Rottin' in Denmark

If you can't beat 'em, poem

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:55:54 -0800

One of the most fun things I did in Sydney was go to a poetry slam. I'm not really into poetry (other than a brief Leonard Cohen written-word phase that coincided with my first week at secular summer camp), and I don't really know anything about it. Most of the poets gave the impression that they learned everything they knew from watching 'Slam'.

At the end of the night, we got the bright idea to attend the next week and read something up front. We ended up not going (due to a scheduling conflict with pilates. Yes, we are granola-sipping arugula-monsters), but I ended up writing something, so I thought I'd share it here.

To the girl I pretended to have a crush on in eighth grade

To the girl I pretended to have a crush on in eighth grade:

I’m sorry I pretended to like you.

In hindsight, it was a bad way to get your boyfriend to notice me.

Your name was Emma Something.

You looked like the fifth Abba.

Not that I knew who Abba was in eighth grade.

You were from the Midwest, and had a smile as wide and unnoticed as Montana.

You weren’t as popular as your hair color or breast size would suggest.

Your late-stage puberty made the straight boys uncomfortable.

I thought you were fabulous.

Not that I used the word fabulous in eighth grade.

I imagined us reading magazines side-by-side on couches at a ranch.

You would look over at me in the firelight

and grimace.

But, like, a happy grimace.

I decided to notice you so no one would notice me.

What’s the deal with Emma Something?

I asked a girl you weren’t really friends with.

Chosen for her likelihood to interpret and rebroadcast my inquiry.

On Tuesday a circle of girls terminated their conversation when I walked by.

It was working.

On Wednesday a boy said, ‘you like her, huh?’

But I mostly wanted to talk about your boyfriend.

I put your yearbook photo on the inside cover of my notebook.

As inconspicuous as a skyscraper in a hayfield.

I made sure to protest one time too many when accused.

Suddenly I was the pervert instead of the sissy.

It was ingenious.

Not that I knew what ingenious meant in the eighth grade.

Not long later, I stopped seeing you in the halls.

Even though I knew the routes your boyfriend took to all his classes.

You were avoiding me.

The next semester we were assigned to sit next to each other.

I left my notebook in my backpack.

I tried to talk.

I said, ‘Where are you from?’

You said, ‘Oh God.’

I’m sorry I pretended to have a crush on you in eighth grade.

Maybe we could have been friends.

Instead we sat, silent, next to each other.

You didn’t look over at me

though you definitely grimaced.

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Hong Kong: Dragon's Back

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:49:32 -0800

You can tell I really liked Hong Kong

I did literally no preparation whatsoever before I arrived

I just woke up early every morning

and Googled 'stuff to do hong kong' over breakfast

The first cool thing I'd find, I'd jot down the transport coords

and head out

That's how I found this trail called 'The Dragon's Back', on the south tip of Hong Kong island

I didn't know how long it was, or what I should bring or whatever.

It just showed up on a list of 'Asia's most beautiful hikes'

It was my first-ever hike in Asia, actually, so I have nothing to compare

But after five hours, four of them hopelessly lost, I'm pro-it

It was one of those trails where your legs are trembling for like 2 hours afters

This 'go for altitude!' compulsion I have whenever I travel is reaching fetish levels.

This is where I started to get lost. Went downhill. Signs in Chinese.

I ended up in a weird village on the water

Where I talked to a Hong Kong lady about running errands by boat

'We have filipino helpers who do that for us,' she said. 'We're too lazy otherwise.'

There were tiny little sidewalks, and all the houses had vicious, barky dogs.

There was a little tidal bay where two dobermans chased after me barking

Which was the scariest animal-related experience of my life

I wish I had a filipino helper who knew how to kung fu those Resident Evil-ass dogs

I was hella rattled after the dog thing, and went back to familiar territory

I kept looking at the view, like 'fuck those fucking dogs oh my God'

My legs all shaking and shit

I ended up on a highway, and hopped on the first bus I saw.

Which took me to a place called Stanley. Dogless views for miles.

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Hong Kong: No one ever writes children's books about big cities

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:57:41 -0800

Hong Kong is partly horizontal, but mostly vertical

People wash their clothes like we do, but they dry them differently

Other than that, they mostly shop, eat and drive places

We have unicorns, they have dragons. A giant lizard is more imaginative than a horse with a horn.

