick houses on a shady cul-de-sac, will soon be sandwiched by towering faux-Tuscan boxes. She reconciles this notion of progress by shaking her head rhetorically when she opens the door for me, “What are they doing out there?” she says.

Today she is confused. “What day is it?” she asks. “I’m such a zombie. I’m so mad at myself.”

Mornings tend to be this way. She sits on the couch, leans forward, rubs her temples, scolds herself. “I’m so vervalant,” she says. Loosely translated as “ornery,” vervalant is a word Oma uses often to make light of her situation. Watching her, I see that she understands her mind is losing hold of things that she knows, even at her age, she should remember. Beyond this, I’m not sure what she makes of it. I imagine the Proustian disorientation of waking up in an unfamiliar room, believing it at first to be familiar. The fog of sleeping too late. But for Oma the room rearranges itself only the slightest bit, the fogs lifts but leaves behind a mist. In the mornings, she doesn’t want to move, she doesn’t want to speak. If I ask how she slept, or what she ate for breakfast, she waves her hand and sighs, “Past history.”

We listen to audio her parents sent from Holland to Houston in the fifties, back when long-distance phone calls were glamorous. The tapes were a way for them to hear one another’s voices without the expense. My great-grandmother, Over-Oma we call her, sounds far away on the recording, in time and distance. She speaks Dutch, laughs, asks questions of my young mother in English; her voice is kind.

Though she has listened to these tapes before, Oma seems astonished to hear her mother’s voice. “My mother!” she says, “So sweet.” My great-grandfather, Over-Opa, takes his turn on the tape. I barely understand a word, but his low voice is magic. Oma’s brother, Bert, tells a funny story. These are the voices oldest and most familiar to Oma, and we are in the room with them. “It makes me sad,” she says. But she doesn’t want to turn it off.

Over-Oma begins to play Chopin. The song is muffled and haunting, a waltz. “I still see her playing,” Oma says, running her fingers over a ghost piano. Oma is saddened by these memories, but she is also momentarily pulled from the stress of forgetting. Do these years seem closer to her than the present? The saddest and strangest part is that the future, with its necessity for context and pattern, is lost. I move forward, and Oma is thrust back. I close my eyes and see her suspended over a great funnel, growing darker as it narrows. I reach for her hand, and pull her out just in time.

It’s early afternoon now. Jeopardy! isn’t on for a couple of hours. The Houston Chronicle is dreadful reading. Oma wants to sit. But even in this mood, she’ll talk about the war. She will always talk about the war.

February 5, 1941: Oma’s first love, Fritz, is shot down at 19 in the Battle of Singapore. His framed photograph hangs in her kitchen. March 9, 1942: the Dutch surrender the islands to the Japanese.

Fritz

Oma and the family fill a chest with valuables and bury it beneath the garage. Bert goes on a bike ride one afternoon and doesn’t return home. Shortly after, Over-Opa is taken away by Japanese soldiers. Both he and Bert are sent to work camps; it will be four years before Oma and her mother see them again. Over-Oma sends secret letters, rolled up inside bars of soap, until the Japanese cut off communication. Japanese officials move into the house, and she and her mother are sent to cordoned-off housing for Dutch women.

Battle of the Java Sea

The stories are not glad until after the war, when she meets Opa, a pilot in the Dutch Air Force. We stare at a picture of the two of them, walking arm-in-arm in Sydney. Oma touches the photo, in love with him. He is striking. “So handsome!” she exclaims. She wishes I could have known him, and I do too. I tell her what scattered memories I do have, of him throwing a beachball to me in the backyard, of him, after he got sick, shuffling across her living room in a plaid robe and a pair of slippers with sailboats on the top.

Oma and Opa

To this day, Oma puts cotton balls in her ears during thunderstorms, dreams of the war. If she loses these memories, I worry that she’ll lose herself. When I think of the possibility that she’ll lose Opa, I stop short. Tom Cruise is on Oprah now, so the conversation turns to Oma’s devoted crush on Paul Newman, our mutual soft-spot for blue eyes, and boys in general. “Don’t make them jealous,” Oma says, then raises her shoulders. “Well, maybe a little bit.” We conclude that Tom Cruise, while cute in Risky Business, is no Robert Redford.

Yes.

And yes.

