Istanbul 01: Call to Prayer

Five times a day the call issues forth from the amplified speakers mounted atop the minarets. These days, the muezzin need not bother climbing the steps up the tower. Because of my training, I wonder (fully aware that I am alone in this) about the metaphysical implications of relying so on technology.

You hear the short buzz and click of the microphone being turned on before the call actually begins. Sometimes you can make out a word; most notable, of course: “Allah,” even though it’s stretched beyond comprehension like countless amen’s of so many Christmas carols.

We arrived too late the first night. Old Istanbul was fast asleep by the time our shuttle reached the hotel. In the morning—even earlier, perhaps, with jetlag and insomnia factored in—the call shocked me awake, but not before shifting my otherwise mundane dreams into vivid Technicolor animation about a drunken vampire. I wanted it to shut up, to go away.

But when the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii) is directly across the street from your hotel, just beyond the paved track of the ancient Byzantine hippodrome, it is up to you to get used to it.

When I see Arabic written, I think of snakes, thanks to Sonia, who, so many years ago, once referred to it as “that snake language.” Every letter looks like a serpent—some with eyes, some with curved tails. Each hissing out the mysterious beauty of that ancient desert tongue. Hearing it—and I’m only assuming that the liturgical language of Turkey is (still) Arabic—made me think of snakes flying through the air, twisting their way into the ears of the devotees.

The call lasts for several minutes. At times, it seems endless, and at other times, abrupt and too quickly ended. And the echoes across Istanbul from the other mosques make it seem even more enigmatic and not of this world.

The evening call retained its splendor and sublimity throughout my entire stay, but already by the third day, I was sleeping through the morning call like a local.

Demockery for All!

... or why women and blacks should not be allowed to vote.

Yes, children: it’s that time again when Uncle Skajlab resorts to name-calling and racist comments in order to make a point about politics in the good ol’ US of the A-hole. Today in the great state of Texas was the run-off election for candidates who did not receive a majority of votes during the primary. I waited until 1:00pm to cast my vote, knowing full well what I was about to find out anyway: nobody fucking bothered to show-up! I was the eighth person at my polling station, which is in one of the largest Democratic districts in the Dallas area.

All those goddamned women and blacks who were all up in arms about ensuring their “own” candidate wasn’t going to get cheated out of a single vote just a month ago apparently couldn’t be bothered to ensure that the best candidate from the Democratic party was going to make the ballot come November. When it comes to declaring their own victimhood, they’re at the front of the line, but when it comes to actually participating in the political process, they are just too busy eating fried chicken or sloughing off another uterine lining.

Way to go, girls! It’s time to go back the “long way” you’ve already come, Baby. This angry, middle-aged, white Anglo-Saxon male is glad to do your job for you. Now get back in the kitchen and make me a grilled cheese!

And woe to you goddamned Obamanations who have shot your wad on the one time a “black” candidate ever made it this far. May it take another century before another Half-rican makes the ballot! (‘Cause you certainly don’t think a real black man would’ve made it this far, do you? You know you can’t run for President with a criminal record, right? I’m just saying….)

Finally, just let me say: you fucking useless “Democratic” fucks deserve another eight-year Bush administration.

A bad case of the hollows.

Yeah, this band is rad. I love new music that gets under my skin. Angry words about how fucked-up stuff is. Makes me wanna burn it all down. Singing at the top of my lungs … before I cough up a ball of phlegm the size of my head. Calls me back to Berlin, to that basketball court where it all began. At 11:11 (or was it 3:32?) last night I fell asleep only to wake up within 20 minutes. I read some Gadamer. Watched porn. Went back to bed more frozen than when I first laid down. Sometime around 2:00am I woke up to the sound of Spic-O-Rama, but without that adorable John Leguizamo. I dialed 9-1-1 on speed-dial to report the disturbance. Today’s shot. Tomorrow probably too. It’s now 4:00pm, and I’m only thinking about the things I should’ve already done by now instead of the things I have to do next. Can’t use the sink downstairs because of the leak. Don’t know when I’m going to get back to the gym that overcharges me on a monthly basis. Sick of the scams all utility companies pull with new service contracts. The bruises up and down my arms have finally faded from the boxes and boxes of books I moved. Ordered two new books from Amazon today. Eventually I’ll bruise myself by moving them as well. Benjamin’s greatest fear was losing his library. Before I slip away into nonbeing, I wanna pile everything I still possess into a gasoline-soaked mound and flick a match in its general direction. Just to see what would happen. Dreading Friday. Not because it’s my birthday but because it’s the anniversary of when the sky over Texas caught fire and rained down on our heads. Dead astronauts and all.

