La Cuenta Grande

driving and singing and singing and singing (saved)

2010-03-21T12:25:00.001-07:00

(Re-publishing this now. It was taken down for some incredible, stupid, selfish reasons. It had nothing to do with Salinger - but it had everything to do with everything else. Viz. life)

The trip is over. It was finished about two months ago. The same time, my father died. Today, instead of poems and Millers, I am feeling my heart crush under things such as law school and communications and the future. I was in the boat in the middle of the Baltic sea when I saw my ghost. I told you about her, the black haired French woman. Well I saw her today and she walked by me without saying anything: no moans, no smoke, no nothing. I feel abandoned by myself. The big bang, the big trip is over. Is over.

The trip is over, might as well come out and say it. And this blog has been a complete failure. [edit- delete]. I am driving into the firey pits of the Mississippi and the purple and yellow smoke, and the purple and yellow smo...

I was walking today and there was one hawk flying high above the tennis courts, and then there was another hawk, and the two predators they danced and loved each other, even as they were awe-shaking and terrible from below - and I thought of my first love, a girl I loved very much, and I thought of this eagle that flew me across the country once - not literally of course - but I saw an eagle and then I knew it, I had to leave. And then I saw a frozen eagle in the Indian chief's freezer, stored and kept with the hamburger ...

And even today! Today I told you: I decided to become a) a lawyer b) an English prof and c) a poet. And I became very, very angry that life is like this. That life is hard.

And so let me please finish this blog with a little bit of dignity. And perhaps with a promise and a request.

But first a note, one more, just one more, of observation. I will never be happy unless I can manage to forget my ego. But until then, I will firmly believe, that the only suitable thing to do in life is change people (with your art, with your science, with your law, with your bare, bleeding hands). I believe that change is the important thing.

And yet souls are stone, are diamonds. The most hard, awful things in the world, the most stubborn, are souls. And so art must be tough, and must be tougher. This is my aesthetic anyhow, and it is the reason I feel such a let down; for I am a softy.

I know that I won't be sharp enough with out a good chance to practice, and yet I just waste I waste I waste: (for proof, read the last three or four entries. For proof read anything from me. I do not focus. I need focus).

This whole thing has been the diary of an egomaniac.

***

One more thing about my beautiful dad.

When I was in Grade 5, I came home from school, and out on the lawn he had collected about 6 large sofas, 3 of those old-time oversized radio-recordplayer combos, and a random and vast collection of junk.

I first saw all of this from about two blocks away, as I was getting off my school bus. For the next minute, walking to my front door, I had burst into tears: Dad was really losing it. There was no more denying it.

There was another time, and it is very likely that it was the same day or week of the mad sofa collecting, but there was one day where I came home and when I got to the basement, there Dad had assembled another mad, manic collection of stuff. This time, however, Dad bought about three guitars - one of them was a black and white Fender Squire Strat, and the other two were sort of Epiphones, shaped like violins - and about four large, silver-screened and black amplifiers. All this wonderful, strange and alien equipment had been plugged in. And later that night, maybe it was a Friday, Dad had his buddies over and they were smoking weed and drinking whiskey.

And he gave me the Fender, and I plugged it into one of the big amps, and played my first guitar for the first time.

(Now, this part is distracting, however it happened so let me get it out of the way: the amp was not grounded, and was wired all wrong - Dad had bought a junk heap - and within a few seconds a current of electricity was shot from amp, to guitar strings, to my tiny little fingers, and I was fried for about 3 seconds, unable to move in what seemed like an eterinty of intense, horrible and dull pain).

And just this last week I opened up the crazy play that had occupied my father's last 10 years of his life: from writing it in his most manic, gambling fueled rampages, to selling it and republishing it later while he was melting away in a retirement home. The page I opened it to had a stage direction at this crucial part of the play - which is a kind of an epic Rock opera starring Mick Jagger - that Toby, me, and Paul, an old band buddy, would play their "Blues Dues song."

Now I haven't really cried all that much since he's dead, but this got to me.

Last night I dreamt of Dad and he could drive, and he could drive and smoke at the same time, and we cruised down a highway in his classic old sports car - which he destroyed in the bad years - and he was smacking the steering wheel singing along, and I could sing with him. And I could hear him playing guitar as we drove, perfectly, just powerful, unlike anything he could ever do in sickness. And we just drove down the road, full speed, with the windows down, enjoying life, singing and singing and singing.

Interlude: Second Letter and Brief Sketch of the Girl.

2010-02-05T23:07:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Salinger,

I am so lonely. There is a south facing window in my bedroom and the air comes in and it feels cold. I have never felt so terrible in all my life. I wanted to begin my letter differently, but these are simply the compelling things on my mind right now.

What does it take to do complex, beautiful things? You have lived a a strange dissected life and the little I know of it only makes me lonelier and more depressed. I've always wanted to be a journalist, and to tell stories as you do. I wonder if I am foolish to want a man's life who seems so angry and alone. Even more foolish of me - I imagine I would feel better if I did. What is writing but the desire to be elsewhere - that thing which doesn't exist.

You should know I realize how spoiled I must sound. Or would sound if you knew the facts. I do have great parents, and two unspeakably intelligent and beautiful sibilings. I have been many places and experienced so much genius that others can barely believe I am only seventeen years old. But it's there. This terrible loneliness, repeating itself - even in times when I feel simply whole and happy. And there are many of those times too.

There were 34 letters between Valentina and Salinger. At first I found it impossible to write as her. After some time, this became easier. Since history is everything, I gave her history. Too much of it sometimes. I envisioned her lovers, her terrors, her questioning. This part was exhausting, but she gave me everything in return. His words, his attention.

I grew up in a small town, and was lucky to escape with a few good books in my head. She grew up in Paris and played the piano. Her parents were magicians and musicians - mine: teachers, gamblers, maniacs. She knew more of the Giants of Modernism than I ever will. She spoke wildly of art, philosophy, science. I simply craved, desperately, to cope with art - to be large, to be friend and confidant to the one giant who still lived. I was a Gollum and thirsty for what ever. Valentina was only strong, not afraid of men or change.

Each week, Valentina sent a new letter, sealed every time in a bright red envelope. Each letter composed by hand, with enormous effort, in the most loopy, girlish style I could. That part was exhausting, too.

It took ten weeks to get Salinger to respond.

"Dear Mr. Salinger," began the tenth letter, as did the others before and after. "In less than one week I shall graduate from school. I am writing for your advice this time."

***

I am publishing this now because I am feeling hostile. This story has not evolved in nearly two months now and I feel as if if I don't set some things down it might just evaporate. This is not how I pictured you receiving any of this story. It feels atrophic but necessary to go on this way. I have no patience or time.

My promise: More letters soon and an ending, eventually.

I was the last person who interviewed Salinger: Part 1

2010-01-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

Salinger is dead. He mattered most to people like me - young American men, who recommend books to girls they want to impress. But he was a master, whose passing everyone should mourn. He changed the poetry of American short stories - the rhythm of everything we read. He invented italics and emphasis. He ruled dialogue and detail.

He was, for the last forty years, a recluse. We know little about his work since he went into open hiding. The hope I have - and I am sure thousands of others also - is that he really did continue to write and that we will one day, soon, see what he's been creating.

My advice for everyone: read Catcher in the Rye again. Read his short stories. Read Franny and Zooey. These books change you more than any other fiction I know. This sounds silly, pretentious - and I am sure will draw scoffs and loathing. But trust me - I am no Salinger absolutist. His work isn't perfect. I hate much of it, most of the time. But there's something in it - magic - and it is powerful. It is sad, and wonderful and huge.

Just after my dad died, last summer, I began writing to JD Salinger. I am not sure if this was missplaced longing for the mysterious artist man in my life I had just lost, or some striking new ambition which I knew I needed to chase. But it sure felt like destiny. For weeks, I tortured over how to write the first letter. I had hundreds of drafts and ideas. And nothing felt like anything he'd want to read.

Ultimately I came up with a crazy idea. Anyone who reads JD's work knows he's into little girls. This is undeniable. (Up for debate is whether this desire is sexual, or simply envy and adoration of innocence. That the young women he displays so affectionately - seductively - are icons of his longing for things lost).

I became consumed with this idea, and I convinced myself the only way to reach him was to exploit Salinger's dark side.

I began writing him love letters under guise of a young Italian-American girl named Valentina. Raven haired, tall and clumsy, precocious. She was the archetype Salinger Doll. To him, I sent her love, her wonder, her guessing games.

"Dear Mr. Salinger - thank you for your lovely letter. I have told my mother about my penpal and she is very curious about you. I shall never tell her the stupendous truth of course - it would not seem right to give you away. Not just yet, anyway. [...] By the way, I was curious the other night: What exactly is a bananafish? [...]"

And months later, this last fall, I received a letter from Salinger and his legal handlers. A stamped-envelope from a Manhattan legal firm, addressed to my Valentina. An invitation to come visit him in Cornish, N.H. His home, "to meet each other and chat."

I don't want to spend much more words here, or time. I am presently producing the documentary of my trip to meet Salinger. I brought with me two cameras, a 1st edition Catcher in the Rye and a friend of mine - a 20-something Jewish girl, who was tall and petite enough to pass as the Valentina, and I met the man who no one else could in nearly half a decade.

I want to say simply that I feel awful for the deceit, that I have no feelings of pride or happiness about my conquest. And I fear with a tender, submerged heart, that as Salinger faded away this morning, the last words escaping from his broken-hearted lips were whispers. "Valentina. Valentina."

R.I.P

- Tobin Dalrymple

To be continued

Go moan for man

2009-07-21T20:12:00.001-07:00

Paris, latin quarter, June 2009.

A small, peach-shaped fist crashing into the keys of an old, chipped piano. This is how the story begins: Clang clang clang.

Valentina is sitting at the old upright Steinway. Eyes closed and humming along with the imaginary melodies, dancing with her mind like children, as the hands they react violently and inept, at what ever violence is felt in not-knowing the right chords, and all of that.

She is wearing nothing but a cigarette in her sharp soft mouth, and I am sleeping, or was just, as the morning sun is striking the catapulted dots of dust and ash that fly and escape the piano's cold vibrating wood and the tin, cold ashtray.

On the floor is a collection of poems - half of them handwritten, half ripped from anthologies, with underlined passages and enthusiastic, blue ink - a wine bottle, red and drained to its syrupy, ash-laden botton - books, paper back Millers and Doestoevskies - and scattered remains of the violence and fucking, love making, from nights before: a pair of scissors, bloodied from when the police came and nearly arrested us both, used condoms and rappers, three packs of cigarettes, Marlboro Gold.

Here I am, here, here I am, clang, her tiny fruit shaped hands proclaim, hands which I know smell like cigarettes and perfume and semen and her pussy; and I rub my head and block out the sun, and I can smell her on my hands too: "Good morning, Bella, good evening," cigarettes and her sex. And my throat is sore, so I stay silent waiting for a response, which I will not receive.

And she is whistling an opera, and laughing like a child in between, whistle and laugh, rage and laughter and whistling. The neighbours will soon start up, it is Sunday.

I take some easy first exploratory steps, and the wood floor feels cold against my feet. The sunlight fills the room after I draw wide the heavy tweed curtains, which had hung half closed, and now that I am at the window I light a cigarette and run my fingers along my chest and yawning I examine the street below. Two ladies are sitting with a lap dog each and they are smoking, sitting at a table of the cafe, on the patio stones.

Over to the piano, as I walk Valentina is still barking, but I see her now and she is lit like gold, and her breasts glow softly and she is exactly, exactly beautiful; "Do you have to do this?" I ask, not thinking, sitting next to her on the wooden bench. I rest a hand on her shoulder but she puffs and with rage she smacks my hand away.

"Fuck you, you pig." And her blue eyes seem grey and are wide with rage. And she plays louder, and smacks down each fist in long extended stone webs, burstingly. And the neighbours have now started shouting something from above, but it is muffled and impossible to understand. And outside the dogs start to bark.

Suddenly she halts completely. She now just rests there, head over her own breasts, hands perched on keys, ready to strike, but calm and gentle, like ten lionesses, her fingers.

Just as I am about to start to play the piano myself, I think better of it and stand up, putting on my jeans. "I am making coffee, do you want some?"

"No. Yes. I will need more cigarettes."

"And you want me to get them?"

She says yes.

tic

2009-06-28T19:00:00.001-07:00

The last thing I wrote about had something to do with a piano teacher and a little girl, the same little girl in Paris who I saw catching sparrows with tiny shoe-lace nooses.

The piano teacher falls in love - sort of - with his little student, mainly because she is a genius on the keys, delicate and sad and inpiring. But also, it should be said, because he is despicable and lonely, and although very handsome, he is aged, widowed and peniless.

The affair begins with a postcard he sends to her ( a post card I really found in a garage sale up in Montmartre). He is always calling her 'his little friend' and with each lesson they have he falls madder and madder in love - wreslting all night with images of her perfect piano playing, her hands on the keys, etc and so on.

One day she kisses him on the cheek just as her mother picks her up from the lesson.

And then I was thinking of pretty much ending the story right there.

(However there's a chance that somethign entriely differnet would happen - ill explain in a second - but it's a little fantastical and I don't much know what kind of stuff I would rather be writing: little empty vignettes, saying nothing really; or obvious little stories saying something, but not much.

He would, after the little kiss, stay up all night feverishly writing a beautiful beautiful piece. He would play mad and marvelously. And since he used to be a prodigy himself, it would be as if he were young again, and life was good again, and all the right music, it just comes to him, and through him, like a sieve of light - no a sieve for light. Playing piano like how he used to - before years and marriage and death and life drained him and his talent of potential or success.

Anyway, he stays up all night and the next day, he keeps on playing the piano. He just can't stop. He goes all through the weekend, day and night. Only pausing to scribble some notes, have a cigarette, or a coffee. Complete mania - but really really genius, extravagant mania.

The little girl comes back the next week for her lesson; and he is no longer - he discovers, with only slight surprise - at all inspired or touched by her presence. In fact, he can't even stand to listen to her play anymore. Before the lesson is over, she is kicked out,, crying and even admiting she adores him, begging for him to not be so cruel, but the piano teacher - unwashed, unshaven, but crazy happy - - sits down to continue with his work.