Later, as I’m leaving, she lets me ring the big bronze dinner bell by her front door, a treasure unearthed from beneath her childhood garage. On the ride home, I pass beneath old oaks and razed lots where I remember old oaks to have been. The woman two doors down is pulling into her driveway when I get home, and I think of the time she called my mother after a thunderstorm. The power had been out for a few hours. “What is going on here?” she said, angry. “It’s like we’re living in a third-world country.”

chilly scenes of winter

“Real Love” (acoustic) - John Lennon (mp3)

“Honky Tonkin’” - Hank Williams, Sr. (mp3)]

“Pale Blue Eyes” - Lou Reed (mp3)

“Always Returning” - Brian Eno (mp3)

PART THREE

Oma and Opa

She doesn’t realize it, but Oma has lost her sense of smell.

It’s another cruel twist of this disease, that its sufferers should lose the most eloquent trigger of memory, scent. It is the sense that cannot be conjured and evades description; when it is inaccessible, it is gone. Oma can no longer verify whether the musty aroma lingering in the spines of her old books is her childhood home. Or her first home with Opa. Or something else entirely. I wish I had asked her sooner.

Oma, age 10

There’s cinnamon and damp wood and lavender in the spine of “The Soul of the White Ant,” by Eugene M. Marais, her mother’s favorite book. This was Over-Oma’s copy, published June 3, 1937, a study of South African termites. Oma, dressed today in a pretty turquoise house dress, tells me that her mother was fascinated by small insects, particularly ants and termites. I remind her that as I child I wanted to be an entomologist studying weird bugs in the rainforest. We laugh because it’s ridiculous, the thought of me as any sort of scientist.

I read aloud to Oma from the first chapter, “The Beginnings of a Termitary”:

The functioning of the community or group-psyche of the termitary is just as wonderful and mysterious to a human being, with a very different kind of psyche, as telepathy or other functions of the human mind which border on the supernatural. When one wishes to write of all these wonders, one is bewildered by the embarrass de richesses. It’s hard to know where to begin.

Oma smiles; she is listening.

The beginning of a termitary dates from the moment when the termites fly, after rain and usually at dusk, in order to escape their innumerable enemies. Even here we see a remarkable instance of the wonders of instinct. The termites beginning their thrilling flight know nothing about enemies. They have never been outside the nest before. The peril of existence is to them a closed book, and yet nine times out of ten they do not fly until the birds are safely in their nests.

Perhaps Alzheimer’s is similar, in reverse. The individual, with time, shedding gradations of self, until what’s left must function on feeling and impulse alone. The body becoming a vessel to the inchoate mind.

Oma perks up in the evenings. Where she used to fret, she is almost blithe. Oma, whose dreams were always vivid recollections of the war, of long-ago conversations, of Opa, now has nightmares which wake her shaking; the past wailing at the door, fists beating, locked out. Still, she suspects only that she is getting old. It’s an especially insidious disease that devours a mind without revealing itself to the very mind it’s devouring. Or an especially merciful one.

Oma in her can-can costume

I make Oma a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and suggest that we play hangman, another classic in our repertoire of word games. Oma guesses my word, “California,” almost immediately. Then she gives me a phrase, four words, punctuated with a question mark. It takes her some time to count out each letter. Before I know it, my man is hanging hopelessly from the gallows. We’re laughing because Oma keeps forgetting letters and I keep getting confused. Finally, I give up and watch as she fills in the blanks, one by one, in her disciplined print:

ARE YOU MY GRANDDAUGHTER?

I don’t know what to do, so I say of course I’m your granddaughter! My tone is bright but my heart is breaking. It’s difficult to accept that she’s asking me this question in earnest. I know she has asked my mother similar questions, but here now, with her, I am not prepared. She recognizes that I am familiar, that my mother is familiar, but the context is clouded. She cannot place our parts in the play. I want to ask her, if she isn’t sure I’m her granddaughter, who does she think I might be? I won’t ask, though, as it would only confuse her more. She looks at the page with an absent smile, gestures as if to indicate that of course she knows I’m her granddaughter, and we move on, back to the present.

I tell her I’m going to see La Bohème tonight, one of Opa’s favorite operas.

“Oh yes,” she says. “I’ve seen it many times.”

Opa’s favorite was Tosca,” I say. She told me this a few years ago.

“Oh he loved it,” she says. “Every Saturday morning he played it so loud, all through the house!”

