Koranteng's Toli

Meshell's Moods

2009-11-07T03:09:00.002-05:00

Anger can be a great musical catalyst. The story is told about Miles Davis's historic 1964 concert at Lincoln Center, that the band was angry that Miles had preemptively waived their fees for charity. The performance, duly celebrated in two albums, My Funny Valentine and Four and more, can be said to have that urgent yet sinuous edge that make it one of the essential live musical performances. The young rhythm section is especially on fire; you can almost hear the added accents in Tony Williams's percussion, Ron Carter does all the right things as a low end theoretician on the bass, and Herbie Hancock solves differential equations on his piano. And then there's the horns of course, Miles is lyricism itself - the ballads are simply wonderful, and George Coleman blows throughout as if it's a cutting contest. The son of man claimed that man cannot live on bread alone, these hungry musicians tried to come up with a corollary to that notion over the course of the concert. Suffice to say that it was an important occasion for all concerned and the potency of the music endures.

It was in this vein that I listened to Meshell NdegeOcello's band last Friday at The New Parish in Oakland. It wasn't quite anger that was at work, it was more like irritation that was the catalyst but who am I to quibble about the end result. I'll get to the whys, wherefores and textures of their sound but should get the hyperbole off my chest upfront.

Simply put, Meshell NdegeOcello's band is the coldest band since The Revolution circa 1985.

If you want a slightly more precise description, I'm referring to the sound and attitude that pertained as the Purple Rain continued to fall, you know, before the addition of horns and the looser feel of the Parade and Sign of the Times bands. I'm talking about a well-oiled band that is out to make a point, a band that wants to share an important moment. Meshell and company are forced to be reckoned with in their live performances, moreover they are touring to support a strong new album, Devil's Halo and are fully committed to its rocky soul aesthetic.

The Wife called them sick - her slang is of a different vintage, for me they were stone cold. Their creative energy harnessed as it was, was something to behold. The sonic architecture brought in elements of Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, Stanley Clarke and Eddie Hazel. And they were versatile in their approach. Meshell can go from Nathalie Merchant primness to Betty Davis fierceness without skipping a beat and she'll throw in some Sly and Robbie dub for good measure. By the time, they got around to freaking Prince's Dirty Mind, rendering it like no one has heard it before, my jaw had already dropped, I was in awe. When someone is in this kind of mood you can only sing along - and admire.

But on to the bit about anger... As we stood in line outside the club, we overheard mutterings about problems. There were scattered phrases that might cause your average concertgoer to raise their eyebrows, things like "No soundcheck", "Equipment came late", "Damn rental company", "Will they even play?" and so forth. The crowd was suitably wary. They were playing at a new venue, a small club and a suitably intimate joint but one where the kinks were still being worked out. And it showed at the outset even as they came out with such energy. For the first three songs, the sound was slightly off. There were sufficient glitches to cause Meshell to basically throw away the small sound machine (synthesizer/sampler thingimijig) that she's started performing with. Her sound technicians were feeling the pressure as they scrambled to fix things. The underlying tension only heightened the performance. Thus she stuck mostly to singing for the rest of the show and would sing mostly from the more recent parts of her songbook. Call the concert an exercise in aural seduction. Raging songs like Lola, Mass Transit, The Sloganeer - Paradise, and Article 3 were full of urgency. Only occasionally would she pick up the bass when her mood would veer into the ecstatic. Mostly she was orchestrating the shifting soundscapes that now characterize her music; the short outbursts that are the bread and butter of her songcraft only slightly lengthened for the live performance.

There was an element of pride as they paced on stage, as if they all had a point to prove. Oakland may only be a pit stop between the bigger commercial venues - Los Angeles (with the beautiful people) and San Francisco (with the sexy people) where they would play the next night. Oakland however is important for soul singers, functioning as a sort of comfort interlude that restores one's swagger. It's a town that appreciates the ironic mood of a song like White Girl, the audience will laugh in the right places.

Songs like Dead Nigga Blvd - from 2003's Cookie, have extra resonance when sung one block away from Martin Luther King Jnr. Avenue, five minutes away from Mandela Parkway, and 10 minutes away from Malcolm X Elementary School. And she is right to be angry, as expressed in the lyrics and performance of that song, at the disrespect and dysfunctionality of part of the black community in Oakland and elsewhere. People campaigned, marched and sacrificed much labour and even blood to secure the gains of the civil rights struggle, commemorated in those boulevards and yet some would say much is being dissipated. The salty language of the song decries a drive-by mentality accented by the staccato keyboard riffs of the song. The mournful Die Young also struck a chord in that vein. It would figure that only a couple of days later I would read the headline she'd anticipated: Man shot and killed in downtown Oakland. Such is life, or rather such is death in these parts. To die over nothing, a block from the martyr's boulevard...

But back to the considerable songcraft on display. Bitter was her pre-millenium, album length meditation on a mood and we were treated to Fool of Me and Faithful in that key. Fellowship and Forgiveness and Love upped the dub quotient, the reggae tinge of a comfort woman. She took up an acoustic guitar for Crying In Your Beer - lovely balladeering with Chris Bruce her fearless guitarist. Deantoni Parks was ferocious throughout on the drums, sounding like an army platoon. Keefus Ciancia had four or more keyboards and would add ethereal sound effects. She's comfortable having Mark Kelley on bass which is a compliment to his capabilities. All in all this a group with a creative edge. We were treated to a lush musical moment capturing shifting moods.

For the encore, she comes out, picks up her bass and gets into her great remake of Ready for the World's Love you Down. It is spacey, laced with dub stylings, and soulful to the core. It is also flawlessly executed.

Meshell is not one to coddle her audience but she is definitely thankful that we stayed with her on this night. We weren't too demanding for the old favourites and went along with the musical trip of the new songs. Devil's Halo is strong set verging on the rock end of a soul spectrum. You could see the sense of confidence and perhaps a little swagger in the step of all the musicians as they left. In her current thankful mood she is perhaps reaching a sentiment expressed in the title of her second album: Peace beyond Passion.

...

The opening act, Beatropolis, were were a musical puzzle of sorts if only because their feel-good sensibility was hard to pin down. Perhaps we should let them descibe themselves in their own words: "live organic drum and bass... many styles". Indeed there were many styles on display, from an acid jazz start, mix in The Roots circa Organix, a touch of Joycelyn Brown, a smidgen of Roni Size or perhaps Dizzee Rascal and let everything simmer. They would throw in a jungle version of You're All I Need To Get By just because they could, and why ever not, I expect Marvin and Tammi would concur. Perhaps most impressive was Fall Apart. Yeats never would have imagined that a century after writing The Second Coming that we'd have rappers declaiming that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" to a fierce drum-n-bass beat, a jungle lament about things falling apart, a topic close to my heart. Needless to say, I approve.

...

The full-length video of Meshell's Seattle concert from the following week finds her and band in a more laidback and relaxed mood. Compare to her previous escapades in jazz from a few years ago.

File under: music, soul, rock, funk, review, concert, live, appreciation, mood, virtuosity, MeShell NdegeOcello, toli

Poetry as Cultural Memory

2009-03-18T03:50:00.011-05:00

Kwesi Brew's poem, Ghana's Philosophy of Survival, is a curious beast, one that continues to confound even as it strikes a chord of admiration and indeed recognition. Judging by the title alone, there's no quibbling here about a pursuit of happiness, that laudable aspiration and seminal con. In this reading, the message of Brand Ghana (or maybe even the more general Brand Africa) boils down to survival and a philosophy at that. You might be a little perplexed and expectant when you turn the page and first encounter the poem. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, that's only the title and you can read the rest for yourself. I thought I'd discuss a few poems and consider his notions of cultural memory: the things we choose to remember and to forget. Herewith some therapeutic toli...

