1:00 AM has never looked better to people below the equator. Indeed, tonight even we here in the southernmost city of the world (I think...) will be celebrating the release of the final thrilling and chilling Harry Potter saga. The local Woolstone's bookstore in the god-forsaken mall I keep visiting for internet service, is holding a Potter Party for all willing participants, including mostly young children who will be up far past their bed-times for the 1:01AM release of the novel. Suffice it to say, I will NOT be attending; I'm excusing myself from this incredible opportunity because not only will I have to be waking up five hours later for a full 12hr day of baboon-herding in the rain and 40MPH winds, but in my haste to stay under the weight limit I forgot to pack my Potter regalia. Again.
So, there you go. THe baboons have NO idea what's going to hit them tonight when wild Potter fans confuse them for Dobby and start throwing socks at them. I sympathize because I get that all the time.
And where in the world has the summer gone?
Friday, July 20, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
The weather up here is fiiiiiiiiine
I just got back from my physical and would like you all to know that since June 2006, I have grown one inch, lost nine and a half pounds, and gotten thirty-five percent sexier. I don't know how they come up with these totals, but you've gotta trust science. For those who want the math, I am up from seventy-one and a half inches to seventy-two and a half inches. I have waited my whole life for this day. Don't ruin it.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Tuesday July 17 in Addis Ababa
Yesterday afternoon in Addis Ababa brought a long-awaited pause tot he yearly onslaught of rain, the tail end of the monsoons crawling across the Indian Ocean. If you check the weather services here they'll more or less always carry the same message: it will rain, heavily, in the highlands, while triple digit heat continues to strike the nation's periphery. Addis was built in a valley in the Shoan region at the turn of the century. Its high altitude allowed the Emperor Menelik's military a strategic advantage over its many potential enemies--rebellious peasants, southern tribes, Western colonizers--all of whom would share the dismay of Modern Addis difficult terrain, poor draining system, and lack of a source of water.
But on Tuesday the sun came out. More than the occasional oasis in a day filled with gray skies, muddy half-completed roads, and sudden thunderous showers, it actually didn't rain all day. But the mood in the old restaurant/cafe "The Tea Room," a colonial pea-green building along Haile Selassie Avenue, in the old city center known as Piassa, couldn't have contrasted the weather anymore. Two years ago, opposition leaders were imprisoned for inciting a rebellion. Their incarceration followed months of civil unrest, demonstrations broken up by tear gas, mass arrests and (according to Amnesty international) the slaughter of 200 civilians by government troops. The whole carnage and its surrounding atmosphere of fear and distrust, along with the arrests of several journalists and the looming conflict with Somalia--which would make the headlines for 2006 as America's War on Terror came to the Horn of Africa, bringing back the Nationalist sentiment of the Eritrean War of 98 and briefly putting an end to tribalist anti-government sentiment in the city's capital.
But not today, Tuesday, noon, lunchtime. The little twenty year old television hung in the corner of Tea Room as our waiter, who I thought bore an interesting resemblence to Buddy Holly, but who, my father said, was a longtime friend, like many other working-class Ethiopians, a mild-mannered boyish fifty year old who had been in the same job in the same place since the Revolution. The others in the room belonged to a city that had rejected the ruling party's bid by a stunning landslide of some 196 of 197 seats. As the opposition prepared to take over, with its Deputy and most charismatic figure poised to take on the difficult administrative role of Mayor in a breadbasket surrounded by government forces who, despite their lack of popularity in much of non-Northern Ethiopia, where there tribal heritage was often not shared and never appreciated, still wielded one of the strongest armed forces in Africa. Just ask the Somalis. Meanwhile, the city refused to collect municipal taxes in the two months in 2005 between the election results and the imprisonment of opposition leaders. Today those same leaders, who share blame for the carnage as they incited the people to rise up--their chairman even went to America and claimed to a bloodthirsty diaspora, raging irrationally against the government from the murky outposts of exile--those same leaders have finally acknowledged it.
Only the letter they signed, the day after (Monday), the court sentenced them to life imprisonment, contradicted everything they had been saying all along. The government, they held, was racist and genocidal (the latter absurd charged was reciprocated in court, shortly before its repeal), they were guilty of everything under the sun and, in these months, the rain. But while Ethiopia continues to stagnate economically, signs of its slow infrastructural progress spring up everyday. And while the utterly shameful inefficiency of the state could be blamed on its hybrid socio-capitalist technocrat-run bureacracy, the freakish state has little to do with the day-to-day incompetences of individuals in private and public sectors, or the infuriating iniquities of class and tribal relations. Everything works on nepotism and no opposition has ever been coherent enough to even suggest real change. As soon as anyone coalesces, rivalries and defections begin to take place providing fodder for the daily papers and bitterly foreshadowing the events of this day.