Buying food goes like this: Point, boil, eat from stick

Hong Kong isn't the city that never sleeps, that's New York.

Hong Kong is the city that sleeps all day, then stays up all night being sweaty and ravenous

One day it rained

And I took a boat

Later that day it was sunny

And the buildings dried outside like people's clothes

Sometimes people reflect on things, and sometimes cities do too

The sun doesn't make it into the canyons, but the wind does

When there are hills, maps make long distances look short

Signs are sometimes hard to read, even when they're in your own language

Cities are great when they have lots of ways for you to look at them

In people we call this narcissism, but in places we call it scenery

The moon is the only star you can see

Because there's too much light during the dark

Cities are full of people who live there

But also people who used to live there.

Cemeteries are where we put the latter

And buildings are where we put the former

Buildings are shinier, and warmer on the inside

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Hong Kong: Ma On Shan

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:43:40 -0800

On my way back to Denmark, I stopped off in Hong Kong for three days

On my last day there, I rented a bike and peaced out to the suburbs

And ended up accidentally biking to the top of a mountain

I was biking along a river, and the road turned inland and started uphill. 'Fair enough', I thought.

Next thing you know I'm in my lowest gear, huffing like an Indiana preteen.

I had no idea where I was going, but I figured, 'well, I've come this far'.

This is the same logic that got Hitler into Stalingrad

Two hours of biking and one hour of clamboring later, and I was at the ridgeline.

There was a weird tinnyness in the air that I couldn't figure out

Finally, I realized that all the other hikers were listening to music on their cell phone speakers

Hong Kong is pure urban porn from above

It's all skinny highrises next to untouched countryside.

If you gotta occupy a small island, that's the way to do it

The skyline came out to greet me on the bike ride back

And the river was misty with ... OK, pollution.

This was the second time in Hong Kong that aimless wandering took me the top of a mountain

If altitude were travel's sole success criteria, I'd be Winston Fucking Churchill

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I love countries with a surplus of used bookstores

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:41:50 -0800

Yesterday I bought a collection of Bernard Shaw one-act plays (fuck Dan Brown, plays are the best things to read on airplanes) and something called 'The Jewish Century'. Together they cost 8 Aus-bucks.

The Jewish Century starts out like this:

Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefits of individuals, nuclear families and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.

The Jewish part I'm not so sure about, or at least I haven't read up to the author's justification of it, but the rest of that is a great description of the social history of this century. Eight Aussie bucks, man.

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Security theater

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:31:35 -0800

A more profane, less articulate version of this paragraph occurs to me whenever I find myself untying my shoes in front of a conveyor belt:

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.
Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event: we confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning. If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.

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Biking up a mountain

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:58:19 -0800

I woke up early, in a conquering mood

Rental bike: Check

Overcarb breakfast: Check

In shape enough to bike 1,200 meters up into the Tasman freshness: Unlikely

The first hour of the journey went pretty well, and my legs and mind were full

of 'I can do this'-ness

The trail got gradually steeper, though

So that each meter was harder than the last

The last two hours was pure 'Are we fucking there yet?'

I wobbled around the top for a bit

Trying to take in the views between panting and sweating

After a while, I just got cold and hungry

It was amazing up there, though.

And the viewing hut looked hella Flintstones, for some reason

What's that song lyric? 'Everything looks perfect from far away'?

Former prison colonies are best viewed from altitude, yes.

That's a grain silo there, my racist cab driver told me.

And this is the view down the backside of the mountain.

Mike: 1, Mountain: 0

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Hobart, Tasmania

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:23:10 -0800

Hobart might not be the biggest city in the world, or the happeningest

But damn, it's gotta be the greenest

And possibly the tactlessest

Everything is lush and tawny, like it's just rained

As opposed to ... 'international'?

It's like the American frontier has been resurrected, but with marsupials.

After being all equatorial the last few weeks, it was nice to be back at the slantier latitudes

With altitude, even

The sun blasted in my window every morning like a SWAT team.

Even the vegetation knows you'll never score a visa here.