A few hours later, as the sun is setting, outside on the street two neighbours talk between eachother. They have been out on their front lawns, maybe watering the garden, or washing their cars or something, and they start to chat. They can hear him playing, the sweet and sad and wonderful melodies coming through the windows, and they say just how beautiful it all sounds.

***

This is more the kind of thing I want to be doing here . I cringe that I made a promise to end a stupid wornout travel blog in a four-parter, and I am only halfway done.

I am drinking scotch and recently I thought of an old friend and some older, deader, poet friends (who(m?) I never met).

The next two parts will come soon to the conclusion. But I can tell you right now they are entirely fictional.

There's the two weeks I will spend living in a Paris hotel with a girl I met in a hostel. I can't see that being too interestign or beautiful, however, I just really want to try out a scene or two and see how that goes. (I will probably throw in a few scenes from Buenos Aires too. There was a few things - again that never really happenned - that I've been dying to tell you all about.

And the final part is going to be a gigantic explosion of fireworks and will be limited by words but not by emotion or vision. It's going to mean absolutely nothing to me, except for the fact that it's all over and time to find a new place to get really excited about. By place I mean this website stuff. I've told a few of my friends how important it is to me to write online; otherwise I can't write at all anymore. I think perhaps if I got a typewriter . . .

that's enough for now.

this wasn't anything.

Part Two: how I became a kid pushing his own stroller

2009-06-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

. . . and so, there I was, in Helsinki, surrounded by five, maybe six, beautiful, blonde Finnish girls."

At a backyard party in Toronto, with about 30 local hipsters, and fresh off a plane from Paris, I am speaking to an exgirlfriend, telling her this story.

"Uh uh," she says, smoking with arms crossed, one hand extended to her lips, her eyes scanning everywhere, in flits.

"I mean really fucking beautiful," I say, I go on. "Can't really even believe it, you know. Oh! And they are all, like, 18! 18 years old, anyway ..."

"Right... um hmm, figures," she jokes, briefly making eye contact, discerning, scrunchy eyes, understanding and emmitting a sense of history, there.

"And so ... well I was with them because there was no fucking way I was going to spend my last night in Helsinki smoking and drinking gin and tonics, you know, just watching these people in these horrible clubs, so I went up to a few girls and we started talking. Next thing I know there's five of them, and it's one of the girls' birthday's, and before you know it I'm acting like I know this one Finnish MTV host, and since I speak English, I go up to him and we start to talk, and I like become an immediate hero..."

"Right, amazing, umm, do you want one of these?" Handing me a cigarette; three or four noisy people around us, and just as many conversations.

"And we are all having an amazing time now. And we're walking towards this kareoke club which they all know, and really want to go to, and then all of a sudden a guy comes down the street, racing down this cobble stone-paved hill, and I don't see it, but you hear a big like thump, and then a smack. And there's a crowd of people around him. . . "

She's not really listening.

"... and so when I get closer, we see he's laying there in the pavement, and not moving, and there's this line of blood coming from his head, trickling down through the cobble stone street. And he is fucking dead."

"What! He dies?"

"Yeah he dies... for a while he kind of opened his yes I guess, but then he just fucking faded, and people were freaking out, calling the cops, and everything."

"That is so awful. This is an awful awful story."

"It was horrible. It was horrible but wait," she doesn't seem to want to hear more. "There's somethign so beautiful about to happen . . . it seemed like minutes later, but his girlfriend comes riding up from behind, and she just jumps off her bike and lets it go riding away down the street, and she gets down in the street, getting his blood all over her, and she just weeps and holds his head in her hands."

"That is awful awful, I don't like this story."

"Wait wait wait. It get's better."

***

After we left the crowd, it was about 11 p.m. and the sun was casting a weird grey-blue haze, like cloudy daytime, across the city. We have already forgotten about the dead man, mostly, and we are drinking and shouting and making jokes in the mostly empty streets.

We arrive at the kareoke bar and it is fantastic. I don't remember all the names, but something like Annie, Neah, Kay, sort of simple and pseudo-biblical I guess. A very kind man is pleased to meet me at the bar and we talk about Toronto for a little bit. He's shy and dressed all in black, and sweaty, and going bald already, although I would say he's just only 24. I buy him a beer and shake his hand and wish him a nice night. He's fantasticaly excited and hugs me and buys me a shot before I leave the bar to join my lady friends.

The joy and laughter we experience, I mostly just watching, after we all sit down and the performances start. . . it's like I'm at the centre of that giant spinning thing the poets talk about, a giant spinning wheel or world (or whirl), where people are laughing and the "bolts they coming loose;" it's that phenomenal sense of rebellion in the face of chaos, the little but divine thing it is to be happy in such a world, falling apart for ever.

This foggy vision I have, of the whole room spinning, there's a clown on the stage, barely singing to the Finnish rock song, and his friends are watching and cheering; and the birthday girl (Julia?), she has black hair - the only one - and black eyes, and a truly cherubic but electric glow, like bacchus baby angels, drinking, and all our feet tangled together in some astounding, joyous knot.

On the dance floor there's this one model-looking short-skirt girl. Tall, beautiful, and dancing with her ugly girl friend. I'm not sure exactly, I know I wasn't trying any pick up lines, but all of a sudden she is yelling at me, and telling me to "just fucking go! Just go."

I decide to stick around, since I'm insulted she would think that I was beign some creep, when really I was just trying to have a good time, and dance a bit, to ride this feeling of joy I had. But she's insistent, and obviously getting very upset with me.

"Look, your not that hot," I say to her, trying to imply my non-interest.

"Yes I am, you fuckign asshole. Fuck. Just leave!"

I tell her I plan on using the dancefloor, too, and indicate with a circle motion around me the area I plan on staying, but she doesn't relent, and finally (I was wonderign what was taking so long), her male friend, or boyfriend - a thin, but wiry, finn - comes up to me: look, I better just fucking leave right now, no problems, or else there's going to be fuckign serious problems.

I tell him to fuck him self and he, with one fast, hulk-like swing, punches me in the gut. As I'm stepping back a bit, wondering in some confusion what to do, my little bald friend materializes from behind, like some guardian gargoyle. He has flung him self on my attackers back, biting his neck, I can see the blood drip from his teeth, as he wails and scratches on the guy's kidneys with his fists. The brute falls to the floor, and my balding friend is now kicking his face in, looking up at me and smiling, through a giant, bloody grin.

***

I can't remember her name. She was one of the five Finns and she walked me nearly all the way home. The sun by this time was out in full, but it was four a.m., and we were both very drunk. I left her when we got to the dock yard, deciding not to kiss her goodnight, and walked away without looking back.

I looked with affection at all the tall ships, quietly rocking, and all the rusted old ice breakers, as I walked along the catwalk of the old city marina, headed back to spend my last night on the sail boat.

This sail boat was supposed to take me through the Baltic - we know. But I am walking and wondering and wondering. And the ships are so slowly rocking and it is all so peaceful and wonderful wonderful. In my pocket is a ferry ticket and the next day I was supposed to board a ship and head to Tallinn, and then to Riga.

Suddenly it strikes me I have no interest in going to either of these places. It strikes me like a church bell breaking the quiet of an early morning.

All of a sudden I am sure that there's one place I should go to. It is like a million tiny bells now, ringing inside of me, I am so excited, for this is the place I have meant to go to all along, and isn't so wonderful that I didn't even really plan on going there, that it was all some huge accident, all some quiet drunk walk home from a Helsinki kareoke bar? And the man who died. . . Isn't Paris, well, isn't that the best way to go ... not planning it ... and so in the rapture and laughter of a death and a kareoke bar, I called the airport and made a reservation for the next flight.

I stayed up for the next few hours, and hung around the dock yards to watch my ferry leave for Tallinn. I lifted my hat, since I was wearing an old beaten up traveler's hat, and saluted my ferry as it left me behind at the dock. And after some coffee and some jam pastries near the fish markets, I stumbled onto a plane, and left.

...

2009-06-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

...

leaving the kareoke bar with four finnish girls, we heard a loud crack

Helsinki night club

2009-06-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Throughout this four-part conclusion to the Cuenta, I will be telling you a few nice little vignettes, little gem stories that are very shiny and heartbreaking. But I want you all to know, that I will really be writing about something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with Helsinki, or a boat, or leather jackets, or France.

And while I could let you all guess what that something else is, I would rather just come right out and say it: I will be writing about how I became a chaser of metaphysical butterflies, little creatures fluttering always out of reach, playing keep-away with their own heavenly, euphoric bodies. (I hear eating moths is poisonous, but it seems justifiable to assume eating butterflies is magic, like encountering and eating god … if only we could eat metaphysical butterflies!)

Chasing these beautiful creatures is always romantic and risky, and leaves one, inevitably, exhausted. There are butterfly catchers and chasers, and so far, I am just a chaser.

It might help, too, to let you know that I am writing you about this romantic sport, tacitly, from the third-floor balcony of the Hotel Caulaincourt in Paris, which is a block away from where thousands of drunks, tourists and lovers (all of whom are, I think, butterfly watchers), gather at night on weekends to see the city twinkle and the Eiffel tower effervesce – which it does every so often. I have a little round wooden table, which faces the window, and on the table I have propped up a small canvas oil painting by Gauguin, called “femmes aux mangues”, and it is Sunday. I have also three cans of Heineken, and just met my new roommate, who says he comes from Istanbul but is a student in Portugal. When I want to smoke I lean out the window and I can see the lovers walking up and down the steep and long series of stone steps, hugging Montmartre.

I also want you careful readers, and especially the very careful readers – the ones who love me – to know, that while most of what I am about to tell you is true, there are some lies – rather big lies – that I am about to effect. Sometimes I will make it clear that I am lying – inventing – and sometimes I will not, and will allow the deceit to live and grow inside your heads with dignity.

The thing is, however, the lies are essential. It is impossible to catch butterflies with a net built by Descartes. Metaphysical butterfly nets are not woven in square-like predictable patterns, with horizontal and vertical axes of cotton thread; they are dances of the loom. Drunken ladies of shalott, from their medieval towers, they weave these nets, from the blossoming, shrieking nature they wantonly ingest, from those shiny, legendary mirrors.

There was a precedent I wanted to set before ending this blog, and I lusted for a defiant, greedy success with the papillions. But I have only just started using my mazy net, and am now headed back “home.” Home, home, home.

Home: written under erasure. Home. (In a recent entry in my journal, I lost all connection to the meaning of the word. As I wrote in a frenzy from the steps of the Sacre Coeur Basilica, as the stars of the city fluttered around my head, I referred several times, by accident, to Buenos Aires and Argentina as my “home”, which, taken as Freud would have, is an incredible, joy-tweaking thing to watch happen . . . It’s strange how I wrote that, just now, “watch happen”, watch me, myself, write, as I watched myself write about home, about my home, me. )

As I was saying, I am headed back to Canada. My flight is tomorrow, and I have only just begun . . . and well, we will get to this part again, a little closer to the finish line, but for now let’s move on with the program.

I wanted to start by telling you about Helsinki … however, I have just come from a little stroll down Caullaincours and the simplest things were beautiful. Some shiny green gems, to be polished, like the two men with lapdogs, eating at the café terrace in the court yard. Or the two other middle aged men, well dressed, outside a very busy bistro, laughing as one of the men fished a lighter out of his glass, laughing as he sucks the wine off the orange plastic lighter. Or the little child, with blonde hair in pony tails, a little girl in an orange and purple flower dress, skipping along the grassy part of the boulevard, lassoing sparrows with a shoe lace noose, as an old clochard watches in amazement from his pile of newspapers. The little girl hopping along, with three or four black sparrows like kites on the end of short white strings, and the drunk smoking, and drinking, and disbelieving, smiling toothlessly.

But no. I wanted to tell you about Helsinki, there was a good reason for it. So I will and I should start now, as the sun dips and the tides, somewhere, spring.

(to be continued)

child in the street pushing his own stroller

2009-06-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

I feel like a kid in the street pushing his OWN stroller

I am a sieve of light; no I am a sieve FOR light;

as I told my closest friend, ANC2 = I was waiting to tell you all where I was in a very well though out way (I must say I am hurt, or bruised; that no one has asked in a week) I have made a video where there i am with a clean shaved face about 2 feet from the camera, obscuring the land mark behind me)

i was supposed to write the prologue to the end = i should tell you all right now that this is the end of la cuenta grande, but its a four parter

heres what the last four stories are going to be, they will all be written very soon; then thats it for this blog;

1) Helsinki kareoke bar and cigarettes in Chile

2) the Jacket part 2: a fantastic adventure and broken love story

3) the million twinkling lights of a certain pyramid shaped tower and children on the street pushing their own strollers

4) how it is that I became a sieve of light; a conclusion with photos and a wedding

stay tuned

FROM THE ARCHIVES: City lights

2009-06-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

"When you come right down to it," Gregorovius said, "Paris is one big metaphor."

Martini Bar

I'll start simply enough. With the date and the time. It is early May in Buenos Aires, and the autumn air is strange and satisfactorily alien. I am in a filthy, neon-lit alley in the Once, and here it looks to me, momentarily, like Paris — only a suffocating Paris where the stone buildings collapse and gasp for air as the black iron street lamps tilt and screech; the whizzing, puffing cars vanish in clouds of dust, the cobble stone alley ways keel over like sinking Titantics. You are struck, paralyzed, as you perceive some invisible god tightening a massive belt around the entire stone built city, which any second now is going to give. But the well dressed people, smelling like perfume, seem to breath amid all this shrinking, and head to the theatre, or are leaving, and going to drink coffee in crowded, midnight cafes. All these druplets, all the city, materialize through brown-grey oil slashes of some mad painter's sure hand, perhaps.

I'm heading to see a friend's play, and I have one hour until the curtains are drawn. As I cross busy streets, I'm in a mad search for the right place to get tight. With only a few days left in this city, I should squeeze out all the glory-filled moments, real story-worthy stuff, that fills the books of all the men who have made cities dissapear, replacing them in twinkling lights and — now I see it — mystic shadows.