I have a collection of random memories here: Oma picking me up from elementary school, her gold bracelets clinking against the plastic Fairmont steering wheel. The brown vinyl sunglasses case which hung from her keychain, tapping the steering column as she made a turn. The symphony or opera playing low on her radio, and the muffled male voices of NPR. I remember thinking that whatever those men were saying wouldn’t pertain to me for a very long time. Oma is wearing the same gold bracelets today.

She asks me if I’m going to the opera alone. I say yes, and she doesn’t like this at all. I assure her that I’ll be careful in the parking garage, and as I’m leaving, promise to call her at intermission.

“Etude in C Minor Op. 10 #12″ - Chopin (mp3)

“Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” - Herman’s Hermits (mp3)

“San Antonio Rose” - Patsy Cline (mp3)

Splendor in the humidity

Of the (limited) pleasures Houston has to offer, including New York-quality ballet and opera companies, The Menil Collection, a house made entirely of beer cans, and ethereal fried chicken, driving from the Westside to downtown along Memorial Drive counts among them.

The route, which cuts through the largest (and what feels like the only) park in the city, is especially pleasing when travelled in my father’s 1984 300D Turbo Diesel Mercedes sedan. One would not guess, rounding the bend at Buffalo Bayou and glimpsing the skyline, that Houston is a city without zoning restrictions. If one were to continue past downtown however, this fact would immediately reveal itself. Downtown, as seen from Memorial Drive, is H-Town’s most flattering angle.

Oma in the Vega

The opera is beautiful; I imagine Oma listening to the proverbial O soave fanciulla, with her family in Holland, with Opa in this very theater.

Oh lovely girl, oh sweet face bathed in the soft moonlight. I see you in a dream, I’d dream forever!

When I call during intermission she sounds sleepy and content, genuinely excited that I’m at the opera. She asks again that I call her afterward; she wants to know I’m home safely.

 

It’s unsurprising that observing Alzheimer’s from the outside augments one’s own awareness of memory. Peering into the orchestra pit, I recall Oma taking me to see The Nutcracker. It occurs to me that A Passage to India is her favorite book, and that I haven’t read it. Driving home, down a street near her house which a few years ago endured a prolonged overhaul, I think of Oma joking about the big orange sign on the sidewalk: ‘Slow Men At Work’. I pour a late-night bowl of cereal, and remember the way Oma, when she was staying with us, would take all the cereal boxes out of the pantry in the morning and place them on the kitchen table. I glance at the mail and think of the letters, into the hundreds, that we exchanged when I was in college. She always told me to throw them out, but I’ve kept every one.

“I’ve been meaning to write,” she says to me often these days, “but I just keep forgetting.”

“It’s okay,” I say, “I keep forgetting too.”

Oma and Yvonne

A part of me is glad she hasn’t written. I broke down reading her last letter, about a year ago, right after she was diagnosed. Oma, always the clever poet, wrote in uncharacteristically wavering cursive:

Dearest Yvonne, I am not good at writing notes. (Maybe I wrote you already?) My mind is kaput. I feel I just wrote to you. Help me out! What day is it? March 12? You are taking care of yourself? I read your article! I write so sloppy- old age. Mommy is taking good care of me all the time. Don’t worry. Don’t work too hard - I know I wrote this already! Tell me if I am losing it? Sweet hugs & thoughts & kisses for all, especially you.

Love, Oma

I cried because I sensed the first tremor of the coming avalanche, and because I understood the best we could do was brace ourselves and hold her close to cushion the fall.

Peripheral reminders are everywhere. A block of Post-it notes invokes memories of marathon scavenger hunts at Oma’s house. I see an advertisement for a bridal store on television, and realize I’ve never asked her about her wedding. These reminders are not piercing because they’re nostalgic; they are piercing because they come with the knowledge that for Oma, they are dropping away. There’s insufficient time. We remember, and she forgets, we remember, and she forgets; a devastating and infuriating stasis. If only I could scream at this disease and scare it off, I would gather the memories to make her whole again. I cannot conceive of what it’s like for my mother, her heroic caretaker.

It’s 12:45 A.M, and I’m brushing my teeth when the phone rings. It startles me to see her name on the caller ID this late.

“Oma?”

“Yvonne!” she says.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “Why are you awake?”

“You said you would call me,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

Hours ago, when I called my mother, she told me she’d just talked to Oma, and that she was settled in for the night.

“I’m so sorry Oma,” I say. “I thought you were asleep.”

I’d assumed she had forgotten.

