Time for a musical interlude

Health, Beauty and further proof that wearing a watch is a bad idea

Nothing quite so profoundly reminds me what it means to be American like getting sick. Last week i got the flu and all my cultural conditioning immediately kicked in: calling in sick is a sign of weakness and indicates lack of commitment to one's job, going to a doctor is only necessary as a last resort, the need to rest is a euphemism for the desire to be lazy. Logically, i know none of these attitudes can survive much scrutiny; however, cultural responses to unexpected situations - i was going to say 'stressful situations', but only an American would classify illness as a form of stress - are not based on logic, but rather on normative behavior.

In the US - especially for those without health insurance - the norm is to work until you drop and as soon as you can stand up again, get back to work. It's no small coincidence that Americans are so inclined to try self-help remedies, women moreso than men. The principle difference between us and Europeans is that much of the alternative/complimentary medicine in Europe is practiced by doctors, whereas in America, we have learned to avoid doctor visits as much as possible and do our best treating ourselves. Over a decade ago, i contracted lyme disease and believe me when i say that i did a lot more work than any of the doctors i went to in figuring out how to recover and then manage this disease. 'It takes a lot of work to get well' fits very nicely with the entire cultural ethos (physical therapy is obviously an exception).

At any rate, while i was being a lazy bum, staying out of the rain and (intense Caspian) wind, drinking a catatonia-inducing quantity of Theraflu or whatever its Russian equivalents are called, i did manage to save myself the expense of going back to a hair salon by covering up those gray roots in the comfort of my own home. This is not to say that i regret having experienced the pleasures of an Azeri salon - au contraire! To spend an afternoon in the midst of so many black-haired beauties carrying out their feminine mandates was precisely the sort of perspicuous adventure any armchair anthropologist would crave.

It's probably safe to say that in a place where the bars and tea houses are predominantly exclusive to males, upscale beauty salons become a sort of female clubhouse. There seemed to be a number of women there just to gossip, drink tea and compare accessories. Smokers came and went through the back door. The only way to distinguish workers from customers was in the footwear, with employees sporting every color of plastic slipper or epsadrillo knock-off imaginable. Instead of music, a muted tv screen was set to a Turkish music video channel: sexy girls in sexy clothes, being drooled over by sexy, lustful men. The whole atmosphere felt almost conspiratorial.

While i was in 'the chair', a would-be Avon lady stood in front of me and methodically went through her entire bag of cheap, glitzy hair pins and jewelry. It didn't seem to matter to her that i wasn't going to buy anything; in a country of high underemployment, not making a sale here was just as good a way to spend the day as not making a sale somewhere else. Anyway, each hair stylist has 3-4 assistants who do lots of mindless tasks, such as taking the place of hair clips, (used in western salons) by holding the sections of hair that aren't being cut or colored, so there was a little mob around me who were happy to ooh and ahh over the contents of her various satchels.

Being a non-Azeri client, i was an item of obvious interest and practically everyone who worked there had to come over and get the low down on what exactly was being done to my voluminous locks. Cups of tea came, cooled and were replaced by new, hot ones. There were several discussions about ideal cuts and styles, followed by repeated disbelief that i only wanted a trim, as if i was insulting their sense of feminine propriety. My hair was dried simultaneously by three different girls while their mentor looked on, giving tips on pulling and fluffing. Far too much fussing for me, but i had to assure them all over and over that yes, the color was good and yes, the cut was what i wanted and yes, i would come back again. When i was finally finished and waiting to pay, in came a woman with a crate of kiwis to sell, which seemed like the perfect finale for this little afternoon comedy. Surprisingly, tips are not de rigueur here, which was fine since i was already paying way more than i'd expected. But no complaints. They gave me the full treatment, as it were, and it was definitely worth the experience.