There's a green-lit neon sign which says Martini bar, in curvy '50s font, and reading the menu posted on the glass and bronze door, it seems just cheap enough to sit in. I sit down and take a seat facing the window, waving the menu away as the waiter approaches, "un martini, por favor, con hielo," I say. He walks off and shouts out to the bar man the drink order. I get up and head to the back of the house and use the toilet. By the time I get back, the drink is there, and the waiter is plopping two ice cubes into the tall glass they made it in. He sets down a bottle of seltzer next to the glass and steps back as I take my seat.

Already, I am feeling a hell of a lot better. A kind of wonder washes over me. With a displaced nostalgia for golden days, I watch my waiter as he walks about to another table taking an order. The most striking thing about him — and the two other waiters in the place — is what they are wearing. They wear black bow ties over these perfect old tuxedo shirts, faded and yellow, impossible to call white, yet still, undeniably white, somehow. Advertizements aged in storefront windows — or, wait— the exact colour of sun bleached newspaper.

With great, inexplicably deep enjoyment I observe my man wipe counters with a dirty, navy blue rag. When he's not busy he stands next to me, straight up glowing with pride, about one metre away, hapilly looking towards the front of the house. He whistles, maybe, a little tiny bit. I scan his clothes. As I play with the seltzer bottle and stir the ice, the night begins to glow and I see hundreds of beautiful twinkling lights forming in my mind.

I order one more, this time with olives. I slam it down and enter the air again, wide open this time and full of warmth. I stroll to the theatre and I am 20 minutes early, damn. I order a beer and sit on the patio, smoke and speak to the theatre owner's wife.

Bailor, call me.

2009-06-03T16:23:00.001-07:00

It is not supposed to be this way; it is supposed to be this way. This is the way it is.

My close friend Anais Nin II C discovered last night a little pin - I imagine red or blue or something primary and childish - plugged into a giant map somewhere in her parents house, it marks Helsinki.

She placed this pushpin there 9 years ago, knowing this is where I'd be the night she was back at her mom and dads rummaging through whatever it was, or doing whatever it was. The details, except for the one, are unimportant.

She sent me a telegram this morning, it arrived over the teletype on the ship: "Found you," so I am supposed to be here. This is where I am right now.

But this week I am leaving. I am all but 100 percent sure that my life is in danger here, on this ship, if I stay on this boat. I nearly died today. . . I will get to that part, a little later.

Or hell, might as well start right now: We have been sailing for two days straight. To be accurate we have sailed for about 7 hours total - perhaps less, probably less - and the rest of the time - due to weather, poor winds, or general apathy - we used the diesel motor to chop our way through the icy, still icy cold Baltic.

We truly left off after spending a night at a little resortish sort of island outside Stockholm. We had two friends with us, and so Pete made chicken fried rice as the beers were cooling in the dock waters.

This was a beautiful, very power-boat vacationy feeling. With the sun on our backs, a beautiful city scratched from our lists ( lists ... that sounds awful and red-faced touristy.... and any way, I would have stayed much longer ... really it was only a sort of flirt with the city - she kissed us and then left in a taxi, taking only our email address - jesus, what's wrong with me ... future writers - never use email in a sentence, it kills it - although teletype seems to work . . . )

Here is what I am trying to do. I will let you in on my formula for this post. I was hoping to shape the arc of narrative like the sun sets in the Baltic. A high beautiful sun will shine over Stockholm well into the afternoon, and will gradually sink, of course, reaching its nadir just above the horizon and it never truly sets... it remains above the surface, its glow does, and then starts up again.

I have drawn little pictures of this to outline little stories I am working on while here - they look like a bunch of overlapping small circles, drawn in messy pencil, flowing in one of those math patterns, whats that name again - like a U or the skull of a bull. So that's what I was going to do.

The apex obviously, the best times, were that day leaving Stockholm. With all the city's tease, the salty breeze and wide-open seas (oh god...). And the down, the putzer, well, that was nearly dying today only 100 metres from port in Helsinki.

Oh, yes, by the way: nearly died today in Helsinki.

Where to begin (clearly this deserves one of those traditional narrative arcs - it deserves a cup of tea, some cigarettes and two comfy seats. But as we are all here on blog world I am keeping it brief - I still need to sleep, talk to embassies of Soviet and Teutonic powers and then consume some Finnish art, food, people. (Consume people. Yes, OK for now).

The day after we left Sandhamn, that little gem resort place, the seas started up on us, but at first it looked like a good time to start sailing. We put on our life coats, and latched our selves to the ship and in a few minutes, Pete's got me lifting the sails. We are making good speed, about 5 knots, and I am feeling only slightly sick. Wow, the open sea, the dark grey mass and weight of cold, long, who knows - there's something there that your mind comes up against and can't help but be satisfied with: How simple everything looks, yet there's a real and figurative hidden power. As we know the sea is a tough enemy and I'd rather not fight it much, if I could avoit it.

I head in after I start getting too cold, and figure Ill learn more a little later. But being inside the boat, and with the waves picking up, the pressure dropping, the sickness starts to get me. Now, when I fist was leaving for this trip, I figured I'd be able to out mind-control this seasickness shit. But it is impossible, or at least , it was for me... I lay down for a bit, and every time we keel over to starboard, the side my bed's on, I see the ocean coming right for me through the window, a huge jump, a gigantic splash, water coming through an unsealed porthole in the roof, I am trying to sleep, and forget about this dizzy feeling, wearing all my rain gear and boots in bed... shivering. Pete comes in and tells me plans have changed. Gravely. I take the news.

The UHF and SATNAV is warning of ultra fast Gale Force winds where we had planned on docking for the night (about half way to Helsinki), so instead of risk it with the water hazards in a storm, the skip says we are gonna sail straight through the night. I tell him I don't think its a good idea, I won't be able to help watch, which I'll need to if we pull an all nighter. . . I just want the whole world to stop spinning, nauseous and desperate (the two are practicaly identical feelings) but Pete tells me in his Liverpudlian-Ringo accent "That's fine Tobin.. I happen to disagree..." He is the captain.

I get up in a while and vomit for a little bit, feel fine for a while and puke again. Sleep again. Around this point I do a night watch, and things are a bit blurry. I do remember one part before or after my watch, getting up and walking towards the upper deck where Pete was, standing there with his arms spread out. A stern grimace, very seaman like grimace, across his old grey and white face. His giant falses sticking out past his blueish lips like the bare bones of an old wreck through the sea.

"I noticed we were headed right for her, so I took some evasive actions, there," he says to me, without even looking my way, arm outstretched gesturing towards a ghost like, humungous cruize ship, towering above,lit up like a Titanic draped in Christmas lights. The image is startling and sublime, robotic and terrifying.

Another part of the spell-bound eve, of which I was surely not going to make it through, I remember vividly thinking of my notebook being destroyed in the wreck, and the words, the all-important words, would all evaporate into the cold black water like tiny swirls of blue smoke.

There was another point where I came back into the cabin after swalling four or five gravols, and I found a french woman sitting on the bed opposite mine, smoking long cigarettes... She was beautiful, of course, black hair, a white round brimmed hat, pale skin and red lipstick ... and I remember not being too shocked to see her, I just said "You know you arent supposed to smoke down here," and he she smiled, exhaling, extinguished one cigarette in an invisble ashtray and lit a new one. I went back to sleep.

*** There's one part I am leaving out. I'll get to it now.

Nearly dying might have been an over statement. But, what a pathetic way to perish, you'll see, after all that high danger and seamanship. Upon entering the city marina of Helsinki, Finland today, Peter was top side in the cockpit, away from the GPS stuff, and I was also on deck, preparing the lines for docking.

He must have missed, or dismissed the cardinal buoy to our west, which indicated the huge hazard lying only 1 metre beneath the surface. He yells Woah, and slows the ship, Whats the problem, I ask, and he tells me: "The depth boy, it went up for a second..."

I presume everything is OK, I guess he does too for he keeps going... SMASH, one giant bump, a few rolls, we have hit something, and hit it hard. We are immobile. We can see the port, the docks, only about 100 feet away - even closer is a bay of giant concrete dividers, which I imagine I could swim to, hopefully before catching hypothermia.

Last thing I want to do is jump in the water, but Pete is tellng me to prepare the life ratf. She's rocking back and forth, and I am running from Port to Starboard and back trying to level her out;

"Jesus christ motherfucker" Pete slams his fist, those sharkish teeth coming out.

We finally get it freed, and enter port, for some reason with our mison sail still flying, which docking difficult, and us look very very stupid. He tells me it feels like a wire is wound around his heart, squeezing it. I am very worried about this situation... before getting back on hard land, he tells me

"Well thats it, then, you be wanting to get out now, take care of you."

This is no good. A damaged ship and captain. No place to go and no will to go back home.

There is hope, that unhuman feeling, hope. And happiness, that boring, human feeling. Hapiness.

The sun has nearly sunk, and it rises.

Housekeeping in Sweden

2009-05-29T06:12:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, welcome back,

I have just arrived in Stockholm. From now on, you will see there's a Twitter feed on the right hand side, and I'll be using this for the rather mundane but important updates (i.e. I have just arrived in Stockholm. Or 'Im sailing into St Petersburg' etc)

Ill try and reserve blog posts for things more interesting, and really save up on the posts so each one is better than the last. I can't say I've been too thrilling a writer these last 2 weeks.

For new readers to this blog, there's some things you need to know.

I just spent 3 months in South America and then rushed home because of a family emergency.

I hate to think the first thing you'd read about me would be the last four posts which are all heavy and emotional, and frankly, probably only interesting to me.

So in order to maybe keep some new readers, if there are any out there, here are a few older posts you should read before plunging into the mires, if you choose to...

Sailor, Call me
http://gomoan.blogspot.com/2009/04/sailor-call-me.html

My oldest friends are all dead ( a day in palermo)
http://gomoan.blogspot.com/2009/04/my-oldest-friends-are-all-dead.html

Cuzco
http://gomoan.blogspot.com/2009/04/from-archives-cuzco.html

Last one

2009-05-27T22:41:00.000-07:00

A number of subjects, I find, I have become obsessed with on this blog. Perhaps obsessed is the wrong way to put it. Anyway - one of them is Miller, Henry Miller, and the other one I think is my Dad, and his death. In both cases, I decided at one point to never mention them again, at least just long enough to permit me to think about other things, to write about other things. But this self restriction right now, at 1:43 a.m. - the night before a plane will take me to other worlds - seems construct; seems wrong.

First off, maybe, because I have just received about three Miller books from a dear friend - her name is Anais Nin II C. Secondly, I really think most of you should read the speech I prepared for my father's wake.

These two thoughts seem like parallel lines thrown into the future, never meeting at any point (help me, what's that term), but they aren't. They are elbows. They are ensembles.

Here is the thing I wrote for dad, I wrote it on Blogger because I can't write on Word anymore.

Dad spent the last years of his life painting and telling stories. And although he painted much worse than Van Gogh, I always find it interesting to note how much these two men, Van Gogh and my dad, share in common. Both were middle-aged, sick men, long past the crest of life, when they started to paint. And they each lived in hospitals when they first took up the brush. I picture dad's eternally paint-covered clothes, caloused hands, and crazy manic thirst for expression, all guided by an illness of the mind and soul, and then I think of Van Gogh.

But if I was asked to really pick a comparison, more than anyone else, I would say Dad was a sort of Don Quijote. It was stories and dreams that became him these last years. He bent after windmills of riches and wealth, churned by the great winds of certain fame. Every single day this was him, the wise fool, the bumbling, innocent knight-errant. If it wasn't a coin collection or a rare antique postcard signed by George Washington, it was his close partnership with Bill Gates or his new book, an apolitical manifesto.

Of course it was clear to everyone that these must have been illusions, that dad lived in his dreams. Who knows just how far Andy deceived himself, but I think for the most part, he believed his own riddles because he had to, because he understood the power of stories and the pain of life. Andy was brave and smart and talented enough to carve out a hundred good stories and live a thousand lives. This was perhaps the most rigourous, enduring way he fought Parkinsons -- with fictions, with stories.

Now that he is gone, it is beautiful to see how precious Dad's stories have become, now that they are soberly, truly, finite and endowed with a kind of magic and symbolism.

Yesterday in the car on the way to Dad's home, my brother Andy was worried the nurses would have thrown out the scraps of paper which my dad always had scattered everywhere, on which he scribbled poems, prose and his ambivalent insights. But when we arrived, the place was pretty much spotless and these scraps were no where to be found – Andy was on his hands and knees, just looking for any random scrap of paper which had suddenly become priceless to him.

Dad’s bedroom in the nursing home is splattered from wall to wall with acrylic paint, crowded by canvases framed in impressive dark black and blue wood and gold and glass, and all over the place are paint-covered books, chairs, desk, and old poems he printed and painted over on heavy carton and photo paper.

We searched, somewhat desperately, for good poems, for his wonderful play, for presentable paintings, anything that we could use at this funeral to tell his story. You might have noticed on display, this one magical, beautiful painting, the one which is about 5 feet tall, a brightly coloured sort of abstract stone cavern.

Everyone in my family knows that Dad didn't paint this one - it was a family gift, from Joan O’doherty... But one day a few months ago, while a few of us were visiting dad, I was looking at this work which he had hanging on his wall, and I realized there was a new addition in the bottom left corner of the piece in red, messy paint. It was his signature.

"That's an A.J.D original," he told me. "Yep. One of my best." After some debate he admitted that perhaps Joan helped him chose the colours, or hold the brush, but nothing more. It was his own work, and he had the signature there to prove it.
(Hi Joan ... thank you for being with us today... )

After Andy died, I went out and bought a new digital voice recorder. I feel it is important to collect every single story about dad. I know it's impossible, but I regret never sitting down and really asking him about his own life. So I ask you all now, his friends and relatives, to come talk to me after if you want to share a story with me.

In his last days alive, Andy had us believing one last amazing, miraculous story. He was a very convincing man, and although his blood tests and diagnostics were severe and negative, the whole family felt he was going to fight and win this battle, like he had done some many times before. He even had some of the doctors convinced. When he was first admitted, Dr. Kortan told us with his sad eyes and a hand shake that our dad had days, maybe hours to live. There was no way to help.

The next day, we came back and Kortan had spent some time reading Andy's rather immense medical file. You could see it in Kortan’s eyes, a certain kind of intrigue I imagine doctor's must experience whenever they get a hold of a unique patient: Dad's medical history itself must read like a Shakespearian harmony of ups and downs. A damn good story and the doctors knew it.