“Noooo,” she says, her voice clear. “You said you would call when you got home.”

In the melody of that wonderful extended O, stern and sweet, I hear her unmistakably. My grandmother. I hold on tight.

Yvonne Puig is the contributing editor to This Recording. She also writes at It Was Evening All Afternoon. She is a writer living in Austin, Texas; her work has appeared in Anthem, The Austin Chronicle, The Austin American-Statesman, GOOD Magazine, Metromix and Variety.

“All Mixed Up” - Red House Painters (mp3)

“The Past and The Pending” - The Shins (mp3)

“Handguns and Firearms” - Japancakes (mp3)

“Stars” - Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma (mp3)

“Stand By Me” - Ben E. King (mp3)

“Trike” - U-ziq (mp3)

“Tenderly” - Lester Young, Bill Evans, Art Tatum (mp3)

“Be Mine” - The Concretes (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

We let it get the best of us.

Phallic objects in the sky.

A journey into the modern.

from here

The American Colony

Our senior contributor Molly Young’s groundbreaking journey to the Middle East concludes today. Relive those memorable Jews and Arabs in The American Colony.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Enjoy the final edition of

The American Colony

by Molly Young

Lauren Bacall and Graham Greene stayed at our hotel (not together), and the bar this time is identical to Rick's Cafe. It will probably be decades before I get to stay in another place like this, I think. We go to the bar and Ida orders an Old Fashioned. The rest of us have champagne, and it tastes just like honey.

At breakfast the next day there is no one but me. "Excuse me, would you like to have more coffee, maybe?" asks the waiter. Yes. His name is Jihad. Gentle Jihad with a mustache like black toothpaste squeezed across his upper lip. I imagine if my name were Jihad Young, or the English equivalent, Holy War Young.

This reminds me that I dreamt, last night, of learning to fire a gun. It was so lucid a vision that I believe I could do it, in real life, if someone handed me a weapon. When my stepmother and Ida arrive and start fussing over the buffet I can't concentrate on my newspaper.

I explore the corridors after coffee, looking at displays of Islamic pots and old photographs. I pick two apples from a bowl of fruit. I am so lucky at this moment, I think. I'm warm, not hungry, I have no cramps or headaches, my clothes are clean, and best of all there are things to look forward to.

+++

The guide who takes us through the old city is a zealous Jew named Mark Sugarman. He repeats over and over again that he remembers the Holocaust every time he sees a beautiful Jewish child. My secular dad nods. Never forget, says Mark, for the fourteenth time. We spend hours twining through the different quarters of the Old City. African churches are built in the round, I learn, so that Satan can't hide in the corner. The logic is impeccable.

Israeli soldiers are lounging around in the sun. A Jordanian king sold one of his London apartments, Mark tells us, to purchase twelve million dollars worth of gold for the roof of the Temple Mount. We go to see it and are quickly ejected; it is Muslims-only for most hours of the day. There are stands and shops everywhere selling cheap clothing and confectionary.

Just as the mixture of old and new is surprising in Jerusalem, so is the neighboring of sacred and profane. The place where Jesus stopped to rest while dragging the cross to Golgotha is three feet from a kiosk selling Kodak film. I hate the way tourists are alternately disdained and coerced.

A few times a day there is a Muslim call to prayer. The sound system is dodgy and the prerecorded incantations sound like someone burbling through a tub of syrup.

After our tour I break off alone, charging up and out of the Old City through the Damascus gate and heading back to the hotel for coffee.

I sit down and think for a while. Jerusalem has struck me architecturally and historically, but not spiritually. I wonder if growing up without religion has made me less receptive to Big Ideas. I do not understand ideologies or movements. This may be the reason why my little appetites preoccupy me more than anything else. It isn't the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I dwell upon but the graffiti on the way back: AHMAD WAS HERE, in red paint on the wall. Beneath it is a crudely-drawn weenie.

It should be the other way around, I think. But I have no ethnic or group affiliations to speak of, no cause to further and nothing really to push against. Which is nice, of course, and I'm happy. But plucked out of the usual environment, I feel a bit like Tonio Kröger. Everyone dancing and I can't hear the music.