Listen when your hair gets pulled. Don’t get caught. It’s gonna be alright. As soon as the embers die.

As I lay me down to fall asleep
with my demons dying and my pilot light weak.
I curse the last six months I’ve been hiding behind a mustache.
To those last ten years I’ve been howling at a paper moon: Fuck you.

Scars & Wrinkles

Several years ago I blogged about scars. Here is an updated engagement with that post as prompted by a question that came to me out of the blue (from where all interesting questions arise):

As for “fetish,” it’s definitely a bit too loaded for me to fully embrace. If we use the term not in its Freudian sense—I’m not sexually stimulated by scars—and probably not even in an anthropological sense, but rather in a purely “pop cultural” sense, then yes, I have a scar fetish ... in that I am at times mesmerized, enchanted, and intrigued by them. I’m also not sure I find scarred people more beautiful; probably more often, I find them ugly(-ier) ... or at least their scars. But I perhaps feel a bit more compassion toward others with (visible/revealed) scars.

What fascinates me is the scar as trace—what remains from something/someone in a person’s past that is brought forward and carried over into the present/future. “Embodied” or “incarnate” in a fundamental way. It’s much more narrative than, say, a wrinkle. Every scar has a story to be told ... or hidden.

And the entire ethos of scars—their permanence, for example—means, at least for me, that they must always be confronted/regarded; in some ways, it’s as if they open up a space (for the possibility) of pure self-acceptance: they’re never going away no matter how you may try to hide them; they will be with you “till the end.” So maybe I’m much more interested in what the scar hints at instead of the scar itself.

That said, I do tend to like scars in the brow—little lightening bolts that disrupt the hair growth, and I find abdomen scars kinda sexy … on the right abdomens, of course!

Perhaps I was just trying to draw attention away from the tribe of wrinkles that have colonized my face over the past several years: scars have stories to tell! Pay no attention to the wrinkles!

15 Songs for a Solstice

...to help keep the cold in on the first day of winter. (As if most of us needed help with that.) Here's to a new season of personal (and universal) growth.

For those of you not on MySpace, I'm currently reading Edmond Jabès' The Book of Margins. After only the first 35 pages, I can definitively state that it will be one of my most favorite books I have/will ever read:

The word is distance within non-distance, that is, the width of a gap that every letter stresses while bridging it. What is said is always said in relation to what will never be expressed. At these extreme limits we recognize ourselves.

This winter will (always already and yet again) prove the truth of the infinite distance I must travel in order to recognize myself in the extremities of the here and now. And now to the soundtrack that will be playing on that trip:

• "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" by Leonard Cohen
• "Winter Kills" by Yaz
• "Drink Before the War" by Sinéad O'Connor
• "Dreamer" by Toni Childs
• "All the Candles In the World" by Jane Siberry
• "Bells Ring"by Mazzy Star
• "25th December"by Everything But The Girl
• "Trouble In Mind (The Return)"by Marianne Faithfull
• "Mad World"by Gary Jules
• "Untitled 3" by Sigur Rós
• "New Lost World" by Chris Whitley
• "Soon This Space Will Be Too Small" by Lhasa De Sela
• "Baby In Two" by Pernice Brothers
• "Wo willst du hin?" by Xavier Naidoo
• "Archangel" by Burial