And added to that, Dad seemed to be getting better. His eyes were open. He was talking again. He would scramble in his bed, ripping off his oxygen mask, shoving away spoons of water, declaring: "I drink like a normal person! I breath like a normal person!"

And suddenly we felt he was back. Dad was still sick, but perhaps not dying, not just yet. I haven't quite figured out why dad's stories and creativity, and the stories others have of him, seem so important now. Maybe it is just how every son feels after his dad dies.

But I have a feeling that we missed the point while he was still living. Somehow, all his stories, all his illusions, now seem truer than they did before. They seem true not because of fact or anything bookish, but because they have actually now become the story we tell when we talk about Andy. When we talk about the man he was.

I loved my father very much. He taught me about honesty, and responsibilty, and he inspired me to go to university, become a journalist and he gave me my first guitar. But his best gift to me, without any doubt, are his stories.
I love you Dad. Thank you.

Seymour Glass

2009-05-26T09:11:00.001-07:00

I have been sleeping awfully for the last week. I am not sure if it is anxiety or whatever. Anyway, I am leaving this Thursday to land in Stockholm a few days before my birthday. I will turn 24 on a boat or in Sweden somewhere.

Excited to be up with the sun each day, the misty salty air and the solitude and quiet. Excited somewhat for boredom and excitement at sea.

Not in the best shape for writing just yet - feeling sick and drowsy all the time - but wanted to get a little practice before I'm on a boat.

Here's a map of the Baltic, if you feel like reading about my adventures in these places, then keep coming to this blog.

I should somehow figure out how to post at least a few times per week, but still have no idea what kind of web access I'll have. This has never really been a photo blog but I suppose there will be some of those to put up too.

What a crazy ride so far. A lull this past week, and where's the energy to start again? I'm sure it will just come .

Jazz music

2009-05-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

Today I have been writing my father's obituary. He died yesterday in hospital quietly, fast, perhaps painlessly, but it was hard to tell. I am glad I was here, and my whole family was here — Evan, Andy, Mom — for him these last days. He wasn't alone. There's much more, there's been so many stories told this last week — so much laughter and tears — and there's more, so I am going out and buying a new tape recorder, and going listen and learn about dad. I will show you all what becomes of his stories, one day.

***

A draft —

Dalrymple, Dr. Andrew J. (a.k.a. Blue)

After a 17-year struggle with Parkinsons, Andy died May 12 with family at his side. A wonderfully smart, entertaining and difficult man, he lived an inspiring life. From homeless immigrant in Vancouver, to respected doctor of psychology, with a beautiful wife and three kids, and ultimately, a vanguard artist, it was a tremendous 57 years. When illness made his career impossible, he launched a new life, driven by a desire to create and express. A poet, playwright, experimental painter, novelist, entrepeneur and inventor, he is remembered most for his wisdom and humour, by Frances and their boys Andy, Evan, and Toby, and grandkids Jenna and Ian. Donations sent to Parkinsons Society of Canada. xxxx

***

how do you boil a life down - such a life, your father's - in a hundred-word death notice?

***

So call me sailor, again. I am leaving for Europe in a few weeks. He would have wanted that, he would have done it, too.

A crazy whisper —

2009-05-05T19:20:00.000-07:00

Me voy.

***

My father is about 57 years old and lying in a hospital bed somewhere in Toronto. Tomorrow afternoon I leave Buenos Aires to board a 12-hour flight — I am going home .

The last time we spoke, my father and I, it was exactly a week ago. This was the first time in nearly three months I heard his voice, as I didn't bother, or hardly even consider, calling him once throughout this journey.

We talked mostly of a silver dollar he lent me — or gave and then decided he wanted back when I visited him in the old age him he calls home, about a week before I flew to Peru.

"Hold onto this, and you'll never be broke," he said.

Later, thinking over these words, I realize it's a clever joke. So clever, I'm not entirely sure he means it the way I understand. "Hold on to this bit of old, valueless currency, and you'll always have at least one coin in your pocket."

Tonight as I packed I searched frantically for the coin, as I'd really like to present it to him when I show up.

***

There's so much I'd want to tell you about my dad. I feel so awful right now it's impossible to even start.

There's this one picture of the three brothers and him all dressed up in soccer gear beneath a tree in the small town we grew up. It's a beatiful sunny day in a park, the grass is green, the tree is in full bloom. Three of us stand in front of dad, in a triangular position, arms a kimbo. A little soccer team of four. Everyone in the family knows and loves this picture; we can refer to it vaguely as 'the photo' or perhaps 'the soccer picture' and I'm sure immediately we'd know what was being discussed.

It captures a light which my family has rarely beheld, which we have rarely known as a body, as a beautiful thing together. There's the three brothers: tiny little Toby with a mushroom cut, tiny Evan smirking fiendishly, and lanky, taller, but tiny Andy, fighting with me, I think, to share the space on the ball with his cleat ( I remember it took us some time to figure out who received the honour.) Dad looks young, happy. He's a doctor, with a beautiful wife and three beautiful, intelligent kids.

It was nearly 10 years later that Dad was diagnosed with Parkinsons. And soon after life for us all, and our mother, has been, well, everything this photo isn't. That's a trite and weak way to put it, but how else describe a thing that has engulfed me, us all, for so long, in such a dark, strenuous way, in less than a volume of words and chapters?

I think this photo must be just essentially ... I can't really say right now. I am sobbing just writing about it.

Anyway, the point is, last January the four of us - the boys - were together for a small, rare vacation in Miami. Somehow, someone asked the question: "Dad, what do you want us to with you when you die?"

He said: "scatter the ashes under that tree — from the photo."

***

I am sad to be leaving, but I'm at peace with it too.

I can write more on everything later. I am headed home to be with Dad. He is sick and in a hospital. Things were looking worse before; so things are improving. I know little because I am Argentina, and disconnected from that world.

I feel awful for writing about things so personal. I do not mean to profit of this awfulness, although I do get a sense of renewed understanding as I write.

Perhaps I'll delete this later.

After the wrestling match

2009-05-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

. . . we began calling him Israel.

***

Joseph Potter had decided to die. It was a nagging, incessant thing — this desire for a grand death, an important and poetic death. And it obsessed him long before he accomplished it. “I have decided to die,” he would say, “pleased to meet you.” Pat you on the back. Light a cigarette. Find some drugs.

He was a writer, and when his first novel came out, it was certainly one of those touchstone “events.” His great talent as a writer was, perhaps, nourished by the fact that he wasn’t handsome — artists can never be too beautiful — and what struck you most when looking at him were a pair of tired, effeminate eyes. Set in plush clouds of yellow-white marble fat, his eyes had no white or colour, simply long dark tunnels, leading blindly away from the light of the world.

But it must be said, to look at him you couldn’t help thinking that beneath the dreariness, there was an undeniable handsomeness, hiding — as if you could remove a layer and discover not bones and veins and muscle, but a perfect Brando, a model of the dark, beautiful America from which he ran screaming, and returned to searching for his death.

***

to be continued, and surely, re-edited

- Tobin Dalrymple, Mon. May 4, 4:03 a.m., Buenos Aires

*** UPDATE: I deleted half of this. I'm working on it and I think I'll probably scrap the whole thing later. Waste of your time, I know.

But while you are here, here's a blog-bite for you: last night returning by cab at 2 am I met a pure bread Nazi - he was the driver. Born in Germany, now some 60 or 70 years old, his daddy was an S.S. trooper and died in the war. "I am a racist!" he tells me with vigour, and pride. "But nothing to do with black or whites . . . for me, it's all about religions."

I was gonna tell you about how after a few inquiries he took me to a secret meeting place and we sacrifice a goat, all wearing hoods coloured with blood; but it never happenned, and if I tell you it did, I'm just being drunk.

Sailor, call me

2009-04-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

These three friends lived for one month together in Buenos Aires, in a beautiful, safe and friendly neighbourhood called Palermo SoHo. One day, it had to happen, they all bought leather jackets, and each night they went out, they wore them together, and they called this 'suiting up.' They looked damn good. It gave them a sense of rightness, which lead to confidence. One of them was me. I looked good. I had always wanted a jacket like this. It fit incredibly, perfect.

One night I had been drinking Fernet, an aperitif made of bitter herbs, and was getting especially excited to go out, when came a horrible tearing sound as I walked out my bedroom. I was scared to look, for I knew the sound. And I was right. A terrible gash had been laid, by the long, slender door handle; it rips in me to see it, in my soul. This perfect jacket, ruined.

Three nights of rain follow. This is imbalance, the three of us need all to be suited for such things, the ratios and gears of our confidence wobble inconsistently.

Bear with me, I'll get back to this.

***

I can't concentrate. I have told you all about Peter, my friend from Machu Pichu, the sailor, who is 70. I have received an invitation to sail with him the Baltic Sea, starting two weeks from now. I meet him near Helsinki.

I will see St. Petersburg, I will see Copenhagen, and I will live on the sea, and I shall see it all, the Baltic. There's Poland, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Russia .

I am unsure of what my decision is. I am edging on becoming a sailor writer (Melville, Thompson, Lowry, Hemingway, etc.)

Call me, sailor. What do I do?

***

I am looking for jobs and moneys. And there's been no calls. I will stay here and rot me for more months, beautifully, like crushed grapes, rotting and enchanting perhaps, but rotting still, and sedimenting, . . . if I stay and write or rather not write, but continue to speak of it, because after all what is there to write you about? This jacket story? How does it end, does it matter?

***

Earlier, the night before, I had been praying to one of the captivating, sad eyed Maries at the great Cathedral at the Plaza de Mayo. There are several tall smooth and imposingly powerful columns outside, the church is indistinguishable from a great stone bank perhaps, aside from it's sheerness. And there are homeless families sleeping on foam and newsprint.

I am inside praying, feeling sort of out of place, as I so usually do. But it is a habit I have picked up on this trip. I am not baptized, nor Catholic, or whichever, but this activity has so far been sincere. (I am not entirely sure if I 'do believe' nor if that matters.)

I walk along inside and marvel, somewhat, at the huge ceilings and arcs, and some of the icons. I pick a Mary, a beautiful, braze-eye, sad-eye, judging eyed, Mary. I believe our Lady of La Paz, although I must return to know for sure.

There's this horrible confession and this awful feeling of unjustly speaking to her. I dip fingers in the holy water as I leave, a curt bow to Jesus, and rub my fingers for sometime, a few seconds, over my heart. I leave and outside I consider giving one family, a man and his daughter sleeping on foam mattress amid ruin, a 5-peso note I had in my wallet. I realize, however, that I had left this note for the Mozzo at the cafe earlier, so I walk by averting my eyes, and hop down to the subway tunnel.

***

Oh the ruined heart. My poor jacket. It is so incredibly difficult to explain and to make you care. It would take a Dickensian yarn of poverty and pride to even approach the meaning of this jacket,

and as I've said before, this is just a blog - so please let us just accept for now the eminence of everything.

I come to the store, and the salesman and store owner who I was expecting to see, the man who sold me this great pride, was absent. However, the incredibly beautiful ( I mean this) and brilliantly happy Uruguayan, salesgirl, who I also met earlier, was there, alone.

"Hello. Do you remember me?" I ask, in Spanish, gravely.

"Yes," she pauses for some seconds, and her eyes awake as with great discovery. "Yes , of course! You are the architect!"

I smile, and half-nod. But I quickly switch to a graven face, great seriousness is brewing, and I explain that there's sad, sad news. I slowly remove the sorely torn leather garment from the carton shopping bag, and she gasps at the sight of the wound.

"Borracho!" she says. "You must have been drinking."

"Look, I was not, no way. Perhaps we had just one drink. But... listen, as we were preparing to leave I brush against the, umm" I gesture towards the door handle of the store, since I don't know how to say it. I explain what happened, and tell her how upset I am.

She is speaking quickly, with such enthusiasm that it is beautiful, the way her lips and eyes spark, but I cannot understand. She has so much energy, and breath, and joy it seems, as she rushes about, leaving me to go to the storage room. I am not sure yet, what is, but she is looking for another jacket. She comes back to the main boutique, bouncing, swinging her tall hips in jovial, rhythm to the loud electro music playing, and then, as if with a great joy of discovery - not as if, but with - she finds the same coat on the rack.

It is a size bigger, but I try it on, and it looks fine. It looks good. "Si me gusta," she says, and I agree, yes it is the same.

"You sure it looks fine?" And yes, it does. She brushes my back, removing some dust. She smiles greatly, but her look now switches from joy to graveness. A light but serious tone.

"Now, quick, put this away in the bag," her dark eyebrows strict, "and get out of here, my boss returns any second."

"Seguro - are you sure?" Yes yes yes, smiling, rushing. She takes the torn jacket, climbs the step ladder to the rack, and hangs it on the rack, replacing where the new coat had been -

"Nobody will ever know, never." She says. She is gorgeous.

I put the coat away into my shopping bag, and, quickly I grab her close, we kiss, I thank her, and I leave the store.

I walk nearly five blocks in the wrong direction, uncaring, unthinkig, unbelieving. I look up to the sky, and I explode into laughter, alone, as I have never once done in my life. Unbelievably happy to be alive, to have this life, this strangeness. This incredible doubt of chaos.

I buy a bottle of champagne and a jar of olives and me and my roommates, we celebrate. Tonight we suit up.

***

My oldest friends are all dead

2009-04-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

My youngest friends are stupid.

***

I come from Penetanguishene, Ontario.

There is one big road and there is a dock where you can eat ice cream. There is a dock and there are houses, hundreds, where there are friends who smoke weed. Who smoke cigarettes, and weed, and their father's share patches of morphine with their wives, their 300-pound wives.

***

Today in Palermo, the rich nest of quiet streets of Buenos Aires, walking home mid-afternoon with three sweating 1-litre bottles of cold, argentine beer.

I had a spanish class in ten minutes with a 29-year-old woman in my apartment and I figure we might need beer. And cigarettes.

So I buy a .75 cent pack of Malboros from the kiosko down the street. I am walking down Charcas, whistling down Charcas, happily down the cobble stone. And a man he comes up.