Clearly, health and beauty are complex cultural realms, especially across national divides. Nonetheless, it was beyond shocking to read that wearing a watch - which has always seemed to me such an internationally accepted form of accessorizing that it doesn't even count as noteworthy - was responsible for no small number of men being renditioned to Guantanamo. Evidently someone(s) at al-Qaeda decided Casios were the perfect gift for their recruits; hardly as classy as a Rolex, but Casios do come with all the practical features a materially deprived, mountain-based terrorist needs: shock resistance, altimeter, solar power and a multi-functional alarm (one imagines that working for Sheikh bin Laden, effective management of alarms would be high on the list of priority skills). The lesson here is that sometimes it might make sense to look a gift horse in the mouth and just depend on the sun and stars to set up your attack plan, as warriors did in the time of Xerxes. Undone by a watch? Well, for a religious fundamentalist it's probably more palatable than being undone by a beautiful woman. But let's not tell the ladies here that, we wouldn't want to spoil whatever romantic fantasies may lurk in the minds of those yearning for eternal beauty, however contrived.

Gratulálok Magyarország! Hála istennek!

Catching up with Spiegel Online this evening, i scrolled past all the radioactive wastelands articles to learn that the Hungarian parliament, under Viktor Orbán's inspired tutelage, has finally voted on a new constitution. On Kossuth tér these days, it is 2011 going on 1935. The Germans and various EU others are not very pleased. Spiegel quotes Süddeutsche Zeitung:

"The constitution enshrines a spirit of ideological, ethnic intolerance, both externally and domestically. Some are being reminded of the fascist rhetoric in Europe between the world wars. Neighboring countries are getting unpleasant memories of the cultural arrogance and power of the Hungary of old, whose Magyarization programs they were subjected to. The new constitution claims that the state of Hungary represents all other Magyars, meaning the three million living in neighboring countries."

Orbán's spokesmen responded to the barrage of criticism coming from Germany with true freedom fighter spirit. "Hungary had to tolerate being instructed what to do or what to include in its constitution from the capitals of other countries for long decades. That era is now over." We have to give the Hungarian political establishment high marks when it comes to never learning from their own history. The purgers later become the purged. This new constitution is so heavily laden with nationalist rhetoric that one can't help but wonder if the motivation is not so much to pat themselves on the back for being Europe's most outstanding race as it is to convince themselves they didn't need papal payouts to set themselves up as an independent kingdom in the first place. Hungarians, in my experience, are even more schizophrenic than Americans when it comes to their identity.

The Fidesz party constitution takes a deep bow towards hefty domestic breeding and enshrines marriage as a solely heterosexual union, which inevitably means the Budapest police can stop whining about traffic obstruction and just ban the annual gay pride march on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. Yet the principle points of contention that have got the Hungarian left-center oppostion and all the centrist EU politicos up in arms involve the extent to which the ruling party will be allowed to cement their economic, judicial and social policies for years to come by making it virtually impossible to change them, even if Fidesz falls out of polling favor in the next elections (2014?). Thankfully, the media law enacted earlier this year should go a long way in ensuring that radical, aka 'anti-Hungarian', opinions are kept out of the public sphere, at least for as long as Fidesz remains in power.

i'm sure i'm not alone in thinking there is serious irony here, considering the circumstances at the root of King Viktor's re-ascension to power. i've been saving this video link for just the right moment... The names of liars in residence may have changed some, but the perversion of truth remains ever constant. Spoken word by Henry Rollins.

Is that all there is?

i'm fully aware how immature and catty this is going to sound, but this is my blog, not Glenn Mr. Maturity Beck's. One of the things i have enjoyed about living in Baku is that whenever i come across a swarthy Texan clad in layers of NorthFace garments, i ask if he works in the oil industry and the response i get is always as follows: he will hang his head, penitently nod and then look me shamefully n the eyes and say, "Yes, I work for BP... but I'm an engineer". The professional qualifier is evidently supposed to induce some level of sympathy, help me understand that not being here to drain the Caspian's reserves (adding billions to BP's coffers) would be a waste of his education and brilliant mind, or render him and his family destitute or victims of some other Ayn Rand nightmare. The main thing is that these guys are all clearly ashamed of BP which - especially after the Horizon disaster last year - they should be. For the first time in my life, oil men are not admonishing me for being uninformed and reactionary; i could get used to that.