"There are some honorable people among them," my father, who never truly supported any opposition, mumbles resignedly. He calls a few friends, discusses the details of the letter, which just about everyone of them signed, and which took on full responsibility, while begging pathetically for pardon from a government surely beaming with the triumphalism of a wary boxer in the tenth round of a grueling match against an undersized opponent. "They have shamed us all," he adds, hanging up.
As we leave the Tea Room in a hurry, each of us of to work, an elderly gentleman, silver haired and fair-skinned, thin and well-dressed in a Manchester suit and an auburn-tinted scarf, strolls over to the two of us from the adjacent table. He had waved briefly to my father when we entered the room and was now coming to shake his hand. He told an anecdote about the Emperor, as people who still feel they belong to that age, before Marxism and revolution, before nationalized property and NGOs, before ethnic federations, but not before ethnic conflicts or border tensions, tend to enjoy doing. But his voice is animated, his narrative steady. He seems sure of himself, like he's merely going through his oft-practiced routine. My father's dissappointment and hurried manner betrays the stress of the last weeks--he is here to cheer him up.
The Emperor has come to a graduation ceremony, where he hands out diplomas to young men, calling out their names and their father's name. (There are no family names in Ethiopia, so the biblical convention of so-and-so the son of Zebedee persists while most similar cultures have given in to Western naming traditions, among other kinds). One young man's name translates to "return to Gonder," his father's name translates to "the crown." Gondar is where the crown, that is the Imperial seat, remained throughout the Middle Ages. You can still see the ruins of castles there today. The Emperor, of Shoan Dynasty and a Harrar background, refuses to hand over the diploma, stating, in his absurdly poised way, "it will not return," prompting my father's laughter. The joke loses everything in translation. Not only linguistic translation. The concerns of his story and the style in which it is told--the location of the crown, the oral form of anecdote conveying feudal myths and the down-to-earth humor humanizing those myths--belong to another age.
As we left the building, I was told that this man was a premiere Ethiopian author, a detective story novelist, with some thrity books to his name. But, my father adds, with a sympathetic smile and a nostalgic shake of the head, "he is getting old..."
We drive through Mercato, the largest open-air market in Africa. The streets are lined with women crouching around clay grinders filled with berbere, a spice that brings life to just about every kind of Ethiopian cuisine. A few streets behind them is the center of the Tchat trade. This "mild hallucinegenic" is a legal narcotic somewhat similar in effect to speed. It makes people paranoid and incredibly ambitious, speeding up the mind, which it eventually leaves in a state of schizophrenic turbulence. Other side effects include dark-green tinted teeth and impotency. Of course, this is only if you take it everyday, which many people do. In this street, for example, the social problem, which originally came from the same spots int he Horn of Africa that the Ethiopian army patrols with a dynamic combination of brutality and professionalism, is on display in the form of dozens of young workers sitting on the sidewalks chewing all day. The other streets bear the faint smells of red spices, and garlic, the colorless shops are filled with people, each standing in front of a small square storefront beside barrels piled on top of one another, their sense of smell now completely impervious to the herbs around them.
We make our way to the statue of Abuna Petros. "Abuna," I then realized, must have the same origin as "Abbe," which, the character of th Abbe Faria in Dumas's "Count of Monte Cristo" taught me, during one of the many summer rainy seasons spent in Ethiopia with during my youths, perusing the abridged versions (I wasn't what one calls a "precocious reader") of various classics, meant some kind of priest. Petros was the "Papas" or "Pope" of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church who excommunicated every and any Ethiopian who cooperated with the Italian Occupation (1936-1940), one of the events that led to the Second World War. When the Italians asked Petros to lift the excommunications, he refused, and met the same fate as many educated Ethiopians who, branded by foreign degrees, wristwatches or eyeglasses were often thrown from airplanes or burned alive in their homes with their entire families. Petros' fate wasn't as gruesome, they merely stood him up against the wall of a clay house on an ordinary Addis Ababa street and machine-gunned him to death.
The spot where he was shot is marked bys everal stones, across the street from the white statue of the pious old man, which stands at the center of a little roundabout in the middle of Mercato. As we pass him, my father tells his story, one of his favorites, again. He then sighs and says, "and here we have politicians, supposedly tough guys, not clergy, begging for pardon from the fate of spending there last few years in jail, they're not even being asked to make a martyr's sacrifice." There are no more heroes, no more stories, no more pride. Only statues, myths and pardon requests.