A man he comes up from behind and he has got a knife. He's a boy with dirty clothes and indian skin and he wants my money. And so much rage, it flows through me. I knew this moment would happen, 'been expecting such. I knew, that when it happen, the rage, it come. It would come.

So I grab the grocery bag full of beer, twisting the white plastic 'round my fist, and swing, smash the two bottles on the indian's head. Green glass and blood explode in a disgusting slow motion cataract. His blood and beer tangles, trickle slowly, down the warm, autumn streets.

***

One week ago, just about, I met the New York Dolls. I was worried the whole time. I had spent days researching, this time, I was hoping to be prepared.

Things never really started feeling good until we (my crew and I) had made it to the venue, and Sylvain and a few of the sound check guys started playing "Here She Comes Again" or whatever it is called, by the Velevet Underground.

"This is a band, a historic band, this here," my sweltering insides they mumble me. "I am excited."

I chew on my pen and I scribble notes with that pen, as the 20 waitresses prepare the venue for the night's show.

Finally I meet the Dolls and it is half awful at first. David Johansen is acting like a straight up rock star with his visible and pronounced disinterest. I turn him around later on , somehow, maybe, with a question or two from the left side of field. He brings up cosmology, so I beg him to explain to me the universe.

We finish things and he shakes my hand, says: you are a clever young man.

Sylvain Sylvain is leaving, with a giant frosty glass of stella or something in hand, to get dinner with the rest of the boys. I am drinking from a bottle of Quilmes and smoking a Malboro, and I take a second to thank him. To give cheers: "cheers, thanks again"

and we cheers, I cheers too hard, and his glass shatters and beer, and beer it goes, the air.

"I didn't need more beer anyway," Syl, says, walking out. Smiling. "Thanks again, Tobin," he whistles on the way out.

***

These are damn good stories. They deserve to be written with more detail.

It is 1:06 am and dinner is over. Jeff and Peter leave Wednesday, and I am once again, solo.

Thinking much: do I stay or return? Law school or stay.

I have this new apartment with a 50 year old woman, Flor, who is amazing, beautiful and friendly, and I am excited for the new rhythm things are about to adopt. Things adopt.

"Things adopt."

I am drunk, it's no secret. We drank 2 bottles of wine at dinner. And we are about to go out.

I have a hundred better stories. A hundred of them.

***

I rode this subway car the other day. The A train is about 100 hundred years old, and made of wood, and the benches they all face each other like a train, and there are wooden, white painted rings that descend from the ceilings instead of steel bars, to hold to.

The windows are open and I meet C -

I invite her over.

***

I have at least 57 stories that I am saving. This is just a blog and it rushes me. It is 1:26 a.m. and I dedicate this last part to Suzanna C.

"life aint easy, life aint easy, life aint easy."

This is just a blog. I am tired and I miss you.

***

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f9NHLP7YWQ

exceptionally for Suzanna C

2009-04-22T01:01:00.000-07:00

from the archives:

Dear S-

There's been about four long days here, in Buenos Aires, where I've had exceptional luck and love and down time. I mean "sad" by down time, but I mean it as an exception. Exceptionally, I am sad here.

Except:

On Sunday I learned how to use a camera. I learned by forcing my way backstage and borrowing a friend's camera. I found a professional newspaper photographer in the midsts, and asked him how to put the settings. The ISO was all wrong, the F-stops were poor, and so we vindicated things.

With about 200 shots, I gained maybe 10 fine ones, and 30 OK. I sat in the dressing room for a while just before the New York Dolls were going to play. I talked with Sylvain about his son who knows French, and about some bar where the Dolls opened for Rush in the 70s in Toronto: before Rush was big.

I also watched the meagre, skeleton, Jagger-of-a singer, David J, warm up his vocals with a large marijuana cigarette with the company of his beautiful, vampiric wife.

Auto check is telling me that vampiric is not a word. But it is, surely, a word.

"Oooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmphhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" David groans, sitting, smoking a tobacco cigarette now. Resting head on one fisted hand.

David Johansen looks like a man who is thinking, always. When we spoke, just alittle earlier. It was rough, my questions were poor, the settings were all wrong: light, camera, microphone.

There were many problems. I looked nervous (I have seen the footage).

Keep on riding

2009-04-21T00:45:00.000-07:00

Listen, the big realization: I am happier today than I've been in 10 years, easy.

I've been writing a novel. I've been talking about it at least. The start is so clumsy and ugly, the hardest part: but it's important to begin. So I've begun.

I try a few words. I talk a bit about how it's winter here and the poetic fallacy of that - or do I have that wrong? Like when the bolt of lightning erupts, in the film, and the horrible monster emerges from behind the door. The kind of link to the weather that is life: but opposite, yeah.

"It is winter and I am alive."

I've been meaning to get around to giving you a book report on that Henry M. book, and I've been waiting for the right time to do it proper. But it doesn't look like that's happening, and seeing as I've moved on to Hemingway, I guess nows a good time to just get the drunken bastard out of my ears.

OK. Obviously I talk about him too much, and probably attempt to meet him too much in my writing. In my defense, I realize that it is just as naive to boldly search for a 'new' way of writing. This is not possible. Me admitting that I am hack is freedom. Artistically, I am free. (elbows. nudge. nerds)

Here's a very brief sketch of the important points, and why you should read Black Spring.

Henry Miller knows exactly how to write. But he is not a writer. Henry Miller is a drunk, a sad and lonely man, who is ecstatically happy at once. At once, toujours he is an artist, a seer a prophet and a blind man. He writes exactly what he sees. You cannot be an artist if you cannot describe what you see.

George Orwell liked Miller's writing, alot, but criticized it because it was irresponsible. And it did nothing to thwart the Nazis or stomp out the flames of the disaster approaching: World War Two. Miller's books are about Miller in Paris, either sleeping with prostitutes, drinking a little aperitif, writing, or simply remember his childhood in Brooklyn. Black Spring is a lot less sensual than his iconic Tropic of series. And a lot more about, hmmm, people. People that Miller knows. He really knows people.

(This circular writing is killing me. It is 5 am. I have spent the last 4 hours editing a video.)

This review isn't going so well.

There's this one really good part where he talks about painting a horse picture. He describes the entire thing so magically, so 'visually'. You see the lines hit the canvas, the water colours seep into the white, them blend, them erase, them. You feel it all. In the end he destroys the original plan and ends up with a piece of genius abstract. This is just like how he must write (that's the point.) Things don't go as planned.

Read this book if you want to be a writer.

Aside from this: moments of good old machismo keep the read entertaining, voyeuristic and vicariously pleasing.

Also, his Whitman mystic shit gets a little dry and you can skip these parts. They occupy the real-heavy first 30 pages. And is why people stop reading the book before it even really begins.

It really begins with his memory of his childhood working in the tailor shop with his poor father.

You see, he begun his book, probably just to begin it. There's no plan to it, and he just goes. Zip. That's it. He's very good at handling, managing, the chaos.

What else?

The end.

(fail - sorry)
***

Coming soon: my interview with the New York Dolls. A write up and a link to the Spinearth.tv video.

Never again: a book report feeling this tired. I just really missed writing. So here it is. I begun.

"It is winter and I'm wintry." Nah.

To begin, that's the thing!

2009-04-14T22:37:00.000-07:00

MILLER'S VERSION:

Today my first day at work. A wide open, second-story office on Mendoza Av., in Belgrano, blocks away from el Barrio Chino. I knock on the big red door, am led to the place, and meet a few American writers, French design interns and other, random, shabbily dressed young, bearded men; all type on lap tops, drink espresso from stained cups, and need to wash.

I am forced to wait 15 minutes for the boss to show up; normal here, in fact, punctual. He comes, he's Kave, an engineer or young-business-man from Berkley, CA. He runs the show, outsourcing B.aires graphic designers to the U.S. - half the price of New York firms, and twice the quality of dirt-cheap India firms. Solid sell. Plus B.aires is a classy, sexy, design city. (Just look around at the angular, glass arc skyscrapers at the puerto; perhaps too the colourful, gay Flogger-hipsters; the several artsy universities. Every attractive girl I meet here is in communications, or graphic design. Zero exceptions.)

Anyway, we chat. He tells me what my job's going to be. To wit: re-arranging words from a pirated maths textbook to post online to avoid copyright infringement. Immediately I remember a scene from Henry M's Tropic of Cancer, his joy in editing the comma and vanguard semi-colons of news print: his absolute, wonderful joy of the simplicity, the order from it, the miraculous symphony, or something, of grammar. His love. I think, maybe I could handle a few weeks here, maybe this grows. Maybe I learn something, start my own competing firm later.

He tells me to watch over one guy, and see what the work looks like. I sit and I begin to wonder something. I ask the guy a few questions. My wonder expands. I am not at all interested in the job, but I am interested in how this guy does it. He is paid 5 dollars an hour, 40 hours a week to replace "Find the solution" with "Solve."

Kave goes to the office makes a few phone calls, chats on phone. He's waiting there, still, when I return 15 minutes later, he's typing away, emailing as we resume the first-day interview. He barely looks up at me the whole time, chatting, typing, I can hear the emails being sent away in these enormously loud "whooshes" that sound each time.

"Whoosh!"
"So that's that," I say, I sit down, he doesn't look up.

"Hmmm, yes. So, let's see here. You speak spanish?"
I try a few words or two. He tells me I shouldn't have put advanced spanish skills on my resume.

"Whoosh"
"Listen what was your GPA in college?"

I tell him, he looks up.
"Look man, you don't seem that interested in this gig."

"I'm not. This isn't exactly what I was looking for."

He looks back down at the keys, a bald white man, black round shades, walks in and we are introduced, they chat about some more super star Argentines coming in that day for designer gigs.

The man leaves. Kave says we should stay in touch.

I'm about to leave, but am struck with a sudden, genius urge.

"Listen, Kave. Here's what I'm going to suggest. I've been thinking the whole time I arrived here that you could be doing better. This thing your doing, with the textbooks - first of all it's illegal. Just switching around words doesn't free you from breaching copyright. However, that doesn't seem to matter much anyways, so let's talk about money instead."

He stops typing, looking up, looks interested.

"... What I wanted to say was, you can fire three of those guys out there, typing away like mad, and hire me at three-times the salary, and I will still get your shit done for you faster than if you had them working around the clock."

He smirks, he smirks because he doesn't understand.

"Let me ask you a question," I say. "How the hell don't you guys know how to use Word yet? There's codes you can do, this is monkey work."

"Listen, Tobin, pal. I'm not sure what's your deal. We tried Control-F, find and replace, that shit doesn't work. It takes too much ...

"I'm not talking about that. Trust me." I interupt.

"I make it so you hit one magic key, and the document get's completely switched, brand new. Your x's become y's, your a's b's, and so on. One button. Doesn't matter what doc you have open."

(Dear reader, please hang out a bit more. Computer talk done soon.)

"Whoosh" he says, "show me."

"I'll do it. But if it works, you pay me 500 pesos, today. I promise it will save you hours. You'll be able to fire three of these guys out there, at least."

He looks happy, pleased, maybe annoyed: intrigue, yeah.

"Agreed."

(So I show him what is called a Macro. It's a WORD trick I learned from some maniac teacher in 3rd year. I made it so when you type out dog, the magic key makes it cat, and when you type out tea, it becomes coffee. I figure keep it simple for him.)

I hit CTRl-ALT-M and ten doggies become kitties, and twenty teas turn to black, sober coffee.

He gives me the cash, and says something like I should stick around. I say, "yeah, maybe I'll give you a call."

Outside, I walk full-face in the sun, slowly and happily down Juranemento Av., looking for a good chinese restaurant, a place to sit, have a beer and read Hemingway. The day isn't even struck noon.

update: SPIN story

2009-04-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

Here's the version of my adventures on Spin Magazine's internets, Spin Earth. spin

Write faster

2009-04-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

"when you say X, in your most recent single, did you mean Y? because in 1992, on your debut EP, you said Z. and that's not cool."

One thing about music journalism:

it’s interesting and easy as long as you can have good conversation with your subject: be it Bono or Cher's boyfriend. (nobody)

I am here in Buenos Aires in an ostensible way. Ostensibly, that is to say, because I am supposta' be a writer for a magazine. Ultimately, I would hope, because I want to live in New York, and write pretty things.

Last Friday I started emailing the organizers of this big electro rave - a one day huzzah with artists who own names that are important. One of the bands sounded familiar, Fischerspooner, so I focussed my emailing efforts on them. I sent out about three messages, all pleading with whomever it was to help me get in the festival, for free, for an interview.

With only limited response - a few passive-aggressive reply-alls, that still left me wondering if I had made it to The List - the next day "I set out" with my two best pals, Jose and Pedro. We got to the big club, called Costa Salguero, on the waters of the rio plata. A huge complex, big enough to be a sports stadium it seemed, protected by about 54 armed guards wearing beige and neon vests. (‘beige and neon’ - see earlier motifs). Big guns, brown dudes, big smiles, smokes.

The night had started poorly: my camerawoman had to cancel last minute, so it would be impossible to shoot video of the event. Left a little dismayed I decide it’s better to go and just get some audio or words down than nothing at all. And things only got worse.

At the main entrance, they don't have my name on the list and say we should mosey to the backstage entrance and talk with the guards there. Here similar problems arise. They write my name down, and the name of my publication, and speak personally with the organizer - a Mr. Garrat - who was said to have talked with the band, and the band said that I didn't exist, or that they wouldn't talk to me, so essentially we were out of luck.

Anyway, I figure I am not giving up so easy. So I re-mosey back to the main entrance, and say to the two young door-women: "hey so I just spoke Garrat, and he said it's cool. Entiendes me?.. no? yo udon’t understand.. Todo esta bien. THIS IS MY JOB....I mean, estoy fucked if I don't get this entrevista , hoy noche! ENTIENDEME?"

This didn't work, not right away. They wanted my name again. At this point I start getting very worried. The security guards had all taken a big interest in me, with their shiny greasy guns secure in their belts: "You! Where you from. De donde sos? What's your name?" Everyone wanted to help, but I didn't want the help. No no no. (I'm going to get arrested). Deep breaths. Ask Jose for a smoke so I look music-journalistic, and proceed: "listen, let me talk to your manager" I say to the young woman behind the barred counter, exhaling in a music-journalist kind of way (I write for Rolling Stone, bichas, is my attitude). She writes my name down and sends out a text message.