Now to get catty and rancorous. This morning i received an email from the Gulf Restoration Network that may place me on the wrong side of this equation, drinking beer with the BP engineers - or karmically worse. Here's what they have to say to me on the anniversary of the Horizon explosion:

You don't have to go to great lengths to play an important role in reminding the nation that a year after the BP deepwater drilling disaster, the Gulf still needs the nation's support. I was out in the wetlands yesterday with an out-of-work oyster fishermen, and I can tell you the oil is still here. Unfortunately, Congress hasn't passed a single bill to restore or protect the Gulf after BP dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into our nation's energy sacrifice zone.

You want to do something though, don't you? Here are two simple things you can do for the Gulf right now—without even leaving your desktop.

1) Update your status on Facebook and Twitter to voice the call for Gulf recovery. Sample text: 1 year ago the worst oil disaster in U.S. history began. BP’s oil is still here! Help restore the Gulf at http://bpdrillingdisaster.org.

Make sure to link to http://bpdrillingdisaster.org.

2) Change your Facebook and Twitter image to the PeliCAN design on the right to draw attention to BP's on-going disaster in the Gulf. Just save the image to your computer and upload it to your social media profiles.

Having vowed to not use facebook this week and still sparing myself the hashtag inundations of twitter, you can immediately see the oil and water quandry GRN has placed me in. I cannot change my profile picture to a pelican. i cannot update my status to admonishing the US Congress. i cannot flood my friends' walls with horrific pictures of dead dolphins, blackened beaches, and stories of out-of-work Gulf fisherman. In short, not using facebook today puts me squarely in the ranks of the apathetic, the inactive, the oil industry doormats.

Am i wrong to feel sickened by this? If not sickened, then disheartened? i get that an augmentation of collective rage can be societally powerful, though i'm not sure if rage can exist in any real sense when manifest in the form of bytes and pixels. Call me naive, call me arrogant, call me a techno neophyte, i really don't care. It's not so much the use of these mediums that disturbs me but the fact that activism is now so focused on them. i'm definitely yearning for those old school, cut & paste flyers, surround the offices of Chevron days. But hey, whatever makes the Gulf activists feel better is ok, they're the ones living directly in the aftermath. i just hope for their sakes that facebook and twitter are not all there is.

Anyone who claims to be surprised by this must not know the history of US military intervention and the drug trade. The triad of military action, paramilitary/insurrectionist drug runners and subsistence farmers has long been characteristic of US foreign invasions, as well as more surreptitious CIA operations from Asia to Latin America. We knew from the onset that Afghanistan would be no different, and Patrick Cockburn likewise reported in 2007 that Iraq's opium fields have been brought back to life as a direct outcome of circumstances created by the US invasion there: conditions of primal anarchy are ideal for criminal gangs and drug smugglers and producers.

Afghanistan is an incredibly poor country. According to the Asian Development Bank, "Despite significant development gains since the 2001 ouster of the former Taliban regime, the people of Afghanistan continue to suffer widespread and growing insecurity; weak governance; inadequate health care, education, and other public services; and gender inequality. Lack of employment opportunities and endemic poverty continue among a large segment of the population, with two thirds of the population living below or just above the country’s official poverty line." That the US/UN lackeys currently trying to run the country publicly posit Afghan farmers would choose wheat over opium at current prices is more of the same dog and pony show we have seen for decades. The whole region is awash in heroin now, and i'm guessing that as the number of disenfranchised, disillusioned youth whose families, et al. have already been shattered by violence and despair increases, the inclination to escape reality by chasing the proverbial dragon will grow proportionately.