Ghana's Philosophy of Survival

We are the punch bag of fate
on whom the hands of destiny wearies
and the show of blows gradually lose
their viciousness on our patience
until they become caresses of admiration
and time that heals all wounds
comes with a balm and without tears,
soothes the bruises on our spirits.

This is the mettle of invisibility.
This is how we outlast and outlive
the powerful and the unwise.
Whether it is best to wait
or engage the scarlet fury of battle
to stay the hand is for the wise to say,
and not the rashness of the moment.

But we have always been here on this land of ours.
Our country is our home and will always be here at home
To watch, listen and take our suffering
'til true happiness comes naturally and without bitterness.
Love of family kith and kin and brother-keeping
has cast us in this mould:
that while we take the blow and seem unhurt,
speechless, we also watch and wait.

Kwesi Brew, from Return of No Return (1995).

He doesn't pull any punches does he? Indeed he come right out and gets your attention with the assertion that "We are the punch bag of fate". I admire the nerve as well as the craft. You can't help but be implicated in the "we" even if you're not Ghanaian because what follows are stark words. Phrases full of ironic caresses follow from a connoisseur of the school of hard knocks. He has thought long about the topic and is deploying his talents in plain language.

He isn't berating a culture of excess, or greed, laziness or similar human failing. He's not complaining, nor is he making any value judgments like the prophets of yore. No. Not quite. There's no moral indictment to be found here. Further, should we go looking in the opposite direction, we also won't find any praise-singing. There is merely clear-eyed reflection on a the working of a community. We are treated to observations born of the discriminatory sensibility of a curator, observations wrapped with the detail of a wordsmith's weaponry. So, reflection it is. The mood is akin to wist, the atmosphere filled with the cosmopolitan perceptions of the weary.

It's a heavy burden however that he has set for himself. Discoursing on the lack of wisdom of the ruler or the excesses of the powerful is the first order of business. One almost expects this kind of pose of our poets. Still, turning the mirror at a society, as the cultural interpreter is wont to do, risks the weight of unpopularity. You get branded as a shrill gadfly demeaning the national character.

As an aside and recent example, it shouldn't have required much courage to criticize the opportunistic imps that landed us with wars and a depression early on in their misdeeds, but few displayed it. Now that the incompetence of that cabal is the conventional wisdom we all prefer to forget the social hysteria that prevailed and that they were able to exploit, the self-righteousness of the wounded and so forth. Cobwebs, I know, dusty cobwebs...

Returning to the poem, what are the contours of the stated philosophy of survival, I wonder? Let's start with the question of form. This isn't an essay, manifesto or political tract, it is very specifically a poem. The meter is off kilter - read it aloud and you'll see what I mean, I would hazard that this is deliberately so. He is usually very precise in his works. The chosen form is meant to disorient with its mixture of concision and paradox. The skill of the poet lies as much in the choice of words as in what is left unsaid. The tone also is very different from the exuberance of his earlier poems, the ones that excited a generation of Ghanaian writers.

There are certain phrases that are meant to heighten the tension. Consider the journey that starts with "the mettle of invisibility" and ends "the powerful and the unwise". It is worth dwelling on what we pass through: a coping strategy that helps us "outlast and outlive". If there are gems in this philosophy of survival, perhaps it is in a certain sense of community, the social interplay that Kwesi Brew describes as "love of family kith and kin and brother-keeping". Teasing out this clue, we learn that social living is the strategy. It's a protective mesh to be sure, but one that one that liberates from the peril of alienation that invisibility otherwise implies.

I keep returning to the last lines contrasting them with the first. It's an improvement, if not a reversal, with a sense of purpose. Cultural memory is the thesis. We may decide what we chose to remember and forget as individuals, what a society remembers, however, is often in the realm of the historian, who takes her cues from the raw material of the journalist, or the humble bureaucrat whose notes serve to underlie - or give the lie to, the politician or flight lieutenant's self-serving talking point memo. The hope is that a community will harken to the larger and deeper truths of a poet's lyricism, the storytelling of the griots of yore.

If it is sometimes good for a person to forget, it can be fatal for a community to forget. By the same token, it also matters what a community chooses to remember and to forget - the trappings of nostalgia, myth-making and selective amnesia mark out many blind spots in this landscape. The task then for the poet is to speak to cultural memory, to weave the dreams at once and to reflect on the messy muddle from whence we forge our society.

Kwesi Brew was perhaps the most famous of Ghana's poets (he passed away last year) although, and perhaps this is in keeping with his notion of survival, the poet in him was only one of the many lives he lead: diplomat, businessman, politician and so forth. He didn't simply witness the story of Ghana in the twentieth century, he midwifed the country and helped write its story with all its ups and downs, an active voice even when politicians and journalists would decry a "culture of silence". His declared task, and indeed his legacy, was to make sure that we never forget "the voiceless days of the past" as he wrote in another poem - contrast here with "speechless, we also watch and wait", consider also the threat to "engage the scarlet fury of battle", and the almost Ali-Foreman rope-a-dope strategy he alludes to. Of course there is also is an element of myth making in the stories that we tell ourselves and he made sure to tell his own stories and to influence the things we remember about our small country. The lesson that Kwesi Brew's Ghana has to teach the rest of the world goes well beyond mere survival.

The book of poems in which Ghana's Philosophy of Survival appears, Return of No Return is centered on a trio of long poems imagining the encounter of Africa with the West. The titular poem is written for his good friend and fellow poet, Maya Angelou, "No Return" was his nickname for her and a reference to the Door of No Return that is the feature of Elmina castle and the various other coastal castles on that saw slaves shipped off to the Middle Passage. Sidenote: these days the castles are tourist attractions of a mournful sort, legacy tourism they call it.

There's a story lurking here in the relationship between the two fellow wordsmiths. Maya Angelou, like quite a number of African Americans in the 1960s left the USA for safer and more hospitable climes. Some were in exile escaping J. Edgar Hoover, others the more benign recriminations of the civil rights era, and still others aiming to satisfy that longing for the motherland. In any case Ghanaian literature and arts in general benefited from the encounter - Efua Sutherland, Kofi Awoonor, Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Anyidoho and others would be part of Kwesi Brew's milieu.

Sidenote: by the early 1990s African Americans were beginning a second round of engagement with Ghana. The Leon Sullivans and Jesse Jacksons of the black establishment part of the seduction. No return was indeed returning.

Thus the terms of reference are ostensibly about the Return of the Native, and his note to Maya Angelou would deal with that and all the complexities of American and African interactions. He prefaces it however by considering the beginnings of that trans-Atlantic story and the centuries-long engagement with those who would become the colonizer. The two earlier poems in the series bear the title Don Diego at Edina (Elmina) and imagine a couple of meetings between local chiefs and the Portuguese. I think we'll call this poetic license but also much in keeping with Brew's own history. The Fantes were the first to encounter the Portuguese once these latter got their headstart on the high seas. Fantes are stereotypically reputed to be the most assimilated with the West. What stories indeed would they tell themselves about the relationship? His character of Don Diego Azambuja is perhaps based on his poet's notion of the first adventurers. Where does power lie? And how much foresight can we grant? This excerpt is a poet's history:

And the brown in the King's eyes thickened darkly over
The presage of gold on hands of iron, gold, gold, gold.
Will there be enough gold to dampen these fierce appetites,
Will there be enough gold, Kyeame?