"You wait here. The promoter is coming."

Jesus. This might be working. I barely know what the hell I am doing here. I don't even want this to ... scary because I should know more. I should know more about this band if they are gonna let me talk to them. I should know what their first and second albums are called. I should know their names! (I’m not even sure if I know their names and faces. Crissakes. Maybe I’ll be fine. )

A tall, dirty-blonde, blue-eyed Florencia, wearing a tight leather jacket and tight blue jeans approaches, smoking and talking on her cellphone. She is a promoter. "Hi. You are allowed in, but we have to wait till the band is done to see if they'll talk to you. How many tickets do you need?"

Jeezus, heart stiff, we’re going in. "Well just one for me and my camera man, but if you're nice, I need three." I point to Pedro, the third.

"I don't need to be nice," she says, putting away her phone. She pulls out a stack of tickets and rips out three.

Inside, Flor and I determine a place to meet after the band finishes their set. I give her my number to text me for a meet up. This place is huge, packed and busy.

This place huge, gigantic, electric, noisy, packed, and it's just 11 pm. Bam. Bam. Later thousands more will pack it more, more, thousands of hipster-sardines on ecstacy, cocaine and champagne, shades and Barbie legs. So much dancing, so much fun.

This place is electric and astounding. Huge and crazy. I have never seen anything like it. We have just been granted free access to what I’m sure is our first rave. Bump bump. We dance, it's amazing.

I'm in the washroom washing the sweat off my face when I get the call. It's Florencia. My heart, my slowing pulse, I’m nervous! I can't do this. I turn off the ringer, ignore the call, and plan on avoiding her the rest of the night: I can't do this! She calls back instantly, clik, once more. I look at myself in the mirror, this is one of those football movie moments, the pump up scene. "You can do this." (Can you really do this?) Ra, ra, ra, ra , ra. She texts me: "they will see you, come now to the stage!".. Something comes over me, almost like confidence. OK. Fuck it. “I'm doing this,” to myself. “I'm coming, see you at the stage," I text to Flor.

That's that. I pour water on my hands, and brush it through my hair, and slick it back. One final look at self, and out.

Plan! Plan, I need a plan. No idea, what the fuck I'm about to talk about. I have no camera man, and I have no microphone or tape recorder. I am the least prepared I have ever been in this situation. I decide to go with an idea that came to me a bit earlier: focus on one thing, a theme.

A theme! I pick "change". We will talk about change. Simple. (Change sounds so perfect when you think of it. So musical, so astoundingly simple and interesting. Like symphonies of chaos and logic, like giant trumpets and cymbals crashing, these are the bouncing feelings of enormous joy that shatter through me when I hear the words exceed my lips: Change change change change. The thought is an orgasm. Splash, listo.)

I'm let backstage and I come to a bright white room. Here a young woman whose name I should know offers me champagne, I refuse and ask for water. I light a cigarette: "Casey is coming soon." Good tip, I write CASEY in capital letters down on my notepad. "Good show tonight really great; you were up on stage weren't you?" She smirks, mutherfucker, "Yeah, I am THE Dj!." She's Lauren, I think, FLEX.

Anyway, it was rocky at first but we talked about Toronto a lot and she's gonna be there this week. She had nice tattoos, long curly brown hair, and was super nice. I'm conscious of self, of me, placing camera on table, smoking twice more, choosing words, writing down extra questions, all plans, my mind in two spots. Trying to be friendly, liked, but trying to be professional;

We wait for too long and eventually she figures we just go to the stage and get Casey. We go and I wait around with my arms crossed for a minute until he comes. We shake hands and I am so gracious for him to speak to me(I mean this), I smile, pat him on the back, and we go back to this square white dressing room behind the stage.

We sit we talk. That's how I get here, to this point, the interview. It went well.

Spin Earth Television: First of all, thank you very much for talking to me. Since Spin Earth is a more TV-based website, and I can’t have a camera, I’m going to make this short and sweet. I’m going to ask you all about one thing: Change.

C Spppppppp: Sounds great, let’s do it.

SETV: Alright. Here we go. At first I thought the new album’s name was Entertainment, and then, at least in the Internet world, people started saying it changed to Between Worlds. What’s the deal?

CS: Between Worlds! No! The album title didn’t change, somebody didn’t read the press release. The album title is Entertainment and then we named the performance (the tour), “Between Worlds”.

SETV: Oh, so it’s still Entertainment…

CS: Yeah yeah, yeah. Someone didn’t read the press release talking about the show, and the name of the tour is “Between Worlds.” So there was no change! But I don’t mind, it’s kinda nice, I like that there can be more than one title.

SETV: Ok, well let’s talk about the title you did pick, Entertainment. In a few words, your reasoning for the choice . . . because I could tell you what I think…

CS: Well you know I’m dying to know what you think!

SETV: You know, it doesn’t really matter though, everyone wants to know what you …

CS: I just like how simple it is.

SETV: Well… I guess I thought way too deeply into it then. I thought, you know, we were selling “entertainment,” putting a title on it, commodifying it.

CS: Well there is that, there’s that too. That’s what’s nice about it, is that it’s simple . . . there was a lot of deliberation because we were worried about the Gang of Four title, but there wasn’t an exclamation point, so it was OK.

SETV: And punctuation is so important nowadays, some bands are entirely punctuation…

CS: Exactly, punctuation is so important! It just seemed to be a nice sort of simple clear title and it feels like it’s in quotation marks. Which I think is what your getting at.

SETV: Yeah, exactly. It’s pointing at the fact that you are buying entertainment.

CS: Exactly. You know, like #1, the record, I can’t even remember if we had a name for it. It was kind of an accident. I mean we were calling it “number one,” we were gonna call our records, “number one, number two, number three.” There was no title. It was like a series. But then there was sort of a typo somewhere and someone made it look like, NUMBER ONE! [here he points his finger in the air and makes his voice real authoritative] and it was kind of funny, like “OK that’s a funny pun because we are making this record.” And then it would be funny because you’d go into the music store and it would be up on the board and they would have “#1” next to it. So it would be kind of confusing because we’d be like number 15 but it would say number one, so people were like “well which is it?”. And then [Dj] Hell put a sticker on it that said “Best Album Ever” which we never had anything to do with… I never saw it until it came out, and then everybody thought it was called Best Album Ever. Which was somewhat embarrassing…

SETV: So how do you feel about not having hardly any control, it seems, over what your albums end up being called?

CS: You don’t worry about it. You go with the flow.

SETV: But it’s your baby!

CS: Yeah, but. It’s kind of nice, you put something out there and it’s interesting to see what sticks. Different things … stick! And so it’s less about you and more about how the world responds.

SETV: Ok, there’s my segue to the number two question about change…

CS: Number two! Change!

SETV: Exactly. What has changed about how you’ve been received in the last ten years?

CS: Oh my God! I don’t know. I think we’ve been loved, and then hated, and now: we are loved and hated. So, I like that. I think if you are just loved it’s boring, and so I’d rather kinda be divisive.

SETV: Divisive…

CS: Yeah, no. You don’t want to be in the middle. It’s a little bit what #1 is about.

SETV: Music is divisive!

CS: Well I mean I think if something is interesting then it causes people to make a choice or have a reaction. So I’d much rather people have strong reaction one way or the other. So when someone really hates us, it doesn’t hurt my feelings.

SETV: Can I ask you a question about that?

CS: Yeah.

SETV: Because I hear that a lot. People say: “I’d rather my music be hated than forgotten.” People seem to think there’s some benefit to riling up people. But why should we care what kind of impact it has on someone’s emotions? Is there a stage after that emotion that will change the world? “Then what?” That’s my next question.

CS: Then what….?

SETV: So you rile them up, now why do you care?

CS: Yeah. . . why do I care? I don’t. I think in a way you can’t care. You just have to make what you make. And you have to be strong enough to accept however people react to it. I mean that’s kind of the challenge of being creative and being public is that you are and you are not defined by the way people perceive what you do. So I just have to be invested in the idea and believe in it and be excited about it to such a degree that I’m impenetrable. So in a way there is no “Now What?”

You know, unfortunately I have to make myself so strong that it cant matter to me. It’s tough though, because of course you fall for the adoration. That’s the difficulty. If you can’t be hurt by the hate, then you can’t really accept the adoration. Which is really tough, because everybody falls for it!

SETV: So, then, how have you changed in the last 10 years, because of the music?

CS: It feels like I got something out of my system. You know, I toiled away in the underground for a decade, and at a certain point I just didn’t feel like I was making an impact. At a certain point you can feel like you are almost too pure. You know, you are working away in obscurity, so what’s the point? If you are so erudite, if you are so … almost like aesthetically pure, then there’s no point in doing it because no one can attach any meaning to what you are doing.

So when we did our first show and it was in a Starbucks, that was revolutionary: these were people coming to a cup of fucking coffee, they didn’t even give a shit about performance art, then all of a sudden, if you put a beat to it, and then if you made it a song, all of a sudden they give a shit.

SETV: Ok, so last question, and sorry but it’s really cheesy: If you could change one thing, anything, in world (this interview, your hair, war, etc…), what do you change?

CS: … Well, I guess it’s simple… hunger, health care … genocide? The things that are important. Eating and living….eating and living! That’s about all, that’s what’s really important.

the hot water kids

2009-04-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

These kids loved the camera. When I showed the little boy the video of him and his sister he lost it with joy. This is in Aguas Calientes, from early March, the day of completing the Machu Pichu trek. My old pal Pete and I bought them ice cream. It was real nice. (I've already told you about Pete, and these kids. Here is the story if you missed it.)

FROM THE ARCHIVES: CUZCO

2009-04-03T23:58:00.000-07:00

* Much of the writing I have done so far on this trip has been by hand. I got to thinking that maybe some of it may be neat for you to read, so I am going to retype some of it and post it here as a "from the archives" thing.

This next post is a continuation (or more accurately, a prequel) to that rant I made about all the fear driving through me at the start of the trip. It shows the foundation of where these feelings erupted and the beginning of what would become a slight epiphany. It is a really long entry from a red spiral journal, written in very messy, sometimes impossible to read, thin black ink. I have tried to edit as little as possible of it.

One last thing: I don't want you to think I am so melodramatic as this next post would indicate. I was reading a lot of Malcom Lowry at the time, and I think this entry was kind of an exercise in detailing the psychotic, crazy little experiences perceived when traveling through mysterious, awful and beautiful worlds.

***

Sun/March 8/ 2009/ 10:15 p.m.

(Night bus to Puno and Copacabana)

"What am I looking for?" This is the question that bluntly kills me.

It looks like lightning is erupting, in soft tiny patches, above the Cuzco horizon of the dark Andes. Yes, it is lightning. It is getting larger now, and shooting out horizontally; looks as if light of a passing car momentarily strikes against a giant curtain, descending down toward old Inca valleys and lost empires.

How! Now each time I look up the light is becoming more fierce. But there is still no thunder. You can see the mountains only by their silhouettes against these eruptions in the sky. The forgotten mountains, or the invisible. Tonight there are no stars and only the street lights throughout the valleys and plateaux of Cuzco city make its land visible. Twinkling symbols of a desire to consume, either ourselves or this place.

Leaving town on this bus, now that we’re out of the city centre, the restaurants and hostels and tourists have disintegrated. Left behind are the insoluble inhabitants of this colonial scandal — pariah dogs, crying dirty children, women in bowler hats and rainbow ponchos — More lightning! No strikes, none audible, not yet. Two children hang like monkeys on the locked gate of a cement-block bodega, looking in. Driving past, we cross an outdoor party; it descends into an open field some distance away, where a band plays Quechan folk on a green wooden stage.

Near the road, just before the slight grassy slope approaching the stage, three young teen boys seem to be robbing — or molesting — a girl their own age. She screams and swings at them with a glass bottle, they laugh and tug at her clothes. Drivers sit in their taxis with bright lit signs, smoking or chewing coca leaf, and maybe forty other locals nearby, just watch. Or seem not to notice. A bottle smashes, a horn squeals in the distance, like a greasy finger rubbing against glass. Driving, still further, more vagrants have set up shop on the sidewalk: selling maiz, seeds, fruit, cigarettes. “Mate! Mate! Sandwich de pollo, Sandwich de pollo!” yells a woman, a dirty beige cylindrical bowler, with a wide ribbon the same colour. It has started to rain. The cement and mud brick houses don’t melt; a gas station is empty except for two attendants, one pissing into the road, facing our bus, the other tosses a cigarette. It’s raining, it’s pouring. The lightning, now flashes closer, brilliant neon purple. Still, no thunder… but maybe there is; it’s perhaps that distant roar. The sound of hundreds of revving engines, buried beneath the rock and mud of the great Andes. The mountains, in the mountains! And now, not even the Cusquenian sky or city or anything are visible. We have left the city.

Briefly, I pray to St. Christopher. The rain, the storm: As I’m leaving Peru! (I am always afraid of dramatic deaths, well timed, and symbolic.) The bus skids and drunkenly resumes it’s way. Ah, but here, more city, more buildings. Another empty gas station. And then another.

- No thunder, but the voices of the city haunt me, bother me.
- Mate! Mate! Sandwich de Pollo
- llamada, llamada
- massages! Massages!
- Puno Puno! Arequiiiiiipa, Arre aree are are-queeeeeeeepa. Ica ica, iiiica, La paz.

Earlier: The California girls trying to take pictures with the Peruvian woman on the street: ‘un foyo parami? Para mi para mi.. un foto…no? no!” The lady, shaking her head, her sad eyes, begging to understand; why a photo? Why me? A smarter tramp might have ask for a Sol or two. But maybe there’s dignity here. In it’s tiniest shred. The starving, the bitter, the inability to even want or know how to deal with the ignorance of a Catholic Supermodel Gringa. (Soon after this, I ate fries and pollo brasa with the girl and her friends. We said grace and prayed before eating.)