Escape From Facebook

It's Digital Detox Week, a great idea for people like myself whose worst nightmare has become the death, destruction or disappearance of my laptop. i'm not joking about this; just last week i dreamt that i got hit by a van (highly realistic Baku scenario) and instinctively used my computer case to buffer the impact. Laying on the ground in pain, all i could think about was that my computer was wreaked, which felt more devastating than any damage which might have befallen my own, corporeal being. i've no doubt that i'm one of millions in the world today who have developed a serious, insidious fear of losing net access, webcams, or worst of all, having their facebook accounts deleted. Not absolutely sure, but i'm guessing this is a contemporary manifestation of barophobia.

Complete detox from the digital world is definitely not in the cards during a regular work week. On top of having to use a computer to do what i'm paid to do, i've got an international job search going on, this blog, an unrelenting backlog of personal correspondence... what i can do, and have decided to do, is stay off facebook for a week, starting today. Oh, but wait! Shouldn't i post the link to this blogpost first? If i don't explain to everyone what i'm doing, does what i'm doing even matter? How can i network about not networking if i cease to use my networks? This conundrum has endless loops, but i won't falter. No facebook for a full 7 days will be good for me, a sort of digital world ramadan, testing my self-discipline for some higher spiritual Good.

Apparently unlike the vast majority of users, i do actually know 90% of the people in my facebook world, which means i'm well below the 8 new 'friends' per day par. The remaining 10% are folks i have shared political or artistic interests with, similar to the peripheral acquaintances one has in real social settings: the people you enjoy dancing with at parties but never quite manage to share a meal or go to a movie with. Some of my closest friends are not on facebook but i'm proud to say this has not resulted in them falling under my radar. i don't use facebook to chat for the sake of chatting (actually, i keep myself invisible to specifically avoid this), yet as most of my friends are involved in environmental/political/human rights work, i do use it as a source of recommended news and a place to discuss the events of the day. i like to think that the discussions i engage in are meaningful and relevant, and since my friends are all over the planet, it's great for being exposed to art, humor and various forms of weirdness that pop up around the globe.

There have, however, been downsides to the whole facebook experience. Posting something or making a brief 'status' statement that receives no comments feels akin to saying something to a room full of people and being completely ignored. When i first set up my account, i felt it was rude to not acknowledge everything my friends were posting, but keeping up with that became way too time consuming and since nobody else was doing it... Intellectually, given the medium, i have learned to adjust to this dynamic, but i can't help feeling that on some level it's not very healthy, psychologically. Why would you want to be 'friends' with someone you then repeatedly choose not to interact with? For people who derive social identity on the basic of their facebook activity, this could be damaging in subtle or even non-subtle ways.

Then there's the abbreviated opinions phenomenon, since short comment windows mandate short comments and people seem increasingly disinclined or unable to express themselves in more than 3 lines of text, anyway. Alternately, if you write more than 2 complete sentences or say something the least bit contentious, it's end of discussion (if one can even use the word 'discussion' for what is going on) or worse: you can be dealt that 'fuck you if you're too stupid to not agree with me' blow. i encounter this a lot, especially with friends of friends involved in cross-pollinated comment threads. Facebook has generated a new kind of phrasal speak, characterized by incomplete thoughts = weak thinking and rapid dismissal of alternative views. It would be easy to say that one reason i let this blog sit dormant for so long was because facebook distracted me, but the truth is that too much time on the site eroded my ability to write a full paragraph - to think through something long enough to have a full paragraph's worth of words to say about it. It might be positive - exciting, even - to regularly exchange information and ideas with so many diverse personalities, but when the end result is an intellectual meltdown, i'm not convinced that i wasn't better off just sticking to email.

While writing this, i've been listening to archives of an old friend's weekly music broadcast on Area 24 Radio, which i think is located somewhere in Westchester County, New York. This is someone i haven't seen for probably 20 years, yet thanks to facebook, i now have an outlet for random music requests and get to listen to T rifle through his eclectic music vault for two hours every week. So again, not everything about my Facebook experience has been negative, but taking a break is good, too. i listen to my students talk about how they use the site, see what gets posted on the pages of my Azeri acquaintances and realize that just as in the real world of social interaction, i am definitely on the edge of the social gaussian curve. i need to get off facebook for a week; some of them should consider getting off it for life.

