What I got in India

Two things I want to hold on to from India:

1. The day a group of villagers let me help with their work. I helped them carry huge hay-bales, which you balance on top of your head. A giggly girl called Lali, about 12 or 14, who could carry the hay much better than me, kept calling me over to make me carry her loads. She was very bold and fearless.

2. In Mysore, I started thinking about buying new sandles, because they have good ones there for a few dollars, and my current ones are falling apart in two places. But my friend Annabelle said don’t buy new ones, you can get your current ones fixed by the cobblers who work in the streets. It wasn’t until a few days later, in Mangalore, that I acted on this. An old man fixed my sandles with amazing skills and speed; the amount he charged was basically nothing in my currency, and he was surprised that I wanted to pay more. The rickshaw drivers nearby seemed to find this very funny. I had to walk past that spot three more times that day, and each time the old cobbler looked at me through the crowd, smiling and making the polite Indian greeting with his hand.

I am back now in “the West” - well, Singapore aiport actually. The horrible resource wastage and pointless luxury goods make me feel sad, so I need to remind myself of the good things I have seen.

Oxford to Mumbai

Leaving Oxford for quite a long spell - 7 or 8 weeks, I think - I have strange feelings of loss. I still don’t know how to interpret these internal machinations, but sometimes I think it’s just because the passing of time makes me sad. Things rush by me, into the void of the past… disappearing over the edge of the waterfall, never to return. Time, the great thief.

Or maybe these feelings are just because I have to decide what to do. I am reaching a fork in the road, Oxford or Australia, and whatever I choose to do will leave another whole life undone. Making this temporary trip from Oxford to Adelaide foreshadows the bigger choice that must come sooner or later (probably sooner), and reminds me that I always have to choose.

The American Pilot was only the dramatic role I’ve ever emotionally engaged with, and leaving that behind, too, has given me a feeling of loss. I never really had an articulation, a description, or an analysis of who my character was - but somehow that made him much more real. Jason Reinhardt, Officer in the United States Air Force. He was a person I became very close to, then parted from, and will never see again. And to compound the emotion, part of him was part of me.

Last night I said goodbye to Oriana and caught the bus to Heathrow. I didn’t set off all on my own: Frogencito, little frog, came with me in my backpack. But then, rather than entering the strange capsule of air travel as expected, I entered another capsulte, almost equally strange. For the second time in my life, I found myself on an overbooked flight, and was offered the chance to wait for the next flight in exchange for €600 cash compensation, and the time in between paid for at an airport hotel. I really wasn’t sure if I wanted to accept, seeing as how I’d focused so much energy on departing for Mumbai that night, but the airline staff seemed to really need another person to take the deal, and of course I was tempted by the easy money. So I said okay, and off I went to one of those spooky Heathrow sleepfarms.

Heathrow hotel

The second time in my life: the same thing happened ot me about 5 years ago, when I was travelling London to Adelaide on Royal Jordanian. It was closer to Christmas then, and they seemed to have overbooked rather drastically.

From Heathrow, a regular shuttle-bus transports listless passengers to the various airport hotels. We move sedately on and off the bus, door-to-door, like cattle with luggage. My assigned hotel was not the same one as last time, but it could have been. Massive place, endless corridors and room after room after room all exactly the same. Each one containing a single lone person in a pointlessly large double bed, stuck in a bubble between one place and another. Room-prices outrageous: £209 per night, plus £20 extra each for despicable dinner and breakfast, and all the decor as is ugly and mechanical as possible. There is something of death in the aesthetic of those long corridors, the plain pre-fabricated rooms, the buffet meals where unlimited mountains of foodstuffs all taste either bland or terrible. I really hope that the coffee I drank this morning turns out to be the worst coffee of my life. In this factory of human storage, attuned to maximum efficiency, I remember grafitti that I photographed in Melbourne six years ago: “We are being farmed.” But if we are being farmed, then what here is the harvest - what product is extracted from us? The only thing I can think of is our shit, the only by-product left behind from each passengers 10-hour stay. Presumably the hotel sewage system efficiently gathers all those single-room, bathroom-door-open, lonely relieving turds into one convenient collection tank.