Molly Young is the senior contributor to This Recording. She currently lives on the West Coast but we are hoping she returns to this one. Her site is Magic Molly.

congratulations are in order

MUSIC FOR JIHAD YOUNG

"Choppers" - Holy Fuck (mp3)

"Safari" - Holy Fuck (mp3)

"They're Going to Take My Thumbs" - Holy Fuck (mp3)

BEST OF MOO

1. Teen Wish, Co.
2. Prune Whip
3. Winter Hideaway
4. Scorsese Week
5. The American Colony
6. The American Colony, part II
7. Bonjour Tristesse
8. The American Colony, part III
9. The American Colony, part IV
10. A New Kind of Porn Star

betty joan perske

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

The gorilla arrived when you least expected it.

A childhood in Ursula Gullow’s afternoons.

The gladiator signed their check.

Space for All

by Alex Carnevale

Think in order
to recall
what the striking thing

resembles.
(So impotently
loved the world

- Rae Armantrout, Precedence, 1985

This morning I visited the Russian consulate in Manhattan, where God made sport of Russian people for my amusement.

My coming series of reportage - much of it lovingly fabricated with compromising Lena Chen-esque photos of the prostitutes I patronize - will likely lead to a Pulitzer Prize in reporting and inspire conservative luminaries like Roger Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson to proclaim me 'the kike Ronald Reagan.'

The scene outside the consulate was an exercise in the disappointment inherent in cultural diffusion, a phrase I had to define in social studies but really means something like 'resentment.'

Crowds generally make me nervous. My last visit to Yankee Stadium in its final season was an uncomfortable experience, as a crowd of people chanted, "Y R U Gay?" to the tune of 'YMCA' at a Mariners fan. I have no doubt the men and women of the Russian consulate could have merited a similar but killing cheer.

Kafka, as with most things, wrote of that everyday experience the best:

"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffee-house that was already almost deserted. 'No, I don't,' I said.

Staring at these people, there is no way to avoid thinking of the most terrible ideology in the world. Being a communist was once something unremarkable. Now, thanks in no small part to Franz's appraisal of bureaucracy, we know it is one and the same with death.

Capitalism bears no such mark, but it is still a potent force. Cue opaque observations of native Russians reading Harry Potter in English, joking among each other even while silent, as if in this little doll house was all in good humor. (The collective has never really been known for its sense of humor.)

In a tiny bubble, these people are in a soft war against a culture that invades every particle of their being, nineteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Kafka on the soft war:

An acquaintance comes and speaks to me. He makes the following statement: Some say this, but I say exactly the opposite. He cites the reasons for his opinions. I wonder. My hands lie in my trouser pockets as if they had been dropped there, and yet as relaxed as if I had only to turn my pockets inside out and they would quickly drop out again.

Only a few people are admitted at a time to the consulate, and since an Ivy League degree and my utter unconcern with the prospect of my death allow me to skate through even the most threatening situation, I prepare to sweep into the building.

The madness of the bureaucracy is most memorably documented in The Trial:

Without giving any answer to this offer, K. stood still for some time. Perhaps, if he opened the door of the next room or even the front door, the two of them would not dare to stand in his way, perhaps that would be the simplest way to settle the whole thing, by bringing it to a head. But maybe they would grab him, and if he were thrown down on the ground he would lose all the advantage he, in a certain respect, had over them. So he decided on the more certain solution, the way things would go in the natural course of events, and went back in his room without another word either from him or from the policemen.

As with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I often ask myself: Is it too much to ask that everyone get tumblrs and sort this thing out through reblogging?

Standing next to a grandma whose teeth chattered in the heat, two members of the Russian Mob emerged from an unmarked car. I trailed them. I then asked to go in front of them, as my task was small. They either didn't speak Ivy League English, or they were more afraid of me than I was of them. A general sweetness can accomplish what resistance on any level cannot.

That is unless you are one of Kafka's protagonists.

He wrote in 1922:

19 June. Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don't find yourself.

Heading to my office on Long Island through Queens, the constancy of marked difference between essentially similar things, that distinguishing feature of the capitalist landscape, is almost too much to take. If Kafka had lived where I live, he may not have survived it.

More and more I resist taking part. It is simpler to think of things axiomatically, expanding. A galaxy is a unit I can understand. It is a force to admire, envy, want to be. I identify singularly with massive explosions of energy, ongoing chemical need. To sit there and observe what unfolds is both to suffer and be suffered by. Only the sun, hanging low, scares me from bed.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=xK30k2WTxY0]

INFINITE MUSIC TO HAMMER THE WHOLE THING HOME

these images were taken with the hubble telescope, itself the shining excrement of bureaucracy

"Við spilum endalaust" - Sigur Ros (mp3)

"Góðan daginn" - Sigur Ros (mp3)

"Suð í eyrum" - Sigur Ros (mp3)

marry fuck kill go

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

This is what a feminist looks like.