You Need To Get Off Facebook from Świat Social Media on Vimeo.

Money, Brains, whatever works

After spending two classes discussing the topic, my well-adjusted student L is still unable to grasp the concept of creative thinking. What does one say to a person convinced that she has never in her life had a creative thought, a new idea, an urge to see what happens when she does X?? Suddenly, my own brain seems to function only a few notches below Pablo Picasso's, perhaps even on par with Alan Ball. i asked her questions like these: How do you decide what clothes to put on in the morning? How do you organize the books on your shelves? Why do you take photos when you go on vacation? Simple acts, all dependent on some small amount of original thought, and still she didn't get it. In her mind, there is nothing creative about making necessary everyday decisions. 'It's an obvious thing,' she says, 'we all do this.' And that was my point, we all do this. She lives a somewhat charmed, upper class life. Maybe all that materialism has caused permanent brain damage?

How Your Money Works from MUSCLEBEAVER on Vimeo.

Strewn relics, crumbling walls

Years ago, my friend Rachel - who, unlike myself, is a real photographer with excellent eyesight, ergo can take pictures that are actually in focus - produced a group of photographs which came to be fondly known as the dead animal series. These images included carcasses of roadkill, bones from dessicated desert creatures and other remnants of animal life in varying stages of decay. What i always found profound about them was the window each photo opened into my imagination of the animal's demise: how it collapsed to the ground or crawled off into the woods to die, the invasion of detritivores, the final stretching or contraction of muscles. Then the fast forward, back of the eyelids flickering that brought a body through its loss of flesh to the bare, clean-washed skeleton seen in the photo.

The other day i went to out to the Absheron peninsula, which brought Rachel's photos to mind in that so much of what one sees there seems to be the decaying relics of the Soviet era and oil industry, what still remains from the heyday of 'peace, bread and work'. As Lenin famously remarked, "fascism is capitalism in decay," and apparently he and his political descendants were intent on proving this to be true. What is perhaps most interesting is the extent to which life simply goes on with the rusty equipment, decaying walls and shaky gas lines. It's not the same as walking through an exclusion zone, yet there is a grimy, cynical sadness about this environment which i find oddly captivating.

Rusted out, often abandoned pump jacks pop up from the flatlands in every direction. It's hard to imagine how anyone could psychologically acclimate to living in a virtual forest of these grinding praying manthises: it's not the mechanical nature of them that disturbs the senses so much as the hardened pools of tar at their bases, the incredible proximity to people's homes, the utterly intense indifference conveyed by repetitive up and down motion or the immobility of lengthy disuse. This detritus from the oil industry works as an oxymoronic magnet, something so shocking at this scale that i simultaneously feel a deep revulsion and a morbid desire to see how disgusting it can actually get. Petroleum is a dirty industry, we all know this to be true. Seeing this side of it - a place where people feel proud of their country's contribution to the global petrol market and are inured to the quality of life costs because that's simply how it needs to be done - i'm left wondering if it's really fair to sneer at all the massive SUVs clogging the streets of Baku. That is to say, having already irreparably trashed the land they live on, does it make sense to suddenly care about energy conservation and auto efficiency?

Outside the town of Suvelen, i encountered a cemetery that overlooks a large seaside refinery and has clearly changed hands from red star era Russian Orthodox to a glittery, we-wish-this-were-Shiraz Shia Islam. At the top of the hill are the weathered Russian gravesites. Again, that feeling of decay and abandonment, of a place which once held meaning being left to the elements. Not sorrowful, but lost. Small monuments to those who came before, intact out of respect or indifference - who can say? They stand as relics of a time people clearly want to put behind them. Fenced and overgrown, dotted by the occasional, inert pump jack (yes, in the middle of a cemetery, when it comes to oil no ground is that sacred), the only flowers at these graves are those growing out of the earth, eventually sure to envelop them. Walls fall, fences collapse. The decay of their relics does not, per force, imply the decay of the people.