So I went in to my capsule, ate offensive food, thought about death approaching, then eventually slept for a few hours. I dreamt that I was arriving at the airport again, my flight confirmed, but without realising that I also needed to confirm that it was confirmed. The confirmation of confirming required a valid ID number, which I didn’t have. (Over the last few months, I’ve been working with numerical ID systems. The language data we create is above all an enormous network of informational links, and to achieve this you need to design a clear, stable numbering system, giving every node in the network an ID. As the data starts to get complex, designing a good ID system becomes tricker than you’d think.)

At 7am I woke up and went back to the airport. On the way to the terminal, I chatted with an Indian guy called Aloyuisius, who’d been in England for a week on business. He said he liked it well enough, but the food gave him diarrhoea.

This time I got my seat on the plane with no problem. But I hate longhaul dayflights: they disrupt my bodyclock much more than nightflights.

I started watching “(500) Days of Summer” on the inflight entertainment system, but I hated it. I found this so-called romantic comedy very bland, and the indie-lovable anti-hero was the blandest, most irritating thing about it. So I dumped it, and switched to “Roman Holiday”, and 50’s classic with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Now, I readily concede that this latter film is corny, silly, and full of old-fashioned patriarchal ideology. But the star and the starlet have that magnetism that pulls you in despite all else, and eventually, I found the film unexpectedly poignant. In its basics, it is a totally frivolous Hollywood crowd-pleaser: princess-in-disguise spends a day having fun with a lowly-but-handsome hack, in exotic, photogenic, Rome. It is blatant cinematic escapism. But then the fantasy begins to crack, and the audience are on some level confronted by un-fantastic reality. The holiday is fleeting, soon over. The protagonists have to go back to dull round of their responsibilities, left only with the melancholy of passing. The princess has only a set of memorial photos, and we have only to look for another film, or rewind this one to the beginning.

Or maybe I’m reading to much into it, feeding it into the big book of Marxist film theory. Maybe I just got carried away looking at Audrey Hepburn.

World in trouble

Dubai World is such a heady mix of crazed ambition and complete frivolity - in retrospect there seems always to have been something fateful about such a scheme. It’s got “hot money” written all over it, “folly” written all over it… perhaps it has always been doomed to become a symbol of the 2000s finance bubble.

dubai world

Postcard

October 2009 was declared by someone to be International Postcard Month, in celebration of 140 years since the postcard was invented.

A group was formed on Facebook, and their people simply left their name and address written on the wall, hoping to become receivers of postcards. I took down three addresses, and sent them postcards. I don’t really remember what I wrote - just whatever I was thinking at the time, stamped then sent to a person I have never and will never meet.

Then, yesterday, I received a postcard. It bears a picture of a “roadtrain” - one of those multi-part massive trucks that transports goods in the Australian Outback. It’s from “Beth”, and she tells me a couple of things about her life. Then she signs off:

postcards = patience. Love from Beth

Goods

I was in downtown Boston yesterday evening, walking back to my hotel. It was just after a company dinner - I was totally exhausted, jetlagged, hadn’t slept well in days. On the clock it said 9pm, but in my head it was 3am. But one thing was enough to make me pause: on the side of a church, I saw a sign saying BOOKS, pointing down an iron stairway. At the bottom of the stairs I could see an open doorway. I needed a new (or old) book.

So I went down the stairs and poked my head through the doorway. Beyond a small “antechamber” was another doorway, again with a large sign BOOKS and an arrow pointing through the door. So I advanced, through the second door. I now found myself in a smallish room, aglow with white neon lighting. The room was full of boxes of bananas, and a few odd things like brooms and old chairs. There was no-one around. (I checked carefully, behind the door and behind all the boxes of bananas.) There were lots of boxes of bananas, a rich plenty. But no BOOKS, none at all. I took a banana and left.

I am tempted to see this experience as meaningful. No doubt some will say that this is an erroneous projection of personal feelings onto the material world… but who can be sure? We should in fact make things meaningful whenever we can.