The bus slips, we are on a dirt path. Another gas station. We have stopped. Peddlers come on board the bus. A woman selling giant round rolls of flat bread – bigger than accordions. “pan solo un sol, pansolounsol.” The same whiney, nasal pitched scream as them all, as the bus station yodlers (Ica icaaaaa, arerrearrerarrequiiiiiiiiiiipa!) or the cellphone street vendors (yaaaamadas yaaamadas), these voices haunt me! Lightning and rain, pouring, filling up in rapid puddles on the blackened cement at the GRIFO gas station. Two men buy their tickets here, to Puno. They board soaked and sit far ahead. They own several plastic bags full of whatever, and stuff them in the rafters above and in the aisle before the stairway down to the first level of the bus. No one can manage to get by without tripping or barely tripping. Aha! More bread for sale. One of the passengers takes out a bag of flat loaves and makes his way to the back. “pan pan.” A man begins to snore. Two Scandinavian girls behind me laugh and talk. The snoring, the snoring. Driving through my thoughts. It seems to have stopped shooting lightning. The rain has slowed. A woman loads blankets and hats, and more bread, into the trunk of a hatchback taxi parked next to us. Still: no thunder, only from the phlegm filled snorer.

We have left the station, the snoring appears to have stopped for now, and I am the only one with a reading light on. Soon I shall turn it off and there will be no light, and no sound but of the road the splashing rain water. I will sit and wonder: “What is it I am looking for?” More truly, I am sure, since I know what it is, but “Why? Why am I here?” Why have I come to witness my own hell, human hells . . . Why alone? Dante takes with him Virgil, a ghost. Jacob is alone, without humanity, when he faces God, in his journey across the deserts of redemption. Where’s my angel, my anti-body, where’s the hell guide? It is here: the thunder. The bursts of fear and the longing — for love (indecipherable) happiness — the dreadful solitude and the blissful peace, alone. It is my words, my sickness, St. Christopher. Pachamama! It is fear that asks questions, which only get answered through gods or fate or whichever. Fear can be my only true conquest and amigo. It will be fear and mystery that keep me alive and kill me.

Your name is so regal

2009-04-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

Buenos Aires is not an easy city. The name is confusing, false, a denial: "good air" supposes friendships and sweet rides, easy rides. As they say 'no hay aca': not here, there isn't.

But it is not a hard city either. Tonnes of drunks, transvestites, prostitutes, hostelers, backpackers, journalists, police, cabbies, art-deco mansions, clubs playing Oasis, nexus, plexus, rich ones, poor ones . . . spirals, stone, tall buildings, all of it. And so on. Is it really 7:48 a.m.? Is it really Thursday! Of course, of course it is. Two days ago I watched the sun come up, as I have several times this trip, with a few odd travelers, and I thought that this, this was something: "no one sees these things, no sees the city so naked, not like this..."

But today I saw the same sun come up - this time it looked more Tang and neon - today, and realized that maybe these nights aren't so special. Half the city sees this sun... but I can't decide if this is something to write home about or not. My roommates and I watched a man water the drive as the sun came up, through the rust and green paint terrace, we watched him three stories up, the sun reflecting off the puddles.

But who cares?

Anyway: no one sees the city so naked, not even us.

---

Spanish lessons and Tango. Living here in the Palermo Soho, Edificio de Burges y Armenia. A small maids room with a trundle bed and a private shower - where I sleep and make the bed each morning. So far the drill is wake up make coffee and read, then chess or read in the Parque Japonesa down the street. I am getting better at chess - play aggressive! like life! - and worse at reading: Miller is coming slowly, anxiously to an end.Let me just say, that if you pick up any of his books, you must give it time. . . the moments he paints are like amber trapped mosquitos: precious icons of time gone and beauty past, all of that.. etc etc... He makes art out of the pure human, (whats that word?) moment... What is that word....? The word starts with an "H". (Means takes joy from fruits and love, makes gods out of pleasure...what is that word???)

---

Sorry for all the stream of consciousness. I am tired and it is 7:57 a.m. I want to assure you that this is a perfectly respectable bed time for anyone here in the city of easy air, of beautiful air... and plus, there's a holiday tomorrow to commemorate the soldiers who died for the Falkland Isles. No one works tomorrow, except for: the taxi drivers, the waiter (mozos), the waitresses (mozas), the cell phone companies, the McDonalds, the lawyers, the tax men, the government, the police, the kiosko men, the carniceria men, the carniceria women (if there are any), the dude who makes emapanadas two blocks up Borges (God hope so), and finally, me. I work tomorrow. Must sleep.

Buenos.

Txo

ps: the word I couldn't remember was: HEDONISTIC.

Frozen in carbonite

2009-03-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

This is my last day as a solo traveller. Tomorrow I meet two friends at our new apartment in Palermo Soho.

Time has flown by. I remember in Lima having some slight anxieties about the long stretch of weeks that laid before me. Actually, those anxieties, they weren't slight, not slight at all. I was damn worried, depressed even, and I kept asking myself: What have I got myself into? What the hell am I going to do here, in this crazy country, for the next 3 months?

But I can hardly believe that was me at all now. I miss Peru, I miss the people and the food. I never got to try the Guinea Pig roast, ha; there are many other cities I would have liked to see. And it seems I just flew right through Bolivia - what happened to Potosi? to Santiago? (the San Pedro prison tour...) The memory of these places flicker through me. Sparkle, fade, etc, etc...

As I said before - getting off the bus from Bolivia, into Chile — I felt like I left some stupefying circus, writhing and happy and dirt cheap. Like some kid terrified of a roller coaster, which he is persuaded to ride, and getting off, wishes the twisting, twirling steel-and-wood tracks would never come to their inevitable, terrible finish. I miss the roller coaster, although I hate it. Although it is reckless, dirty and cheap.

The essence of my trip is about to gain an entirely new flavour and formula; this writing is the nostalgia I am having for the first part - all things ineffable, I am trying to capture something about a brief part of my life which is all but over already. So brief and liquid it's hard to believe it happened at all - it is impossible to even really know what it is I am missing: but let's try to stick a few pegs around it.

I was alone and the people I met did not know me. Strangers all of them, and that made me a stranger too. There was no plan and no need to stay anywhere, or do anything. I spent days, too many, in Lima, not speaking a word of English. At least one third of the nights up there were in night busses, watching stars and finding constellations that don't exists in the skies back home; being the last one - every time - with the reading light on. Waking up too early, or too late, eating alone. My heart stopping almost every hour for the first two weeks from fear. Fear! That's the word.
The wonderful, horrible fear that existed for this first month and half, that is fading, is evaporating. What is left is the pulp, the idea of it: night bus to Trujillos; the cab driver who cursed me at the Huaca de Luna, only minutes after he drove off the road down a dirt path, through a twisting alley way of concrete , full of pariah dogs and chikens — scarred chicken missing feathers — he is trying to rob me— he says he is only taking an alternate route, and that the main one is closed. I grab on tight to my rucksack and ready myself to jump out of the yellow, rusted cab... wait, we have arrived. He tells me the cost is doubled and I tell him I am no estupido.... he spits on the ground at my feet and tells me I will regret it all. (Later, I see him waiting in the parking lot for me...I take the dirt path past the Huaca de Sol - a still buried temple - and get onto the collectivo mini bus. I ride back to town with farmers missing teeth, Peruvian wives and girls, and two perros sin pelo (dogs with no fur, sick black muts with tuffs of vomit coloured, wirey hair sparsely occuring on the muzzles and backs).

This alley way on Chile St., here in Buenos Aires, which I can't even explain or entirely remember.... I am with three Swedish boys, and we are looking for a bar party, and the American at the hostel has given us the wrong directions. It is three a.m. and a woman with her two toddlers playing in the shadows behind her - a normal sight here to see small kids on the street, playing with the stray dogs or eachother, at any hour - tells us that we are looking for this place, right there across the street. Foolishly the Swedes thank her, and offer her two pesos for the help - she inexplicably refuses the cash, perhaps because of the two police cars parked down the street, officers eye's trained on the gringos....the swedes foolish as always and very young meander into the dark building... inside a dark alley way...inside is not inside, but it is a roofless shanty court yard, a large wooden desk with a glass shield and a leading to this reception area is a line up of ten or twenty homeless, young and old, men. They lambast us all for our cigarettes and some spare change (monedas). This is not the party we are looking for, the Swedish boys are exhilirated and want to stay. They are buying drugs.... Watched the yolk -or pudding - sun come up over the Avenida de Mayo later that morning - this, after breaking into the rooftop terrace of a neighbouring hostel, and smashing the light sensor on the brick wall...

fear, destruction, discovery, some moments of absolute joy: this is life. And moments of absolutely loathing too. This is life?

I realize I have been very negative about the journey. Don't take it the wrong way. I am happy to be here, I think that I am generally a cynic with all things: anyway, I am just being honest. Traveling isn't all peaches and pancakes. It's difficult, it is scary (for me at least), but it is wonderful!

I am glad that this thing is over, this solo adventure, but that I want it to go on. It is better to leave something wanting more, then begging for it to be over. I'd rather be dragged out than dig my way out.

UPDATES:

- been searching for video camera person via craigslist because I start to work with SPIN Magazine this next week. Have at least 3 or 4 meetings set up with local boys and girls this week to meet a good partner. This is a good way to meet likeminded people.

- My laptop is working, it turned on for me, that little tease....

- book report to come this week on Miller's BLACK SPRING. Damn good, so good. Look our for it!

- if you haven't yet subscribed as a FOLLOWER to this blog, please do so now!

Thanks,

xot

jo y bos

2009-03-22T20:51:00.000-07:00

Mendoza. et puis et puis....

Helping a French woman with a script she has written. She studies cinema and is interested in documenting the radical changes taking place in France in the late 60s and the simultaneuous dictatorship reining at the time in Brazil. I told her I´m interested in these kind of things and we have been talking alot about it. Maybe she will need a researcher or extra writer. She says so, anyway. et puis et puis... shes assembled a neat narrative which follows a French journalist with Brazilian familly back into the jungle to rescue an old friend. Contexts are colourful and the climax et denouement occurs within Carnivale... I imagine.

I am in Mendoza, reading Henry M., and will be for a few days. Having fun and perhaps too much fun. Bike tour of wine country on Tuesday.

00000

List of bad stuff that has happebnned this week

- Yerba Mate. I bought a Mate, the gourd carved device used for drinking the Yerba, and a bombijja (the metal strainer and straw) but whilst I was being taught how to cure the receptacle, I noticed it was roto, broken, and so now it slowly leaks, cries. (see note on Yerba, at bottom).

- iBook G4. People said bringing a laptop with me was risky. It would get stolen or I would get mugged. Jesus. Well I was doing fine until yesterday or the day before... getting of the bus from Salta I hastily threw my waer bottle in the bag wuith the laptop. The lid wasnt snug, and the water entered expensive electronic exposing holes and now the screen hums and wont turn on. I hope the files, pictures, et al.. are secure and alive. (meanign no more picture uploads, for now, and likely much more difficult to work and write)

- vintage 1950s Raybans; stolen or lost at Salta hostel.

- sleeping bag; riding in trunk of some angry Bolivian cab driver. It fell off my bag and he took off, quick time.

- green sleeves. my cold has still not died.

- power. need yet another set of power adaptors, for Argentina has differnet plugs. Meanign I have no camera for a bit.

Good stuff;

- discovered Pancho V... hotdogs. Which are footlongs that are made with your choice from millions of salsa and sauces, and topped with mini french fries. Price; priceless.

- Arrived in Mendoza. Met locals and some guys from Miami who work here and hung out at their apartment in a posh neighbourhood.

- have been in touh with Spin Magazine and will likely start filing stories for them as soon as I am settled and find a cameraman in B.aires. makign my user profile tmro

AGENDA AND OTHER LISTS

- buy tailored wool suit in market for cheap , and buy new sun glasses

- grapple with my desire for a shaved beard vs. the coolness of having a huge beard and the naggign thought that this is THE best time to grow face hair

- if shave is a yes, find a barber that will do a wet shave. (and maybe get a trim too)

- spend no money on Monday (new day; no money mondays)

- read more write lots more

YERBA; you probably dont know about Mate and the huge ritual Argentines have for it. It is tea time with a bunch of friends who sit around with thermos full of hot water and they pass around the Mate pot in a circle. Its an herbal tea. It tastes rather bitter but some people add sugar, and other spices to make it sweeter. Everyone has their own die hard rituals and it takes 24 hours to get the MAte ready for use for the first time - to cure it - which is what I am doing right now. Needless to say Yerba is a good way to make friends if you are a lonely traveler in Argentina, or Uruguay.

Salta'd

2009-03-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

Last night a few friends and I went grocery shopping, here in Salta, a city at the northern end of vast Argentina. We bought four nice sized steaks and three bottles of red wine for under 10 dollars. Then we walked into the Plaza market and somehow got sucked into a casino; it took about half an hour to learn how to play the poker game, and about an hour to lose our 20 pesos each. Salta is fast and beautiful; I've probably had too much of the street meat, but it is all so good.

Not sure the plan yet, but might be headed to Mendoza tomorrow before finally arriving in Buenos Aires. But it's not exactly on the way: it's a 20 hour bus ride from Salta, and then once I leave Mendoza, it would be another 20 hours to BA. Yeah wine country and al of that, sounds good, but haven't really decided if its better to go solo and see all the other citites in between; Che is born in Rosario, Cordoba sounds exciting and uni-town-ish, etc...: these British friends of mine are going and I'm trying to figure out the plan.

Sad to have left behind the relative 3rd worldness of Bolivia and Peru now that it's gone. Trite to say it, but I am chastened from not having bought enough cheap Al Paca sweaters (only one, which I don't like much now) and cool leather goods. I didn't realize how different, and much more expensive this world would be. Getting into Chile felt like leaving the circus. All a sudden the roads are paved and the waiters expect tip.

Last week (I think), I travelled through the salt desert in Bolivia. At times, the vast white vista would reflect the sky (a thin layer of rain) and there would be nothing to tell you you weren't floating in heaven, except for the ground under your feet or the magic, enormous horizon of dead volcanoes. After a day of that you get into Salvador Dali territory (literaly, you see some places that he used as background for his work)... giant stone trees, smooth valleys and plateaux of brown sand desert, ornamented with stone obelisks and snow peaked volcano. (No hundred foot tall elephant nor gigantic eggs, however...)