- from Don Diego at Edina (Elmina)

The old chiefs were no fools but were confronted with guns, steel and the concomitant "fierce appetites". The second poem in the series, adds The Great Rebuff as its subtitle perhaps indicating the bad turn in this centuries-long conversation. In it the chief's Okyeame (his spokesman) whispers

Remember, Nana, temptation's honour is disgrace.
The stranger seeks the nether edge of your bed
To snatch your pillow for his head
when sleep overtakes your wakeful care.

Azambuja looked on.

Tell them, Kyeame tell them,
Friends who met but seldom,
Til death parts them.
Savoured the sweetness of untroubled friendship.
The nature of human heart wreaks its mischief
Upon close neighbours each smoldering with his own craving
From unfulfilled desires burst forth consuming anger

- from Don Diego at Edina (Elmina) The Great Rebuff

Again, the chief and his advisers have agency and foresight and negotiate as best they can. Perhaps this is an important point in light of the later catastrophe of the slave trade and colonization. He ends the second poem with an observation about nostalgia, moving forward a few centuries and laying the ground for his consideration of the African American yearning for return. He couldn't talk to his soul sister, Maya Angelou, without invoking the African memory of that dislocation and forging a common language. Again the entire suite is all about cultural memory, what we choose to remember and to forget.

The collection, Return of No Return, was a departure for Kwesi Brew, less exuberant than The Shadows of Laughter and less expansive than the vision outlined in African Panorama (previously discussed here). A mature meditation and a means to recapture his muse. Always clear-eyed, at times it is a simple critique. Consider:

The Force Of Evil

When bad men
Pass through a place
The way is closed
Behind them by the injured,
Even to innocent men.

When in this mood, titles such as Democracy with a Dark Face, Power Perverted should give insight into the focus of his observations. Miracles and the Message is his reflection on the the 1983 drought in Ghana another sore episode and one that is rarely addressed, even as its effects linger.

In writing about these topics, he was perhaps responding to a frequent complaint about the short memories of Ghanaians. So when thugs confront us, we should meet them with our active gaze. And just to prove this point here is Kwesi Brew as Jeremiah, inveighing against the military thugs who were then in the midst of their misrule. No one can say that they weren't confronted. Consider this excerpt from A Goodbye to Arms

Where the green khaki struts and grinds
its marijuana terror into unarmed hearts,
They come as men-at-arms
badged as justice, grim of face.
And then at last, dissembling cloak removed.
A pack of common traders stained in violence
Wresting bread out the mouths of babies
only to give it back to them at a price
so kind are they who betray us.
Mothers, fathers, children, brothers and sisters
Their own shame stained blood

...

Where is our liberty, you thieves of time?
Where is your vision of prosperity, disciples of greed?
Where is your safety of life, agents of death?
Trusting in these tempers of discontent,
We shall be free again
Free from fear, the fear of fear, the worst
And forever!
A nation's life is a span of just one single bold day!

- from A Goodbye to Arms

The play on the phrase "free from fear", favoured of election observers everywhere ("free and fair, free from fear") is perhaps the sole levity in that poem, a J'accuse directed at Rawlings and his chameleon crew who were ostensibly shedding their military proclivities (hope springs eternal). The rest of the collection, however, serves to round out the picture with laughter and acute observation. We can all use some laughter to leaven life, some riddles to puzzle over and some landscapes for quiet contemplation and revival. The oral tradition that was our past might have encouraged laughter and forgetting but it was also the font of proverbial wisdom and coping strategies for dealing with tricksters. The poets and writers of our present have their work cut out for them.

There is only one aspect of Ghanaian society that Kwesi Brew's words don't fully address in his works, and that is the growing influence of the new religions. Perhaps the urbane cosmopolitan in him didn't feel the need to consider these articles of faith as he spoke to memory. His message of social living was a worldly one even as it invoked the spirit of brother-keeping. It was simply his duty as observer to hew to that message, to bear witness to an unvarnished Ghana.

He lived then "in a land flooded with ubiquitous miracles" and fought the good fight, fashioning his way in the path of a long line of cultural interpreters. I love the texture of Kwesi Brew's poems, the exuberant efficiency of his wordplay and the complications he teases out as he captures both personal and social moods. His words are a soothing balm when the temptation of wrath beckons, they have the consistency of shea butter, guaranteed to heal open wounds and I feel very close to their vitality.

I often feel impatient about Brand Ghana, the twists in the writing and the frequent setbacks. My elders counsel me that it is best to dwell on the small things, to look at the big picture. Talking the long view is a hard thing for the impatient; watching opportunities pass by as small mindedness prevails seemingly at every turn. After reading Kwesi Brew however, I come back refreshed. I no longer begrudge the sanitized fairytales that many like to tell about Ghana - they have their uses, and, if anything, sharpen my resolve: resist nostalgia and the larger temptation of myth making. Lyricism and clear-eyed reflection were Kwesi Brew's weapons of choice. We are writing the story, we have been writing it forever.

Poetry A Playlist

Phoebe Snow - Poetry Man
Deliciously seductive soul music. The Zap Mama remake with Michael Franti is also essential.
Roy Hargrove - Poetry (featuring Q-Tip and Erykah Badu)
Perhaps this belongs more properly on a playlist entitled elation, but I couldn't resist. Like butter... shea butter.

This is the second of some reflections on Ghana, prompted by the recent election. Let's place this note under the banner of social living.

File under: poetry, literature, criticism, review, appreciation, culture, observation, memory, griots, Ghana, Africa, Kwesi Brew, Social Living, toli

The Wound Part I (Ghana Elections 2008)

2009-01-01T20:22:00.006-05:00

Let's start with this: they almost killed my uncle.

I really can't write much more than that. When I look at what was done to him, when I look at the pictures, there really isn't much more that can be said: they tried to kill my uncle, they almost killed my uncle.

For an election.

My mother was the one who received the phone call from her brother telling her to come quickly, that they were killing him, that she should bring help.

I was back in Accra at a remove of 200 kilometers. I only saw the text message that read

"Dr Ohene beaten to pulp at Dededo polling station, Ho West. He has been sent to Trafalgar hospital. It's time to stop these gung ho moves"

True I heard the almost primal sound that my cousin had raised when she received that message, a terrifying sound that had made me stop whatever I was doing on this, my dad's birthday, and rush her way. I felt the same wound. I still feel it.

My mother had been talking to my grandmother and grand-aunts when she received that frantic phone call. I can't imagine what those women must have felt in that instant and in the subsequent fraught hours. Is it possible to wound anyone more?

I don't know what my 10 year old cousin, my uncle's son, who was in that house with those women, must have felt. He had been arguing throughout the previous day that he should accompany his father to watch him be a polling agent. Would they have killed his father in front of him? Is it possible to wound anyone more?

The threat had been raised in 2000 and 2004 that "There will be blood on the ground". There was certainly violence and intimidation back then but we have seen things this time in 2008 and now 2009 that are chillingly close to what transpired in places that no one should ever emulate, in countries that people use as cautionary tales.

The cynical people who incited, who fomented, who organized the political violence are as much to blame as those who attacked, who beat, who kicked, who threw stones, who threw planks, who sprayed acid and sundry powders, who held people hostage until they signed, who chased people off, who surrounded cars that arrived in their villages and towns, who shook cars, who spat, who came with cudgels and cutlasses, who threatened to burn down our family home and many others, who stole watches from bleeding men, who searched for cement blocks to take lives, who heeded the call to slaughter the strangers in their midst.

I had promised myself that I wouldn't write during my holiday in Ghana. I knew that I would have prime material with these runoff elections and indeed my home has been plum center of the election strategizing and campaign. Sociologists, historians and political scientists would die for what I've witnessed.