American Pilot reviews

All reviews are in now for the American Pilot:

The Oxford Times

a remarkably effective piece of theatricality … very well expressed

American Pilot

Going with the Flow (Junta Sekimori’s blog)

The set is limited but resourceful, the acting is good to memorable, and the production should be seen, not because it does the local culture a service but because it tells a thought-provoking, multi-layered story tremendously well.

Daily Info

The play has some wonderfully lyrical moments, starting with the first monologue, and the foreshadowing technique is highly effective, but sometimes the play fails to deliver its promise and you are left wishing that more could have been said. There are moments of humour (watch out for Daffy Duck!) but more could have been made of the translations; that they could be both amusing as well as dangerous when mistranslated is touched upon, but this is a rich seam that the play does not exploit to the full. Nevertheless, this is a topical, thought-provoking play which is well-worth seeing.

What’s On Stage

Having said all that, this non-professional production is agreeably rough around the edges and highly engaging. The cast do their best to keep the action snappy and it succeeds really well in holding the attention when it could have been a preachy yawn-fest … The American Pilot is flawed but highly worthwhile. If you are the sort of person who goes to the theatre in order to endlessly dissect the show afterwards, there isn’t a better production on in town at the moment.

Days of War, Nights of Love

Lying awake last night, I started thinking back, again, on the book Days of War, Nights of Love. This, along with the Idiot, by Dostoyevsky, are the two books that have most influenced my life.

Days of War, Nights of Love begins with a barrage of questions:

How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?

Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for what?

Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What can you get later that will make up for this day of your life?

How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?

What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards? Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?

… And throughout the book, it calls on the reader to answer difficult questions. My main reading of the book is this:

Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves - a sort of moral obligation - to live a meaningful life. And this “meaningfulness” must be something creative, passionate, personal and authentic: not a set of prepackaged meaning that we passively accept.

To create this sort of meaning, we must reject false authority. And false authority is any system of control that extends beyond people you can see and trust, any demand of obedience that goes beyond small groups where you can voluntarily give service and obedience for the good of the group.

(Does this mean then that we should all go out robbing and murdering? Not at all. We should each take responsibility for our own actions, and do what we hold to be right.)

False authority is not new, but it is something that has grown particularly intense in recent decades. Social “progress” and “development” have brought with them ever more sophisticated systems of social control (combined with carefully defined social “rights”). So the individual living in the late-capitalist West has a particularly strong obligation to resist such systems.

I said that this book has influenced me greatly, but I don’t mean that I have taken up its point of view as a means of making all my decisions. (Of course, anyone who knows me, and knows that I work in an office, for a large international publishing house, knows that this is not so.) But ever since reading it, the point of view has always been a consideration in each decision I make.

a stage

Last night was the opening night of the American Pilot. I was playing the Pilot, and this was a really Big Thing for me - the first time I’ve had a major role. (I’m not quite sure whether it counts as “major” or “starring” or what - the Pilot is on stage the whole time, and in a way it is all about him, but he doesn’t actually talk all that much, and when he does, he is inarticulate.)

I think I did the part quite well. Certainly, I did much more than I thought I was capable of, even a year ago. It was an incredibly intense experience: I became the Pilot, at least in some moments, and acting started to bleed into being.

Because of that immersion, I was totally drained when the show finished. It’s a pretty traumatic role, and some of that trauma passed through me in the course of the play. I could barely talk afterwards; I couldn’t sleep either; I felt very empty, and just wanted to be alone.

It occurred to me then, after the show last night, that acting seems a very unwholesome art. I felt so emotionally wasted by it: it’s so much “about you”, so impossible to be detached, such a public spectacle. Going through emotions in public, for the edification of strangers. There are people who do this all the time: I can’t imagine how.

Also, after the show I had a strange feeling of pointlessness. I’d done what I set out to do, met the challenge, feathered my cap. And then what? Nothing. Silence. A slight loneliness. What do we do things for; why do we strive? You make so much effort, then you get there, and then what? You don’t reach a state of nirvana, just emptiness. So what’s it all about then?