I got way lost on a bike ride, and ended up ... here. Wherever this is.

All roads lead to the water, though, and I eventually made it back.

The whole island is nonstop postcard. I don't think the animals even poop.

And people don't actually need to hang their clothes out. It's just so your pics have a foreground.

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Segregated education in America

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:11:01 -0800

Somehow I managed to find a cafe on Crown St. here in Sydney with a toddler-sized stack of mid-decade Harper's magazines. I spent pretty much the whole evening there, and the most striking article I read (the only one, actually, that I finished. Harper's is interminable) was this one on the new realities of the American education system.

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.
[...]
The school board of another district, this one in New York State, referred to "the diversity" of its student population and "the rich variations of ethnic backgrounds." But when I looked at the racial numbers that the district had reported to the state, I learned that there were 2,800 black and Hispanic children in the system, 1 Asian child, and 3 whites. Words, in these cases, cease to have real meaning; or, rather, they mean the opposite of what they say.

This is actually pretty wise, and kind of funny. You never hear anyone call a group of people 'diverse' if it's, like, Swedes mixing with Belgians.

Then you get to what this is really about:

The dollars on both sides of the equation have increased since then, but the discrepancies between them have remained. The present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island. The present New York City level is, indeed, almost exactly what Manhasset spent per pupil eighteen years ago, in 1987, when that sum of money bought a great deal more in services and salaries than it can buy today. In dollars adjusted for inflation, New York City has not yet caught up to where its wealthiest suburbs were a quarter-century ago.
[...]
In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. "This," he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, "would not happen to white children."

I usually roll my eyes at that sort of thing, just because I don't think the government of the U.S., or really any country, is particularly racist. They un-care about all poor people equally, my argument usually goes. But man, it's hard to argue with this shit:

A tall black student, for example, told me that she hoped to be a social worker or a doctor but was programmed into "Sewing Class" this year. She also had to take another course, called "Life Skills," which she told me was a very basic course—"a retarded class," to use her words—that "teaches things like the six continents," which she said she'd learned in elementary school.
When I asked her why she had to take these courses, she replied that she'd been told they were required, which as I later learned was not exactly so. What was required was that high school students take two courses in an area of study called "The Technical Arts," and which the Los Angeles Board of Education terms "Applied Technology."
At schools that served the middle class or upper-middle class, this requirement was likely to be met by courses that had academic substance and, perhaps, some relevance to college preparation. At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the technical-arts requirement could be fulfilled by taking subjects like residential architecture, the designing of commercial structures, broadcast journalism, advanced computer graphics, a sophisticated course in furniture design, carving and sculpture, or an honors course in engineering research and design. At Fremont High, in contrast, this requirement was far more often met by courses that were basically vocational and also obviously keyed to low-paying levels of employment.
Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-dressing.

Fucking hair-dressing, dude.

Two things occurred to me while I was reading this, probably not the two things that were supposed to.

1. This would make a fantastic TV show.
Where the fuck is Hollywood on this? If you read the whole article, there's so much drama here waiting to be mined. Quantitative test scores! Beleaguered principals! Newbie teachers! Kids struggling against the system!

I'm not talking the kind where the magic white lady reforms the puffy-jacketed academic ruffians through Hamlet and a personal-growth arc ('No... they were teaching me'.). Why is 'The Wire' the only artistic work to genuinely confront this issue in the last decade?

2. Why am I reading about this in Harper's?
All of these cities, presumably, have a newspaper. Harper's cites a number of quantitative indicators (enrollment, budgets, dropout rates) that should have raised red flags in any newsroom with a pulse. Dude from Harper's strolls into these schools, chats with the kids, leaves and writes it up. Journalists: You live in these cities. Where the fuck are you?

Overall, the whole thing just made me think of my University of London's professor's old catchphrase, 'You can blame people for their choices, but you can't blame them for their options.' Maybe the American version should be 'Don't talk shit on hairdressers. It's better than being a seamstress.'

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Hollywood depicts end of world with characteristic subtlety, class

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:42:32 -0800

Did anyone else die laughing when they saw this image from '2012' in the New York Times?

It's like Thomas Kinkade started taking commissions from end-timers.

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