Since 10am on election day when I heard that awful news, things have been clarified for me. The deeply political animal that many of you who read me know is simply in pain.

I have written about my uncle before in these pages, noting that he was one of three psychiatrists tending to the mental health of 20 million Ghanaians. These days he might well be the only psychiatrist in Ghana since almost everyone who trains in his discipline seems to leave the country. My favourite uncle, I don't know a gentler man.

I will write more later on this and other topics and more in my customary style. I will share two things now, I hesitate with the first but I recall having written on the necessity of permanent outrage and certainly there has been outrageous behaviour here.

Photos of my uncle after the attack on him that my mother somehow thought to take (warning these are graphic).
My mother is more sober perhaps, and certainly calmer when emergencies arise. I don't know where she has found the time given the tremendous pressures of the past few days but she has written an account of things.

Look On At Your Handiwork

I hope these wounds will heal and that I'll forget these things. But for now I'll end with this: they tried to kill my uncle; they almost killed my uncle.

File under: life, violence, emotion, Ghana, election, politics, strategy, Africa, blood, memory, family, toli

A Debt Foretold

2008-12-08T00:08:00.007-05:00

Asked if she would use a credit card if one were given to her, Ms. Zhang looked confounded. "What's a credit card?" she asked, adding, "We have everything we need."

— China's Economy, in Need of Jump Start, Waits for Citizens' Fists to Loosen

Indeed, I ask. Indeed. Ms. Zhang has vocalized the existential question of our age. What's a credit card?

Everyone is asking similar questions these days. "What's a bank?", for example, is something that markets the world over are pondering. We're finding out that there are many things that are bank-like entities — from insurance companies through mortgage companies to even car companies, and others, nominally called banks, that had very odd ideas about what a bank was actually supposed to be or do. But I digress, let's stick to the matter at hand: what's a credit card?

Well the credit crunch hit home in a minor way last week. The message, delivered in a plain white envelope, was resonant in its simplicity:

Dear Mr O. Amaah

We are writing to you because we noticed that this credit card account hasn't been used for at least [redacted] months. We believe this may indicate that the account no longer meets your financial needs. With this in mind, the account has been closed.

[redacted closing pleasanteries]

So there you have it, ever so pithy. It kicked the bucket; there's one less credit card in the world today. A little piece of plastic was duly snipped, shredded, and recycled. And that was that, you might say. Still, there's a tale lurking behind that note, a petit divertissement perhaps, an object lesson about the current global reassessment of risk, or if you are so inclined, a parable about the meaning of credit. Consider the following credit card toli a chronicle of a debt foretold...

My introduction to Generation Debt (USA edition) was with a First USA credit card that I signed up for sometime in 1994 in order to finance a conference that a bunch of African students decided to put on that year. Not being favoured sons and daughters of Harvard, donors were not being forthcoming with spare change to help our efforts. But we were bloody minded enough to want to put Africa on the university's agenda, for a weekend at least — we knew our limits. So I picked up the three credit card applications that had been crowding my university mailbox, filled and returned them in their glorious postage-paid envelopes.

I have to admit, I was shocked when a sleek credit card duly arrived in the mail a week later. I was doubly shocked when I saw the number of digits in the credit line assigned to me. I still can't believe that a bank would extend almost $12,000 of credit to a mere African student who was earning $8.50 an hour working weekends as a dishwasher in the Harvard dining halls. Well, this meant that the show would go on, my $300 bank balance be damned. I dug this plastic exemplar of American bravado. Sidenote: one of the other applications had been promptly rejected, and after a longer period, the third was approved (with a credit line of $500).

Incidentally the first purchase made on this card — and the card's claim to fame, was a plane ticket for Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf to bring her to the conference. At that time she was a humble bureaucrat at the United Nations Development Program who, if I remember correctly, had initially suggested that she would even contemplate driving up from DC if we could find someone to car-pool with her... You'll recall that Liberia and Sierra Leone circa 1994 was prime warlord running riot material. She, in contrast, simply wanted to talk to the students. How refreshing.

Anyway, the eventual budget for the conference was around $22,000 of which approximately $15,000 was put on credit cards that were bestowed on yours truly over the next two months.

Now I see you shaking your head. I understand. It's OK, go ahead, shake your head, titter away. I can handle a lot of head shaking, rolling of eyes and the like. I certainly am shaking my head as I remember the things I charged on that card. You see, thrift runs deep in my family. Further, there's a certain conservative streak and reputation that is very much belied by this, my first encounter with a credit card. In mitigation perhaps, I'd note that I was just a year past the sophomore stage so you could place this anecdote under the banner of youthful indiscretion.

Returning to our original question — remember we're trying to clarify things for Ms. Zhang — what can we say so far?

Well a credit card is claimed to have something to do with meeting financial needs — that is what my credit card company suggested even as they terminated our dalliance.

The anecdotal evidence also shows that a credit card is something that changes one's relationship to risk, and indeed risk assessment.

A further reality illustrated here is that a credit card is something that allows sophomoric impulses to move beyond mere bravado to full-blown fiscal train wreck, all within a 25 day (or 20 day) billing cycle - for these things can change at little notice per the small print.

It turns out that there's nothing like having $15,000 bills to concentrate the mind - well at least to concentrate my Ghanaian student mind. It also turns out that, statistically speaking, credit card debt doesn't concentrate the minds of most Americans - students or otherwise. It must be a cultural thing. It is confounding, isn't it? A credit card is a puzzle.

Suffice to say that I sweated a lot for the next few months as I applied to various funding sources to try to get reimbursement so that I could pay off my credit card bills. That $15 minimum payment that was cheerily suggested to me seemed a little out of proportion to the actual bills in question, on the order of a thousand times the amount of said bills. A credit card is a hassle.

If you were in Cambridge in those heady months and had even a faint whiff of money about you, you would have made my acquaintance. The idea was that I'd beg, steal or borrow to repay this debt. I visited more foundations, Harvard-affiliated or not, wrote more letters, made more phone calls, appeared in more student council meetings or board meetings, than I care to remember. I discovered reserves of argumentation and negotiation skills that I never knew I possessed. Some looked for polish in the presentation and others wanted you to dance for the money. I had no shame, and was chameleon-like in my affectations. For a surprisingly large number of organizations, it appeared that it paid to look very skinny, malnourished, child-like and/or poor - there's a certain image of Africa that loosens wallets. Normalcy wasn't a feature that they cared for. Well, I obliged. I remember someone wondering aloud why we needed to bring all these mid-level African professionals (Johnson-Sirleaf, Djibril Diallo etc.) to the conference when an expert like Samuel Huntington was available (and local). I kept my mouth shut. A credit card is a hustle.

I learned a lot in those days about money, power, time, and especially about debt. On the question of time, I learned one of Einstein's dreams about the perception of time: there's that notion of time dilation as evidenced by the interval between when someone says they will give you money and the actual moment when you receive said money. A credit card is an alarm clock of sorts.

There were many lessons learned, perhaps too numerous to enumerate here. The American facility and close companionship with debt will forever remain a source of fascination to me.

My sweat paid off, money trickled in, the conference went on and I managed to pay off those initial credit card bills on time. A couple of months later, I got another letter from First USA: the credit card company duly increased my credit limit to $15,000. A credit card is a dream.

When you read about the psychology of conmen, you'll find a lot about misdirection in language and verbal framing. The fact that they call it "credit card" is quite a tell when it is actually a "debt card". The verb credit has positive associations of honour and achievement that enable the crucial leap of faith. Truth in advertising, if you will. A credit card is a confidence game.