Slept in salt hotel on outskirts of this tiny, beautiful city in the desert, where we bought wine (of course) and played cards with the other tourists, after taking in the sun set.... At night the skies twinkled as in Disney movies. The stars on and off like millions of beacons... bright... Orion the only one I can recognize (I think actually, someone told me, that the Southern Hemi stars are completely different...all except Orion and his bright, definitive Beetlejuice.. maybe his dogs - Cerebus...?....) The southern cross, what looks like teh big dipper upside down. I remember the second night walking 20 metres away from the camp and being completely lost in the sky for about 20 minutes. Later when the moon was out it was easier to walk...

I even met a Basque photo journalist, working freelance in San Pedro de Atacama (the entrance, beautiful, city ion Chile from the Bolivia border..I stayed one night...). He was a doc filmmaker in this town once and now was back to take some pictures, of all things, of the stars from Atacama observatory. Good life, good job, makes me wonder...

Have been trying to figure out the plan for summer. It was my One Month anniversary for taking off a few days ago (St Pats day I think...) Go sailing the Baltic? Live and learn on some boat which I have no idea how to work, but defintely would love to learn how... or get a job writing or something in Canada...(I am waiting on an offer, I hope, from the Montreal english daily.) Anyway: anyway: anyway: it's taking up a lot of thought.

BOOK REPORT:

just finished Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO. It is the most beautifully written, and yet awfully depressing, book I have read. A masterpiece work for its narrative - the plot takes place in one day, the day of the dead, in a small Mexican town, in the life of an ex-British consul...but it occupies a Shakespearian sort of eternity. I think it is mostly a Adam and Eve type story (the woman's name is Yvonne...) an attempt to sneak back in the garden. Or a lament of the fallen state of things (love, his own life). But what is lost is lost.

Lowry is either a Canadian or a Brit, depending who you ask. Canada in the book occupies the role of New Eden. The Mexico is hell (or not Mexico, but the self imposed vision, mythology, of the Mexico, is... I do it too, I have been doing it, mythologizing the difference of the people here... my hell. My heaven.)

The fact that 300 pages are here weaved and the plot lasts only hours, and stays stressful, interesting, tense, till the end, is wonderful, impressive. When traveling you are supposed to give up your books once read...but I love the verse so much I might read again. Or I might retype the parts I really loved to learn the poetry of them, to realize maybe how to do it... (a trick picked up from Hunter S Thompson, who used to retype Melville. And Melville probably did for Shakespeare...and so on... "you can see where the great tide has finally receded"...)

TODAY: gondola ride up Salta's volcano, bus station, laundry, and relax and write.

La Peace

2009-03-14T06:07:00.000-07:00

Safe in Uyuni, and 1 hour away from embarking on a 3 day tour of the salt flats, via hired Jeep.

See you soon

T

Going, good

2009-03-08T14:54:00.000-07:00

Going to Bolivia tonight via Puno; maybe I will meet some of Che's assassins. Lots of news coming from Bolivia, especially with the new president and the naturalizing of the country's many resources, including the giant salt flats and gas reserves. (Bolivia is probably the most resource rich country in South America, but is definitely the poorest as far as the people go.)

Enough of this. Will write back once I have something to write about.

Last days in Cuzco - I think

2009-03-07T06:37:00.001-08:00

Well, last night was an OK little party here at the hostal,met some nice people and a good time, but it's just the same bunch of rowdy Australians everywhere I go, so I think it's packing up time once again.

I want to leave to Puno tomorrow or tonight and somehow hop on another bus from there to Copacabana, which is Bolivia. Both towns are located on the shore of Lake Titicaca, the world's highest "navigable" lake, and where the first Incas were created, as the myth goes.

Anyway: initially I was going to be traveling with a Argentine friend (is name is either Diego or Martin, depending on what time of day you ask him, and if you are a woman or not), but I think we fought last night (I say "think" because its impossible to understand Argentine spanish, especially Cordovan, and all I remember is him grimacing at me as he went to his hostal room and shut off the lights. Anyway, he is asking me to lend him cash and also to wait until wednesday to leave. Both requests are not appealing, and not doing either.

However, neither does going solo to La Paz, a city of much turbulence and kidnappings, sound very good. Well, I may just end up waiting for him at Copa and go from there. We are supposed to head through Bolivia and to the north of Argentina to his home. Solo's not the worst and I definitely won't be partying solo when I get anywhere. (Maybe I just won't go out..get a nice hotel with a desk and a view). I'll just have to make new friends. Easy.

---

It is 9:45 am and Frances, the Cusquenan who works the desk here at the hostal, just bought me a giant beer. I started by saying no thanks, but... "When in Rome," I guess...

Hot water

2009-03-04T15:02:00.000-08:00

I am here at the Presidente in Agua Calientes, a village at the base of a network of old and new mountains, including Machu Pichu, that surround it. The town is divided in three by a set of train tracks and the great brown river Urubamba. The prices are jacked and the rum is very expensive; I am surrounded by about a thousand other trekkers who just saw the hidden city too.

When the blue Peru Rail trains arent passing by, the train tracks become pedestrian - children play tug of war on opposite tracks with sticks, the indian workers haul heavy cables and cement mix up and down. It was sunny today and it rained heavily for about an hour at 2. I ate pizza and got sick from the lemonade.

My last four days were hard and my knees are killing me. But I have spent the last few hours exploring the town and sitting on my hotel patio overlooking the river with my new friend Pete, who is 70 years old and who walked the trail with me for four days straight - amazingly, really, since I almost died myself, it felt like.

Today I saw Machu Pichu. We woke at 4 am and ate oatmeal and drank coca leaf tea before setting off to teh check point, which opened at 5:30. I raced down the old Inca trail of slippery stones and terrifying cliff to make it to the sun gate by about 8 ish. I enjoyed the historic and post card vista for a while, on my own for a bit, but my knees were so destroyed from the days before that the climb down to the old complex of Machu Pichu took longer than it did for the peach faced and white haired tourists who had come for just the day by bus or train -- arguing about the altitude as they rub sun tan lotion over their pug faces. Oh well.

Day two was absolutelty the most challenging. From the camp, it is about 1100 metres up to reach the first pass.. which is well over 4100 metres above sea level. A steep up, where I amused myself by speaking to the mountains. For the most part I was all alone and chewed coca leaf. The problem was I didnt drink any water, and as the day was over, I was drenched by the Andes rain and well dehydrated. Once you get to the top, it is all down for two more hours, and you havent even eaten lunch yet. The down is the hardest, they say. But the climb up was mystical and tortuous, like something from Dante or some bad routine of Naked Lunch.

Peter is a good man. He wanted to get a good picture of the Urumbamba before getting on his train. But I knew he liked rum and decided it would be better to first settle on the patio of my hostel and have a few before exploring.

"Theres this poem, and in it, the man wants to learn all there is to know. So he buys a complete set of the Encycolpedia Britannica and reads it from A to Z," Pete is telling as the river rushes past. "Except the only thing is, once he finishes he dies, --- ´and the only ones who feasted upon his knowledge were the worms"

Here is a man who admits hes got tonnes of books in him. But given that hes an engineer and, once retired was diagnosed a dislexic, he admits he cant write adamn word. Now, I tell "well thats why Im here... I guess. I can write, or at least, I WANT to. But I dont have a book in me."

I bought these four screaming happy kids ice cream and let them play with my camera after Pete and I watched them play tug of war on the tracks for a bit. Immediately I felt a tidal wave, sort of, shift between me and this city.

Pete sailed across the Atlantic on his own. He is trading in his London house to buy a nice new sail boat and is going to sail the Baltic in May and then in September go somewhere very south from Liverpool, his home. Im not sure, but he firmly shook my hand and said Im welcome as crew, for definite, if I wanted.

My friends, although this trip has been more work than play so far, I am glad to be here. Experience is life.

"I dont care if if I die tomorrow, but I plan on using life as much as I can until I do." Peter Marksman, 70. I hope you live, but if you dont, I hope you die in yer boots.

2009-02-28T13:57:00.000-08:00

So it took me hours but finally some pictures are up! check em: http://picasaweb.google.com/tobydalrymple/SouthAmericaVol1LimaTrujillosCuzco#

Now just getting ready for Machu Picchu (leave tomorrow a.m.) and a bus to Copacabana, Bolivia, when I get back!

love T

Cuzco

2009-02-27T14:44:00.000-08:00

Altitude sickness, sure I've got it, but it beats living in Ottawa.

I think.

Cuzco is way high up in the Andes and is a colonial style city. All the streets are cobble stone. The buildings adobe and ceramic-tiled. In the main centre there's some astoundingly rich and imposing cathedrals. Spectacular mountains of the Andes are visible in ever direction.

I do hate blogging, if only because I know for a fact I wouldn't read my own blog, especially if I wasn't me. Maybe if I could figure out how to find time to upload pics you guys would be happier to waste your time with me.

In Sunday I leave for Machu Pichu. Its a five day hike on foot to the sacred and lost city of the Inkas. Going to pick up a bag of coca leaves on the way to keep the spirit and teh body in good shape for the even steeper climes (about 3,500 km above sea at some points...)

Coca tea (Mate de coca): drink it constantly to stay fresh and feeling well. When ever my breath begins to shorten and I feel as if I was hungover - the sickness - I hop into a little cafe and grab a cup for about s/1. 50 (40 cents).

Vendors on the street sell you grocery bag sized packages for less. And you chew it. You can even buy San Pedro, in cactus form, or in pure, mescalin powder, at some of the markets for about 2 bucks US. I haven't tried it, and not sure if I want to cope with the psychadelics..but you can do a spirit journey here and its a guided trip.

Beer here costs s/. 2.50 (90 cents). There's a chinese restaurant every ten feet in parts. There ex-president was Japonese. Going to an afro-reggae dance club later.

(want to get out of) Lima , Feb, 24

2009-02-24T08:10:00.000-08:00

I woke up Sunday needing to get out of Lima. Not sure why I had the feeling, but real fed up with the hostel, some of the hostelers, the bustle and noise of Miraflores, etc... Spoke with a good dude here, and he told me to go to Trujillos for a day.

So I planned my trip a bit with him, had a few pints with some of the hsotelers and hopped on a 8 hour night bus to the city, about 500 km North of Lima.

(had the strangest sleep and dreams in my life...)

Lots of ruins there to see, from Chimu and Moche civilizations. Really amazing stuff actually. WIll post pics up on Picassa or Flickr, soon hopefully (once I find my charger for the laptop).

Came back the same night by night bus and now have my last day here in Lima before headed to cuzco.

I think i might go to Larco mar today and swim in the pacific. I havent yet, and might not have the chance for a while.

From CUZCO after MACHU PICHU I think I am headed to Copcabana and La Paz, in Bolivia, and hopefully down to see the mines at Potosi.

Then I will bus all the way down Argentina and perhaps slice through some parts of Chile to get to Buenos Aires. I really am very excited to get to BA ..... I want a city to live in for a while, and find a job. Order, and expats.

Lima Day 3

2009-02-20T16:10:00.001-08:00

Much to write about, but not like this. Not sure if I really want to be a blogger.

I have a lot of pictures, and will post them or a link soon.

Note: North America has money and order. Peru has happiness and chaos.

2009-02-19T21:25:00.001-08:00

Arrival - Lima, Peru. Thursday Feb. 19, 2009.

2009-02-19T15:40:00.000-08:00

I am here at the Loki Hostel in Lima, Peru. There is a bar stocked with Peruvian beer and Pisco, a stone roof-top patio and a view of La Parque Kennedy, on the busiest intersection in the Miraflores backpackers district.

The air is thick, the beer is cheap.

Last time this week, I was in Penetang, Ontario, racing by snowmobile at one-hundred miles and hour on a frozen lake, blanketed with slush and water. That was my goodbye to the small town where I spent most my youth. I could barely breath as I latched on to the sides of myfriend taking me over the lake at such crazy speeds.

There are two interesting things I can tell you about Lima so far. One is a personal story, and the other is very large, and journalistic, and I don't think I can quiet explain it yet. So let me start with the small story first, and maybe after I will try with the other more daunting story to etch.

I arrived at Lima airport about an hour before midnight. Lima has no buildings higher than two-stories, for the most part - but it is a vast and expansive city and houses about 8 million habitantes. The magic of this squat city reveals itself from the air: stretched out over the miles and miles of space are what appear to millions of yellow Christmas lights, all part of some gigantic, magic christian web.

The dark mountains - there are three big ones forming a triangle in the area and hundreds of smaller ones, are visible in the sky at night only from their pure blackness that juts them apart from the twinkling lights.

Jesus, I don't really have the energy to go into all of this. But let me at least try and get the basics down:

I was greeted at the airport by a friend of a friend's back in Ottawa. His name is Mario, and he is an architect and professor here in the city. He was wearing a red cape and denim hat and we walked about 15 minutes to get into his old Volkswagon hatchback.

Driving to his place in San Isidro, a relatively wealthy and residential enclave, Mario keeps his hand above the horn - a ceaseless background noise here - and the Volks in the middle of both lanes, so that he is cruising with the yellow line dividing the car in two.

We get to his little pad on Pezet, where I drop off my bags in a small room with ceramic tile, this is where I am too sleep for the next ten days. Or at least thats what I was told. This morning I woke up and decided Id rather live in the relative comfort of a hostel and have lots of people around me, so while Mario was at work I packed my bags up again, left him $20 and headed to the Loki. I feel bad, since he was very kind, but the immortal - immoral - words of Miller ultimately assured me I had made the right choice: "I am alive. Morally I am free."

My comfort over the world's feelings, that will be my first rule.

And that is sort of it for the first item. I coudl tell you more, but I doubt it makes much difference at this point: we are just getting to know eachother, and me this blog, and I will save you all some of the details.

Finallly: the broad sketch of what I see as perhaps a dispatch from Peru:

There are Casinos at almost every corner here in Miraflores, filled with the emphysemic and gansters. There are babies selling cigarettes and 10 year old boys shining shoes. No public transportation, and thousands of taxis. I haven't seen one old man driving the cabs, nearly all of them are my age or perhaps ten years older.

That is not so much an idea but a spalsh of details that I think will all fit in, somehow, to something more tangible, one day.