What’s happening in Paris.

Fanny Howe brings space-time to your doorstep.

The Earth is suffocating… Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive

- Chopin’s last words

Suicide Colony

by Tess Lynch

Let me take you back in time to 2005. I was at Brown, in the miserable never-ending cold, with no good produce to eat and a thesis to write.

All I could think about was moving to Los Angeles, which I'd left with my parents shortly after my high school graduation (leaving fingernail marks on every graspable object on the way to the car); they'd moved to Connecticut, so my visits to L.A. to see my friends were always weird and brief, with lots of sleepovers at any acquaintance's house so I didn't outstay my welcome anywhere. I missed it BAD. My friend Allan, who had graduated the year before me, was my accomplice in spending all available time (time that was supposed to be spent doing papers, straight chillin', or being nostalgic for college, I suppose) apartment-hunting for the cross-country move in June.

Living here would have been a way better call.

I lived off-campus for a year in a really cute but intrinsically dumpy apartment in Providence -- I once heard a friend refer to our shared landlord as a "slumlord" because she, if I remember correctly, advised my friend that rats and roaches were "a part of life" - but I loved it.

The bathroom was in the hall, which provided a lot of fodder for locked-out-in-a-towel hilarity; the kitchen was falling apart; bits of plaster ended up in bed with you after falling, like snow, during the night. This is just how your first apartment should be. You love it anyway. It's like your first child who always winds up in jail but never forgets Mother's Day.

Personification of first apartment (left)

Personification of Archstone Studio City apartment. 'Cept he'd drive a really nice car.

So, anyway, I'm not above falling in love with a dumpy apartment.

L.A. has a different thing going on, though, than New England's dumpdom: everything's new, so the dilapidated one-bedroom you can find and totally crush on is charmless. Allan's reporting, with pictures and summaries of his findings, was not encouraging. Every economical one-person pad was really icky. Carpets with lingering stains, missing holes where dishwashers once were. We started to become connoisseurs of apartments, and it was at that point that Allan found Archstone.

I can't let this vague metaphor go.

When I went to see it with my folks after graduation, we walked into the snazzy lobby and saw this phenomenal model apartment. You could walk to Ralph's, you could walk to Starbucks, you were in the valley but it was okay because there was a POOL and CENTRAL AIR and you could wash the valley smog off your clothes in your very own in-unit washer-dryer.

It didn't seem like Hannibal Lecter, it seemed like a mammoth wet dream involving Jude Law covered in diamonds and offering to launder your towels while you sat in pajamas on your sweet-ass balcony sipping mojitos made in your giant kitchen.

My mom and dad loved the 24-hour security (creepy music starts to play so you know that I am foreshadowing here) and the covered garage (dun-dun-dun-DUNNNNN), and we all played the fun "What will life be like when you are living above your means in this giant complex?" game for awhile, before they flew home and I began my lease.

Archstone Studio City, aka "Suicide Colony." I did not know this when I moved there.

Everything went fine for quite some time. A couple of months, in fact, passed totally uneventfully. I got locked out when I was hungover, and they rushed to my aid on a Sunday. My cat pissed on my pillow, but I can't blame Archstone for that.

And yet meanwhile, people were saying things on a website I was only to discover later; things about:

Thefts, attacks, drug deals, shootings and even rapes. There were also a couple of suicides during my time here too. I do not feel safe here.

And:

A week after moving in the former security guard killed himself in our laundry room!

Great security. Talked to other residents who told us the place was nicknamed suicide colony due to many incidents on the property.

Ooh, you can lease online. Goody.

My first indication that something was amiss was when a dude asked me in the elevator if I could supply him with some weed.

I had made a friend. A friend who would not go away.

Then, a few weeks later, a guy (let's call him Dave, I don't want to be sued) who lived across the way befriended me and I told him about my new frequent visitor.

"Be careful," he advised ominously, before disappearing downstairs to use the jacuzzi.

"Whateverrrr," I thought, but started deadbolting my door.

In February, I was relaxing with a carton of Camels on my balcony when a strangely decorated man (tattoos (on his face?), funky beard, crazy-eye) called down to me from the floor above, which was outdoors and gave a clear view of my delicious cigarettes.