The Story of O

Having a long and hyphenated name, I was always wary about using my now dearly departed credit card - even as First USA's issues in the realm of e-commerce were being worked out. For one, my full name didn't fit in the required space on the card's front so the first part of my last name became the initial O, and a new identity was minted, Phoenix like. For fifteen years, an entire area of forest and countless trees have been sacrificed to the cause of junk mail offers to that guy with the O initial. I tell you, Mr O. Amaah has been positively deluged by marketing offers after First USA promptly sold my details to its marketing partners. A credit card is an alter ego.

Returning to our story. In time, First USA was bought up by Bank One which was bought up by Chase Manhattan bank (later renamed Chase), which was bought up by JP Morgan to become JP Morgan Chase. The card name changed accordingly. A credit card is a chameleon.

When I lost my wallet and bag a few years ago, and tried to cancel the card, I had to go through a whole rigmarole with customer service trying to determine what the name of the card was. I always remembered it as my First USA card but there were at least four different entries in their records. Who knew? A credit card is a complication.

I am not one for debt. I had this card for almost 15 years but I found myself preferring the second card which, you'll recall, came with a lower credit line and on which my full name could be printed on its front. I only use credit cards as a convenience and am one of those termed deadbeats by the credit card industry, ergo one who pays his bills in full.

Truth be told, I stopped using it because of fickle and aesthetic reasons. I didn't want to pretend to be Mr O. Amaah any longer. I was skeptical of that entire identity conjured up out of missing pixels and thin air. A credit card is a sleight of hand.

Still, I kept the card around for sentimental reasons – you always remember your first credit card, your lost virginity in commercial debt. It was the prodigal card, or perhaps the card that the builder refused in biblical terms. Well no longer. My credit card is dead.

JP Morgan Chase received a bailout in the form of a $25 billion equity injection from the United States Treasury under the authority of the TARP legislation. Presumably as the company absorbs its Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual acquisitions, the bean counters have decided that hoarding cash is the name of the game. Risk managers the world over are doing much the same thing – that's why they call it a credit crunch, innit? They no longer relish the prospect of yours truly being seized once again by a seminal lunacy and taking advantage of the now $23,000 credit line that they had since extended to him. Oh well, their loss.

I suspect it will take a few years for Mr O. Amaah to stop receiving junk mail. While I might (briefly) mourn my First USA card, I can't wait for my alter ego's disappearance. In the grand scheme of things, I'm doing fairly well in life. I have health and loving family and friends. I applaud those faceless credit assessors for cutting me off — even if abruptly and without notice. I'll echo the words of a confounded Chinese woman:

"What's a credit card?" Adding later, "We have everything we need".

A credit card is a debt foretold.

Light Reading

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The end was always certain but the story was worth telling. And re-reading, over and over again.

Credit in Film

One of my favourite films of the 1990s is the Dutch film Karakter (Character). It's a tale of Oedipus meets Inspector Javert with the prospect of bankruptcy looming and debtors' prison. A wonderful period thriller founded on the themes of identity and duty — the duty of repaying one's debt; that Dutch sense of rectitude.

Soundtrack for this note

The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free
An album length meditation on the small things and the daily hustle. Standouts include It Was Supposed To Be So Easy, Not Addicted and What Is He Thinking. Indeed.
Lizz Wright - Dreaming Wide Awake
The sophomore album in the form of the young lioness growling. Aural candy for the jazz vocal fiend.
Tom Scott - Today and Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y)
The sinuous horns are duly credited to Tom Scott's brand of seventies' rare groove. They were sampled to great effect by the one and only Pete Rock who added glorious snare drums. Everything that is good about hip-hop can be found in that song.

Next: What is a bank?

File under: credit, debt, bubble, USA, economics, risk, banking, finance, observation, culture, life, Shell Game, toli

Drum Magazine Ghana 1969

2008-11-10T00:04:00.006-05:00

Belatedly, some notes on the year 1969 in Ghana, as viewed through the lens of Drum magazine... (see slideshow)

I spent some time scanning images from a year's worth of issues of the Ghana edition of Drum magazine. Truth be told, losing myself in the pages was a bit of escapism. I wanted a glimpse of my parents' world, of their aspirations and of the culture from which I emerged. Those pages were a good source of any manner of cultural artefacts and goings-on in the country. Call it nostalgia, call it social anthropology, call it a poor man's history, or perhaps I was simply fascinated by the advertisements. So. Drum Magazine. Ghana. 1969. Here goes.

1969 was an election year in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah's one-party regime had been overthrown and civilian rule loomed. But that was by the by - the magazine was typically focused on lighter issues. By way of background, Drum magazine is most known from its South African roots but it also had Ghanaian and Nigerian editions from the late sixties until the eighties. The equivalents would be Ebony, Jet or say Essence (alternatively think of Hello and Paris Match) ergo, none too weighty society papers. A good place to start then would be "Drum's fabulous contest to find the prettiest mini-skirt (and its wearer) in Ghana."

The singer Rose Small's pink mini-dress "proved irresistible". Her testimony was eloquent:

"Minis are gorgeous and I adore them. With the right figure, pretty legs and a lot of taste a girl simply looks wonderful in a well-made mini. I believe that for a long time to come minis will continue to be ravers.

I wear minis because I feel free in them. In any case what's wrong with showing just a wee bit of thigh? For parties, for casual wear, for public outings when I appear on television or nightclubs my dress is either four inches or six inches above the knee. I have no fixed notions about the length anyway. On a day I feel gay I just slip on a six-inch-above-the-knee dress.

Of course I do not fancy very complicated fashion make-up. For the mini which won the competition I just asked a dressmaker... a fan of mine... to make me a six-inch mini with a matching long-sleeve blouse. That's all. The important thing is the poise and grace which I think I have. The mini cost only eight new cedis to make. No fuss, no mess!"

Dig the insouciant language of the liberated. Others however took offense, Ghana was (and perhaps still is) a fairly conservative society:

"The mini-skirt which you have so irresponsibly patronized is becoming a nuisance in the country"... "most of the girls who put it on do not have the good legs, the shape and poise to do justice to that weird dress of yours".

The fashion spreads contrasted the mini-skirts and bell-bottoms of the time with the more traditional cloths (Dutch wax, batiks and other fabrics).

We see the marketing of the Kenyan fabric named Maridadi (from the Swahili word meaning bright and colourful) and its Ethiopian analogue.

Teijin Tetoron, the Japanese polyester brand was trying to make a splash - without much success, as it turns out, cotton works best in our tropical lands.

There was plenty of eye candy throughout the magazines.

On the perennial question of hair, the influence of Motown was felt with Supremes-styling presumably taking over from the corn roll of yore.

This same dynamic is at work 30 years on, as the following posters from 1999 show.

Imagine an academic paper: Tradition and modernity, the sociology of hair in post-colonial Africa.

The alternatives were afros and going au naturel of course. Wigs were for the more adventurous - brand 99's wig spray advertisment proclaimed that it was "Ghana's favourite lacquer".

Head scarves abounded, the older, traditional duukuu that had given way to European headgear before independence was now reinvented as the lappa cover cloth.

Timothy Burke made his name as a social historian studying advertisments in Zimbabwe in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. There is much of the same material here. There was soap, lots of soap, Lux Soap would weigh in against Rexona and its ubiquitous cover girl. Omo competed with Surf.

Skin lightening products were popular (well at least they were heavily advertised). Fela would sing Yellow Fever a few years hence and bemoan the extremes of the practice. It's not just Africa however and not simply old history, the same thing happens in India and China today. "You deh bleach, oh you deh bleach".