But on Tuesday the sun came out. More than the occasional oasis in a day filled with gray skies, muddy half-completed roads, and sudden thunderous showers, it actually didn't rain all day. But the mood in the old restaurant/cafe "The Tea Room," a colonial pea-green building along Haile Selassie Avenue, in the old city center known as Piassa, couldn't have contrasted the weather anymore. Two years ago, opposition leaders were imprisoned for inciting a rebellion. Their incarceration followed months of civil unrest, demonstrations broken up by tear gas, mass arrests and (according to Amnesty international) the slaughter of 200 civilians by government troops. The whole carnage and its surrounding atmosphere of fear and distrust, along with the arrests of several journalists and the looming conflict with Somalia--which would make the headlines for 2006 as America's War on Terror came to the Horn of Africa, bringing back the Nationalist sentiment of the Eritrean War of 98 and briefly putting an end to tribalist anti-government sentiment in the city's capital.
But not today, Tuesday, noon, lunchtime. The little twenty year old television hung in the corner of Tea Room as our waiter, who I thought bore an interesting resemblence to Buddy Holly, but who, my father said, was a longtime friend, like many other working-class Ethiopians, a mild-mannered boyish fifty year old who had been in the same job in the same place since the Revolution. The others in the room belonged to a city that had rejected the ruling party's bid by a stunning landslide of some 196 of 197 seats. As the opposition prepared to take over, with its Deputy and most charismatic figure poised to take on the difficult administrative role of Mayor in a breadbasket surrounded by government forces who, despite their lack of popularity in much of non-Northern Ethiopia, where there tribal heritage was often not shared and never appreciated, still wielded one of the strongest armed forces in Africa. Just ask the Somalis. Meanwhile, the city refused to collect municipal taxes in the two months in 2005 between the election results and the imprisonment of opposition leaders. Today those same leaders, who share blame for the carnage as they incited the people to rise up--their chairman even went to America and claimed to a bloodthirsty diaspora, raging irrationally against the government from the murky outposts of exile--those same leaders have finally acknowledged it.
Only the letter they signed, the day after (Monday), the court sentenced them to life imprisonment, contradicted everything they had been saying all along. The government, they held, was racist and genocidal (the latter absurd charged was reciprocated in court, shortly before its repeal), they were guilty of everything under the sun and, in these months, the rain. But while Ethiopia continues to stagnate economically, signs of its slow infrastructural progress spring up everyday. And while the utterly shameful inefficiency of the state could be blamed on its hybrid socio-capitalist technocrat-run bureacracy, the freakish state has little to do with the day-to-day incompetences of individuals in private and public sectors, or the infuriating iniquities of class and tribal relations. Everything works on nepotism and no opposition has ever been coherent enough to even suggest real change. As soon as anyone coalesces, rivalries and defections begin to take place providing fodder for the daily papers and bitterly foreshadowing the events of this day.
"There are some honorable people among them," my father, who never truly supported any opposition, mumbles resignedly. He calls a few friends, discusses the details of the letter, which just about everyone of them signed, and which took on full responsibility, while begging pathetically for pardon from a government surely beaming with the triumphalism of a wary boxer in the tenth round of a grueling match against an undersized opponent. "They have shamed us all," he adds, hanging up.
As we leave the Tea Room in a hurry, each of us of to work, an elderly gentleman, silver haired and fair-skinned, thin and well-dressed in a Manchester suit and an auburn-tinted scarf, strolls over to the two of us from the adjacent table. He had waved briefly to my father when we entered the room and was now coming to shake his hand. He told an anecdote about the Emperor, as people who still feel they belong to that age, before Marxism and revolution, before nationalized property and NGOs, before ethnic federations, but not before ethnic conflicts or border tensions, tend to enjoy doing. But his voice is animated, his narrative steady. He seems sure of himself, like he's merely going through his oft-practiced routine. My father's dissappointment and hurried manner betrays the stress of the last weeks--he is here to cheer him up.
The Emperor has come to a graduation ceremony, where he hands out diplomas to young men, calling out their names and their father's name. (There are no family names in Ethiopia, so the biblical convention of so-and-so the son of Zebedee persists while most similar cultures have given in to Western naming traditions, among other kinds). One young man's name translates to "return to Gonder," his father's name translates to "the crown." Gondar is where the crown, that is the Imperial seat, remained throughout the Middle Ages. You can still see the ruins of castles there today. The Emperor, of Shoan Dynasty and a Harrar background, refuses to hand over the diploma, stating, in his absurdly poised way, "it will not return," prompting my father's laughter. The joke loses everything in translation. Not only linguistic translation. The concerns of his story and the style in which it is told--the location of the crown, the oral form of anecdote conveying feudal myths and the down-to-earth humor humanizing those myths--belong to another age.