Bullet-Point Friday

• The first definition of "bullet" listed in the OED is "a small round ball." I think first of a child's ball: small, probably red, and rolling across a street in front of an oncoming car.
• When I was living in Shimonoseki, I often traveled by Shinkansen, Japan's bullet-train. Speeding down to Fukuoka (sometimes purposely mispronounced "Fuck you, okay.") for a day of gaijin (that word still grates on my sensibilities) shopping was a luxury I grew accustomed to, especially during my last semester in Japan: time was running out; time was of the essence. And I could turn a 90-minute one-way trip into a 20-minute breeze just by paying more than three-times the cost of regular trainfare.
• I made up for the cost and convenience by factoring in Shinkansen tickets when traveling home to the US or back to Japan to serve out my two-year contract: if I could get cheaper airfare from out of Kansai--even with the Shinkansen fare--I would go that route. Direct flights from Osaka were always more acceptable than stopovers on that half-assed Korean peninsula. Plus a trip to Osaka probably meant a trip to nearby Kyoto as well. If time wasn't an issue but money was, then I could take advantage of several other transportation alternatives: the overnight ferry or the long-distance bus service.
• My preference was the overnight ferry: not only was the cost bizarrely low compared to just about everything else in Japan--$5.00 for a can of Coke!--but the ferry also included an onsen, or traditional Japanese public bath.
• The time I've spent wet and naked in the company of foreign nationals cannot be measured. (I'm just saying....)
  
• Over the 1998 Christmas vacation, I spent probably no less than four hours a day at the onsen where I was staying in balmy Okinawa.
• Perhaps it's been a way of recovering from the years of Texas summers and droughts I've suffered through. Perhaps I'm more fish than human. Perhaps I didn't have a clue what else to write on a Bullet-Point Friday.
  

Bullet-Point Friday

• It’s like, you know, flamenco piano: when you hear the first measures of just such a beast you recognize the form (flamenco) but don’t recognize the medium (piano) because your ears are not trained to interpret that form through that medium. After a few moments, a new synapse fires, and you are better prepared to hear flamenco piano again: a new possibility has been created in your world.
• It’s like, you know, when human beings rely too heavily on infrastructure designed to keep them safe (i.e., guardrails, stop signs, traffic lights) that they behave irresponsibly because someone else is policing their reckless behavior; they have a false sense of security because they’ve relinquished responsibility for their own actions. (It’s also like, you know, when parents expect legislation to supplement their demonstrably poor parenting skills: they want society to be policed instead of being responsible for the raising of their own children. I mean, think of the children!) Remove the guardrails and pedestrian accidents fall 60% because pedestrian and driver behave more responsibly when they must think for themselves. If I choose to jaywalk, then I’ll be sure to look both ways—twice, even—before jumping out in traffic.
• It’s like, you know, trying to get through a lecture on Berkeley’s immaterialist idealism when your students would much rather hypothesize about “crazy people” or “people on LSD” or “the blind”: if someone falls in the woods and no one is around to perceive it, did the person really exist in the first place? (Thankfully, for Berkeley, God is omniscient and omnipresent: He’s always watching/perceiving! And even if you don’t believe in God, He still believes in you.) I sometimes wish my students would stop invading my sensory world so their drug-induced craziness would simply stop existing, even if only for me.
• It’s like, you know, hotdog!
• It’s like, you know, accepting the alternate relationship with truth that wanders to supplement one’s acceptance of truth that remains coordinated on a grid. To start walking with the right foot (techne, the logos of techne, the word: “technology”) is quite alright as long as the next step is with the left foot (organic, systemic (uncoordinatable) episteme, the organicity of the epistemic); otherwise, you spin around in circles going nowhere. And no guardrail is going to protect you from doing that!
  
• It’s like, you know, attempting to speak language as such without using any of the words from the language of humankind. Or perhaps like, you know, speaking a word to(ward) an other all the while speaking a word as (an)other. This too shall not pass.
• It’s like, you know, Liberace’s famous question: “Would you rather have roses on your piano or tulips on your organ?” Vote now!