A yearlong series on sex education draws a big response from readers, dealing as it does in straightforward terms with everything from birth control and family planning, the pill and other contraceptives, midwives, child birth, relationships (pre-marital and otherwise), passion and even prostitution.

Healthcare advertising is also much in evidence. Presumably the infant formula and powdered milk of the time wasn't contaminated with melamine but the hard sell about infant nutrition was well on the way as breast feeding was deemed passé.

Cod liver oil remedies compete with Milk of Magnesia treatments. Vicks rubs elbows with the various potions and herbal bitters that form the bulk of traditional medicine. The same competition between modern pharmaceuticals and traditional practitioners continues to this day and all now have large advertising budgets. As one would expect, we find adverts for various malaria treatments - Nivaquine gave "sure protection", Resochin claimed to cure malaria. Bayer, Merck and others were targeting Africa.

Ghana Airways was continuing its expansion - by the mid 70s it would begin its inexorable decline (it died a few years ago) - well, we could all dream in 1969.

Next to ads about Westinghouse air conditioners or Fan ice cream (which had been launched on the advice of Dr Fred Sai and was instantly favoured in generations to come), you'd find much about beers of course. Star beer and Club lager had large budgets and blanketed much of the magazines. It was all about the good life. The culture and politics of alcohol have been much studied in Ghana. Schnapps was less in evidence but featured - it is used in libations and many of our ceremonies.

My clear favourite is Pepsodent toothpaste with Irium. Be progressive and dig the production values and the light skin.

There was a vigourous music scene and perhaps a golden age of music in the country. On the highlife side of things, E.T. Mensah and his Tempos competed with Jerry Hansen and The Ramblers band who were more in the vein of King Bruce's Black Beats. These newfangled Ramblers stepped things up and "brought back the boogaloo" from London and the States.

The Professional Uhuru Dance Band featured the guitar dexterity of Stan Plange. The GBC Band roughed it up with The Revellers, Railway Dance Band and the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation Band. The Aliens Band, The Planets, the Black Santiagos rounded out the cast. The Sierra Leone Heartbeats, fronted by Geraldo Pino had set up shop in Ghana after the coup and found a receptive audience for their brand of soul music - echoes of Motown were in the air. Paradoxically The Soul Messengers' tour was judged a failure - the competition was too fierce.

Every issue featured the obligatory society puff pieces (sundry ceremonies, weddings, durbars and funerals). Memo to self: finish the long overdue toli on African ceremonies.

The Ga chief, Nii Bonne, the so called "Boycotthene", who made a stand against inflation and organized a national boycott in 1948 against colonial rule, died during the year and his funeral was a major marker. It was unusual for traditional rulers to feature in the independence or nationalist movements but Nii Bonne didn't recoil. You may recall, my previous commentary about E.T. Mensah's song, Inflation Calypso, which marked that episode in lilting music.

On funerals, the thinking was that "it costs too much to die". A certain Moses Ababio in Somanya bemoaned 'senseless, prestigious funeral ceremonies'. Millicent Adamafio in Sekondi chipped in:

'grandiose and extravagant preparations must be condemned in the strongest terms. Some people have become full-time mourners, showing their faces at almost all wake-keeping services. Their explanation is that the more one attends such functions and registers his condolences, the more sympathisers one gets when he is bereaved. In fact there are voluntary organizations whose sole purpose is to give moral and financial support to members who are bereaved'

Others countered:

"what is wrong with a nice colourful and impressive funeral for a loving relative whose face we will not see again. The dead are an important subject in our tradition and should be accorded the due ceremony and honour they deserve".

You'll see much the same debate if you read today's Ghanaian newspapers.

There's a cultural point to be made here. Those "voluntary organizations", those funeral societies are very much tied to the informal sector in the economy. This has always been true and was even moreso during military rule. It was said that during the worst of the Rawlings years the funeral industry was the only growth industry. They provided not only social comfort but financial support. Beyond that, the susu collectors that deal with money management in our markets are intimately coupled with these informal societies and their financial arrangements are our equivalent of the shadow banking system, the essential glue that underpins the Ghanaian economy. Many analysts of the Ghanaian scene seem to dismiss these cultural organizations too readily. The financing of funerals and weddings would make a great dissertation topic for a budding economist or social historian of Ghana. Those considering technological solutions such as mobile payments and the like would do well to start by examining what makes these organizations so effective.

The formal banking and financial sectors were big advertisers, trying to convince the unbanked to start accounts after the hard times under Nkrumah in which banks had fallen out of favour. There was a concerted campaign targeting market women, young professionals, textile workers and entrepreneurs.

On ceremonies, there were scenes from the Oguaa Fetu Afahye celebrating the peoples of Cape Coast - the Oguaa traditional area. The headlines: custom and taboo take their turn.

The original founders of Cape Coast were said to be the Bentsils and Inkooms who migrated from Sekyere and Techiman and settled in Effutu, nine miles north of Cape Coast. The wandering Effutus soon began to explore their new environment and through the trapping and marketing of crabs, pitched themselves a settlement in this part of Effutu Kingdom called Cabo Corso (Cape Coast) by the trading English and Swede settlers and Oguaa or Gwaa (market) by the "natives"... There were images of "top-level fetish priests" performing the annual purification ceremony (Wohyefa) at Prapratem. These were "top-level", not your garden variety fetish priests.

Closer to my family home, there are the celebrations at Aburi and the Akuapem "mountains" with welcome images of Nana Kwame Fori II, Omanhene of Akuapem, and Nana Dokua II, Queen Mother of Akropong. Family...

Jimmy Moxon was also in attendance, by then he had already spent 25 years with the Akuapems. The so-called "Gentleman Chief" had moved from England and was known by his official name, Nana Kofi Obonya. At other events, you could catch glimpses of members of the Oddfellows Lodge and of various Freemason societies dressed in their distinctive attire.

There was much about student life (the writers were not far removed, if at all from university). Siren, the journal of Mensah Sarbah Hall, University of Ghana, Legon did a satirical end of year issue featuring a cartoon strip that gave rise to the "Wankye Wankye Scandal" - and consequent student riots...

The strip was denounced as 'pornography', students were duly suspended, campaigns were mounted to have them reinstated, demonstrations were started. Things got out of hand.

Reading closely you realize how benign the commentary was, young male students frustrated at the lack of internalists - 'internalists' being those female students who dated fellow students. There were complaints about "the young lecturers who openly fish in the limited pool of Volta Hall - and in the female wing of the controversial Sarbah hall". Student militancy prevailed however. The riot police had to be called in to calm things down. Dig the uniforms.

When the mood swings there are even looks outward to the deadly costs of the Biafra war in nearby Nigeria. Nelson Ottah termed it a "descent to the abyss" and was shocked by what he saw in Ojukwu's Biafra.

A great magician was abroad, and many things that had no relation with reason were happening. So it happened that the whole people got up like a herd of sheep and followed to their own destruction.

It was all grotesque. it was all an extravagant imbecility. It was all a gigantic political swindle. It was all first-class mass-hypnosis. But it needs an explanation.

On Ojukwu, he didn't mince words:

"the man is a nihilist - a nihilist uninhibited". A magician who "found it so easy to take fourteen million intelligent people down the path of folly, vanity and destruction."

A young Cameron Duodu takes a trip to America at the height of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers' confrontation with The Man. One gets the sense that he was really there to check out jazz groups like the Sonny Cox Trio or watch Le Roi Jones catching the spirit in live performances but he found that there was no escape from race in his travels in the United States. As he put it: "I see the beauty evaporate". It is interesting to read about America's civil rights trauma through the eyes of a Ghanaian journalist. He titled his pieces America the beautiful with no little irony.