As we left the building, I was told that this man was a premiere Ethiopian author, a detective story novelist, with some thrity books to his name. But, my father adds, with a sympathetic smile and a nostalgic shake of the head, "he is getting old..."
We drive through Mercato, the largest open-air market in Africa. The streets are lined with women crouching around clay grinders filled with berbere, a spice that brings life to just about every kind of Ethiopian cuisine. A few streets behind them is the center of the Tchat trade. This "mild hallucinegenic" is a legal narcotic somewhat similar in effect to speed. It makes people paranoid and incredibly ambitious, speeding up the mind, which it eventually leaves in a state of schizophrenic turbulence. Other side effects include dark-green tinted teeth and impotency. Of course, this is only if you take it everyday, which many people do. In this street, for example, the social problem, which originally came from the same spots int he Horn of Africa that the Ethiopian army patrols with a dynamic combination of brutality and professionalism, is on display in the form of dozens of young workers sitting on the sidewalks chewing all day. The other streets bear the faint smells of red spices, and garlic, the colorless shops are filled with people, each standing in front of a small square storefront beside barrels piled on top of one another, their sense of smell now completely impervious to the herbs around them.
We make our way to the statue of Abuna Petros. "Abuna," I then realized, must have the same origin as "Abbe," which, the character of th Abbe Faria in Dumas's "Count of Monte Cristo" taught me, during one of the many summer rainy seasons spent in Ethiopia with during my youths, perusing the abridged versions (I wasn't what one calls a "precocious reader") of various classics, meant some kind of priest. Petros was the "Papas" or "Pope" of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church who excommunicated every and any Ethiopian who cooperated with the Italian Occupation (1936-1940), one of the events that led to the Second World War. When the Italians asked Petros to lift the excommunications, he refused, and met the same fate as many educated Ethiopians who, branded by foreign degrees, wristwatches or eyeglasses were often thrown from airplanes or burned alive in their homes with their entire families. Petros' fate wasn't as gruesome, they merely stood him up against the wall of a clay house on an ordinary Addis Ababa street and machine-gunned him to death.
The spot where he was shot is marked bys everal stones, across the street from the white statue of the pious old man, which stands at the center of a little roundabout in the middle of Mercato. As we pass him, my father tells his story, one of his favorites, again. He then sighs and says, "and here we have politicians, supposedly tough guys, not clergy, begging for pardon from the fate of spending there last few years in jail, they're not even being asked to make a martyr's sacrifice." There are no more heroes, no more stories, no more pride. Only statues, myths and pardon requests.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
What I'm listening to...
I might be a bit behind on this, but I recently heard Feist's single "1234" on the radio, and totally liked it. Especially because there's a banjo (they're listed as an 'alternative' band if you're looking for a label that will provide you no information about the band). So I bought the album "The Reminder" and have really liked it so far (one listen through). I think they're already in a commercial of some sort though, and apparently at Starbucks, so it's not some sort of new discovery on my part, but I think she/they are really good. Here's a NYT review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/arts/music/13feis.html?ex=1184817600&en=8f005731fe70acde&ei=5070
Anyone else listening to this group?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/arts/music/13feis.html?ex=1184817600&en=8f005731fe70acde&ei=5070
Anyone else listening to this group?
Monday, July 16, 2007
It's Business Time!
For those of you who loved the Business Time song: I highly recommend checking out Flight of the Conchord on HBO. The network gave those two guys their own TV show, and its really funny. It's a really dry comedy that works their songs into different plot lines. TV-Links doesn't seem to have it, so maybe find someone with HBO On Demand. It's worth it - those guys are hilarious.
And now, the Chuck Klosterman Question of the Week, sticking with last week's theme of bodily mutilation:
And now, the Chuck Klosterman Question of the Week, sticking with last week's theme of bodily mutilation:
5. You meet your soul mate. However, there is a catch: Every three years, someone will break both of your soul mate's collarbones with a Crescent wrench, and there is only one way you can stop this from happening: You must swallow a pill that will make every song you hear--for the rest of your life--sound as if it's being performed by the band Alice in Chains. When you hear Creedence Clearwater Revival on the radio, it will sound (to your ears) like it's being played by Alice in Chains. If you see Radiohead live, every one of their tunes will sound like it's being covered by Alice in Chains. When you hear a commercial jingle on TV, it will sound like Alice in Chains; if you sing to yourself in the shower, your voice will sound like deceased Alice vocalist Layne Staley performing a capella (but it will only sound this way to you).
Would you swallow the pill?
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