"Hey, can I bum a smoke?" he asked, and I'm such a dumbass that I said, "Of course, come on down."

Smoke these, woman!

I didn't expect to be inviting him in, so I brought a cigarette to the door. He waltzed inside and straight out to my balcony, where he made himself comfy and lit the cig off his finger-flame (I jest...perhaps).

I freaked out, so I listened to him with all the politeness of a pale, indoorsy child facing a herd of wild beasts.

"Oh, yeah, I used to live here," he said, which was weird, because I'd assumed he DID live there. "Sure, used to live here with a woman, she lived right across the way." Weighty pause. "Now I live in my boat. But I'm here a lot, just sort of crashing on floors. I miss it here. I loved it."

I asked him why he left, and the dark clouds descended over the pool and started to rain kittens and vampire bats.

"Well," he said, stroking his beard, "everyone here thought I killed that girl, so technically I'm not allowed here." (n.b., this was before the murder that apparently occurred there after I left?)

At this moment, my friend Dave came out on his balcony, saw me sitting with the mayor of creepytown, and disappeared back into his apartment, drawing the blinds. I could almost hear him bolt his door. The guy on my balcony went on for some time about his boat, and then exited.

Dave met me by the elevators later that day. "Hey, I saw you with that guy," he said. I nodded. "That guy killed a girl," he said, in minor keys. "He killed her, and they couldn't prove it, but we all think he did. I mean we know he did. HE DID."

"AHH!" I said.

"He's going to come back to see you. Don't let him in. Call the police if he comes back."

"AHHH!" I said. I went downstairs and told security what had happened, and they pretty much freaked out and told me to call the cops if I saw him again.

Which I did, less than a week later, bearing gifts (or maybe a tightly rolled sleeping bag so he could live on my floor before murdering me in my sleep); I had to pad slowly away from the door in my socks, grasping madly for the portable phone to call the police (which I did, and they chased him off the property; however, I understand he stood across the street, watching the apartment menacingly for an hour or so, which is what villains do anyway so not at all surprising).

That was the last of him, unless those "suicides" the reviewers talk about were actually murdercides.

"Four Women" - Nina Simone (mp3)

"Mississippi Goddam" - Nina Simone (mp3)

"I Put a Spell on You" - Nina Simone (mp3)

The next incident was no less terrifying, in its way.

My boyfriend parked his car in someone else's spot while he unloaded groceries, which everyone knows was maybe the wrong decision, but didn't seem like a big deal at the time.

By the time he got into the garage to move it five minutes later, there was a dude pulling off his hood ornament and throwing trash onto the hood of the car. Peter apologized and no fisticuffs were had; we assumed the incident was over.

The next morning we walked down to his car, presumably to drive it somewhere, and there it was: two distinct marks of baby batter. That's right: even if you think you wouldn't recognize jizz for what it izz, you will when it's decorating your ancient Mercedes.

It was a sublime act of revenge, so chapeaux, gentlemen. At the same time, so cruel and foul.

Hey betch, let's make it on that car. Twice.

Please excuse/the blues we splooged/on your '83 Diesel/we knew it was evil.

The final straw, for me, was in March.

The splooge had dried, no murderers were coming by for smoky treats, no men treating me like their own Nancy Botwin.

Everything was eerily calm, and because I now know that life is exactly like a horror movie, this should have kept me on the edge of my seat. I suspected nothing, though, as I naively hummed and opened up the door to my newish Volkswagen and got in; nothing, that is, until the canvas roof of my convertible breathed a huge sigh, and I realized it had been slashed with a razor.

Its cotton batting innards spilled into my car and I screamed, at first with terror and then anger that they had not at least stolen my radio so I could get a new radio from insurance, maybe even a better radio.

Escaping with your life = happy inflatable jumpy party toy.

Some dude in the garage heard my shriek and came over, smug. "Oh, so it happened to you, too," he chuckled. "It's nice to know I'm not the only one."

He explained that he'd had three new roofs on his BMW since he'd moved in (why didn't he move? I moved after one!), and was battling with the leasing department to get security cameras. He'd only lived there a year. I moved in May, and Allan was out by June.

Tess Lynch likes mayonnaise, hates murder. She is the contributing editor to This Recording. She now lives in Los Angeles, thank God.

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Taking the 3 a.m. train home.

Watching the neighbors get it on.

We have some latent anger, but hey, we're Virgos.