Ghana was looking towards space - playing off the Soviet achievements against the USA's Apollo prowess (the moon landing was duly celebrated) - well anyone could dream and there were even nuclear ambitions (since revived in 2008).

On Politics

General Ankrah resigned and handed over to General Afrifa early on in the year. The die had been cast however, and the transition to civilian rule would account for much of the year's manoeuvering.

The Akuffo-Addo commision enjoined that "never again should there be any tyranny in Ghana... little purpose can be served if, having set up a democratic Constitution, we allow anti-democratic forces to overthrow or even attempt to overthrow the democracy that the Constitution ensures." A Constituent Assembly was sworn in to draw up a constitution taking into account its recommendations and those of the general public.

Lt. Gen. Ankrah would state 3 principles to inform the new Constitution:

The freedom and liberty of the people and their enjoyment of fundamental human rights
To eliminate the possibility of the return of tyranny and dictatorship to the country
To prevent the abuse of the Constitution through frivolous and ill-conceived amendments to it.

That last was a reaction to the deposed President Nkrumah and "his disrespect of the Constitution and the frequency of amendments which rendered it a simple tool in his hands for the perpetuation of his rule". With hindsight, the worries about tyranny would prove prescient - Acheampong and his band of rogues would mount a coup in 1972.

There was lots of campaigning and electioneering and much of it would feature in Drum's pages.

K.A. Gbedemah, finance minister under Nkrumah's CPP was exempted from the vetting conducted by the NLC and threw himself into the campaign with the National Alliance of Liberals (NAL). The association with Nkrumah would harm his performance. The "bearded, bespectacled, mystic-looking Dr. Willie Kofi Lutterrodt" didn't make an impression with his People's Popular Party. Joe Appiah broke with erstwhile colleague, Dr. K.A. Busia and the Progress Party, and founded the Nationalist Party on a platform to economic revitalization and promises to cocoa farmers. It would unite with the Ghana Democratic Party and the All People's Congress. Ex-minister P.K.K Quaidoo led the Republican Party the Dr. de Graft-Johnson led the All People's Party, these last two merging and forming the All People's Republican Party. Their manifestos make for interesting reading.

The elections would be won handily by Busia's Progress Party - the heavyweight brain-trust and shrewd electoral tactics proved overwhelming. Having B.J. Da Rocha on your side counted for a lot on the campaign trail.

Ajax Bukana, the irascible trickster, rabble-rouser and all around general entertainer launched the Mosquitoes Protection Party during the 1969 election. His platform was thoroughly ludicrous but brought some very welcome levity. The minstrel tradition had reached Africa and found fertile ground.

On Economics

There were complaints about smuggling - Ghana's economy was still dislocated. There were many scapegoats:

"we are asking them not to have a special liking for the Syrians, Lebanese, Indians and Nigerians who are mainly behind the illegal importation of cases of liquors, tobacco, used clothing and cotton prints".

These days, the additions to the list of convenient scapegoats in the Ghanaian discourse are the Liberians who arrived as refugees over the past 15 years. If you press a little harder, some might mention the Chinese but so far their impact on the economy hasn't drawn populist rebukes.

Early on in the year there was the so-called Railway Rumpus - labour disputes with the Ghana Railway and Ports Workers trade unions going on strike. They would face harsh treatment from the NLC - a military government, even a benign one, by definition is not very sympathetic. G.K. de Graft Johnson was then General Manager of those government-run enterprises and had a hard time balancing negotiations with the unions and keeping things running.

Mark Cofie, who started an empire of car garages, becoming an agent of Japanese car companies and dealing with repairing most of the American cars in the country, was given a glowing profile. A consummate entrepreneur, he had grand visions of a Ghanaian auto industry. In retrospect, it wasn't to materialize but he at least made a go at it.

On cars... the Hillman Hunter, the Honda S 800, Peugeot 204 Brake, the Mercedes 230 S, the Ford Cortina 1300, the Rover 2000, the Volvo 144 S and of course the Fiat 125 were all available in local showrooms. I still have fond memories of my Uncle Mike's yellow Fiat 125 which somehow survived well into the 1980s. Those Fiats were as indestructible as the Peugeots.

It wasn't clear how popular, or indeed how reliable, Soviet cars like the Moskvitch 408 were - the adverts made sure to note that there were plenty of "spare parts and excellent service available". Sidenote: Ghana had turned towards the Soviet Union in the previous years under Nkrumah - socialism with an African face was the slogan.

The slogan for Chrysler trucks and vans was "Engineering in Action". These days it's more like engineering inaction - and the prospect of bankruptcy.

There were many articles stressing the importance of vehicle assembly in developing countries, for example the Bedford VAM 23 motorway bus assembled locally by Africa Motors. These were the successors to the venerable, bone-shattering Mammy Trucks.

The recently opened Akosombo dam was meant to enable a new era of power and support the development of fledgling industries. "Abundant power for Ghana's new industries" read the headline. Manufacturing didn't take off however, and these nascent efforts would falter in the decades to come. It is only forty years on that these same aspirations seem to be taking off in any sustainable fashion. Still there is much on the various factories that were sprouting up.

Reports on the poor and often non-existent infrastructure in the Volta region make for depressing reading: no drainage systems, no street lighting, no water supply (only 8 percent with access to good drinking water), poor feeder roads, few doctors and so forth. The proximity of the Akosombo dam seemed to be of no consequence. A few gestures were being made to promote places like the Wii waterfalls and the mystery rock of Akosombo as tourist venues but the capacity wasn't there yet - indeed it has taken decades for some of those ideas to come to fruition. Certain parts of the country were being left behind and some would exploit the resulting grievances for political gain.

The environmental degradation of Keta and the anxiety of its harried inhabitants were a concern. Those who live between the sea and the lagoon will always find grievances. In any case, some of our best poetry has come out of their predicament, witness Kofi Awonoor's wonderful poem, The Sea Eats The Land At Home.

The obligatory photo of African school-children in morning prayer raises the issue of church or state. The big question was "whether the churches should continue to manage schools with local, urban and city councils or should the management of all educational institutions come under a unified system to be directed by the Ministry of Education". It was noted that

"the churches spearheaded the drive for education in Ghana... in 1737 the Danish chaplain attached to the Danish Castle at Christianborg in Accra sent two boys from the Castle school to be educated in Copenhagen. Again in 1828 the Danish governor at Osu, Accra invited the Basel Missionary Society in Switzerland to take up missionary and education work in Osu and its neighbouring districts."

During Kwame Nkrumah's reign, his government introduced party politics and the notorious Young Pioneers Movement. A relevant tidbit: when "Rt. Rev Richard Reginald Roseveare, former Anglican Bishop of Accra criticised the Movement's ungodly behaviour at a church synod, he was instantly deported from the country".

The public/private conundrum is very much in the news in today's Ghana, private schools are all the rage, often funded by churches. The jury is still out as to their effectiveness and the question of standards; the Ministry of Education still has to reconcile unyielding demand for public education with limited resources; worse, everyone has an opinion. The easiest way to get any Ghanaian talking for a good hour is to broach the topic of education, we all wax eloquent about what is to be done.

In 1969, the Sukura neighbourhood of Accra was gaining a reputation for crime and squalor even more lugubrious than Nima. Forty years on it is the aptly named Sodom and Gomorrah that takes the prize as Ghana's school of hard knocks, the place you terrify your little kids about the prospect of leaving them there. Of course this is all a matter of perception, the settlement of shantytowns always gives rise to dark hints of nefariousness by the establishment. Drum was firmly of the establishment and would editorialize about the problems of slums, runaway children and other social ills.