Good Goods, by Anthony Riddelll

It was not until the majority of the items had been placed into specially greased railway cars that laughter was even considered. But, as is so frequently said (generally by persons who I wish to avoid), “When it rains it pours”. Chuckles, guffaws, titters, snickers, etc. came about in huge torrents. Using his tongue to quickly shovel milk into his mouth was Cornelia Hypertenuse’s slave, Mr Haggis. When his judgment told him that he had ad enough Mr Haggis wiped his lips clean and replaced his mask. This item was white and black and depicted a simplified smiling face: black eyes and mouth on the white part, white eyes and mouth on the black.

Having finished his milk, Mr Haggis looked towards Cornelia for further instructions. Cornelia’s eyes were not to be seen, suggesting that her mind was not present. He started to stealthily move away.

You cannot escape,” she mentioned. Her eyelids remained closed. Squawking was heard outside. Mr Haggis gazed fearfully about to no apparent avail. “Draw, Haggis.” Mr Haggis knew what this meant. He used marking things to make dark marks on a big piece of paper. Cornelia directed him – telling him when and where to mark. Afterwards she shackled him to his Perch inside the railway car.

Mr Haggis had always been a slave. Why did he now wish to frolic with the birds? Nearby was a refrigerator. Beyond that was a fairly odd chap tapping into a lap top computer. If asked his name he would say “Nils”. That was not his name. Boris Fischer was. He had some kind of arrangement with the persons who install “snow” on televisions. Cornelia now made Mr Haggis seek the nature of this pact. Mr Haggis was not one to play with words like a cat with prey. He asked “Nils” directly. “Nils” did not cause anything to happen but asked Mr Haggis where he acquired such a preposterous notion. It became obvious to Cornelia that not many persons would give information to a known slave. Mr Haggis asked “Nils” about the arrangement every day, producing a cosy equilibrium.

One day “Nils’” lap top computer failed to work. Consequentially service persons came. They installed a brilliantly polished, whitish round thing. At the centre of this was a face. “Nils” felt that he should come to some sort of arrangement with this new device. Unfortunately the new device hated the installers of “snow”. It even wished great pain on them and their followers. “Nils” tried to conceal his own arrangement but after a short amount of time was shaking badly and was unable to keep his food down.

Cornelia made Mr Haggis open the refrigerator. There was a lot of milk in there. There were some jars of furry matter and some metallic spheres. Cornelia said not to touch these last things as they belonged to “Nils”. She made him remove a glass jar with a gauze cloth fastened tightly to the jar’s apex with a rubber band. No life was seen in the water contained in here but nonetheless Mr Haggis retrieved it and handed it to her. Cornelia’s eyelids displayed relief as she held it. Mr Haggis watched without emotion as Cornelia inserted a teat pipette, withdrew some fluid and placed it on a glass slide. She placed this on a microscope and gazed at it with joy.

“More have arrived,” she murmured, “I’m not sure yet if the reproduction is sexual or otherwise – I suspect otherwise because I have not seen anything which can be accused of being genitalia.” Cornelia did not see the many-legged white cylinder walk past, nor did Mr Haggis tell her. “Nils” was busy trying not to be harmed by the round thing. He assumed that he would be safe if he was quiet about the arrangement. This was correct, to some extent. Many times that he passed it, it would shower him with shower him with a mixture of food and saliva, sometimes with iron filings in it.

“Go to your place.” Mr Haggis knew what this meant. He ambled to a strong-smelling section of the carriage’s wall. Here was a basket with some cushions in it. “Sit. Lie. Go to sleep.” These commands were gentle. Later she peered past Nil’s prone form and out the bedroom door. The round thing’s face peered back.

ElectroMecca

I have often wondered, when Muslims are travelling, how do they keep track of the right direction for Mecca. (This is the way they need to face whenever it’s prayer-time.)

I once flew to Australia on Air Jordan, and they had a screen displaying the correct direction to Mecca at all times.

Then the iPhone came along, and suddenly there is a widely-available, handheld device that contains a GPS and a compass. Bingo. And what do you know, someone has made the app.