Looking towards East Africa, there is a feature about Pope Paul VI's visit to Uganda - and the story of the Ugandan martyrs. This would be juxtaposed with commentary on Mumiani, the legend of death - the blood sucking myths in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. This is about the "ghoulish people who murder for medicinal purposes". The feature recounts the superstition and bloodshed that swept Tanzania in the 1959. The derivation is from "the dark-coloured gum-like substance used by Indians, Arabs and Swahilis as medicine and said to be brought from Persia". Mumiani were viewed as colonial agents so the myth and that kind of mob justice began to fade in the post-colonial era. Our souls were perhaps contemplating other articles of faith.

Society Profiles

Dr Stephen Addae receives a great profile showing off his laboratory work. He was gathering materials and experience for his later opuses The History of Western Medicine in Ghana and The Evolution of Modern Medicine in a Developing Country. These tomes are bibles for historians of science and medicine, I should know, I'm married to one.

Pete Myers, the presenter of the BBC's Good Morning Africa whose "swinging career began in an Accra nightclub", was worth a lengthy treatment as an exemplar of the Ghanaian affinity with cosmopolitanism. Born in India, brought up in Caracas, Venezuela, he moved to Ghana as a teenager. He identified strongly with his Ghanaian associates and loathed the way that other expatriates conducted themselves in the newly independent country.

An interesting tidbit: he became a broadcaster after his friend Smokey Hesse who hosted the 50-minute Jazz Club on Ghana Radio got run over by a bus. He filled in for his friend after that tragedy and came to make a living as a radio presenter. He began to organize Friday discotheque sessions at the Metropole nightclub in the center of Accra, the club rapidly became the center for rock-and-roll and teenage fashion and even inspired mothers to write to the papers that their daughters were being misguided by the "decadence". It bears reminding oneself that Accra used to have a vibrant nightlife.

He went on to direct the Africa's first ever musical, Obradzeng, with sculptor musician Saka Acquaye and Beryl Kari-Kari, dancer and choreographer. After its initial dismissal by Nkrumah, the whole orchestra and 85 dancers were subsequently taken to Russia on one of the Premier's trips. Back in London he started working at the BBC, hoping to change its "colonial mentality" and "the way it talked down to the audience". His efforts were rewarded and the audiences responded to him.

In contrast to Myers' positivity, consider Geoffrey Bing, the former British Labour MP, who became one of Nkrumah's confidants, first as a constitutional adviser and subsequently as his Attorney General. He of course helped pass "the obnoxious Preventive Detention Act which came to rob Ghana of some of her best brains - it killed the celebrated Dr. J.B. Danquah". Unable to bring authoritarian socialism to Britain, he was glad to have an African playground to test out his ideas. A man who always operated in the shadows, we should compare him perhaps to those faceless European advisers to Idi Amin in the 1970s. After being thrown out of the country as a result of Nkrumah's overthrow, he would head home. Despite his fawning 1968 memoirs, his attempts to return to the political scene in Britain came to naught in 1969.

Baba Yara, Ghana's greatest footballer, the "King of Wingers of West Africa" would die on May 5, 1969 after sustaining a spinal injury in a lorry accident at Kpeve in 1963, three months of treatment at Stoke Mandeville hospital had done nothing to improve his health - nor had the local prophet healer, who had offered his services once he returned to Ghana, been successful. Thus his last six years of life were spent bedridden. Asante Kotoko, the Real Republikans and, of course, the national team, the Black Stars had suffered a grievous loss. The scenes commemorating his life leap off the page.

Born in Kumasi on October 12, 1936, it was in 1955, his debut year for the national team that he wore the number 7 jersey of the Gold Coast team which massacred Nigeria by 7-0 at the Accra Sports Stadium. Yara scored two goals and was the architect of four of the seven. Decades later his legend as a fearsome attacker is as glowing as say that of the magic hands of goalkeeper Robert Mensah. Those who saw him play wax rhapsodic to this day, my uncle Emma has been known to go on for a good hour about that golden era and those stars. The Baba Yara sports stadium in Kumasi is a testament to his memory.

There's an interesting profile of the great Ghanaian nationalist John Mensah Sarbah, born on June 3 1864, who died on November 6 1910. A lawyer he was the first native of the Gold Coast to qualify as a fully fledged barrister-at-Law. He argued against the obnoxious Lands Bill of 1897 which would have placed all public Lands in the Colony under the Colonial Government. It was never passed after legal argument and petitions to Queen Victoria. He waived his retainer for that case saying "I seek no reward in serving the land of my birth" He wrote a treatise on The Fanti Customary Laws in 1897 and the Fanti National Constitution in 1906. The great hall at University of Ghana Legon is named after him in his memory for his educational works. This included his founding of the Fanti Public Schools Limited which eventually became the present Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast. He designing the school's crest and its motto "Dwen hwe kwan - think ahead of time".

There's all that and more - like any society magazine Drum was sometimes shallow, other times profound and even on occasion sublime. Consider this a profile of a country in transition, between military rule and democracy, full of hope and navigating between tradition and modernity.

Ghana is headed to elections in the coming weeks and, from the outside, much of the discourse is akin to that seen here in 1969: great promise amidst reminders of just how far we have to go. I can only hope that my fellow countrymen take heed of those who paved the way for them and remember the words of John Mensah Sarbah: think ahead of time.

File under: Ghana, Africa, Drum, magazine, media, culture, politics, history, observation, photography, fashion, 1969, memory, toli

Maxwell's Suite

2008-10-29T04:40:00.006-05:00

For the record, the best $3.13 I've ever spent was for a copy of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite in May 1996 dug out of a remainder bin in a dusty record store (now defunct) in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts. I remember very clearly looking at the cover and deciding to buy the record on the sole basis of the title, thinking to myself: this is surely some soul music. I was 9 months into my first job and this was the first bit of whimsy I had indulged in all that time, the first thing I had bought for myself beyond bare necessities in all those months. For some silly reason I had worked myself into a state of thrift, subsisting at times on those "bags of burgers" that were the rage at McDonalds - 10 cheeseburgers for something like $4. Well I digress, we'll tackle that toli later... I remember also the look of interest as the guy at the counter rang up my purchase: "Looks like some soul, let me know what you think of it".

When I got to my room, I found the turntable, played the record and discovered that I was in possession of some exceptional soul music, a suite, a trip. This was a new voice that demanded attention, someone I would be proselytizing for even if he wouldn't need it. Looking at the credits I read names that gave me further comfort: Stuart Matthewman of Sade looked to be a key collaborator. Amp Fiddler and Wah Wah Watson were among the musical cast. I dug the voice, I dug the production values, I dug the sound, I dug the message, I dug the execution.

A mood lifted by the time I wore out the needle on the turntable that day. My immediate favourites were Til The Cops Come Knockin' and Lonely's The Only Company; I could identify with the vague longing and perhaps sense of obsession — young adults. Lots of things were resolved to the sounds of the album in the next few months. For one I decided to buy a cd player, that I deserved to have more than that gray room, that — well, lots of things you know.

I returned to the store a few days later to buy a cd copy and gave my report to the guy. We listened and talked our way through the album, talked music like those who share our affliction do - for example comparing Maxwell to that other guy, D'Angelo, who seemed hungrier. If they would be MJ and Prince in coming years, we wondered who would be their Madonna. The guy was an R&B traditionalist and kept trying to get me to buy that Brian McKnight album - I kept demurring, that thrift thing. Then he played New Moon Daughter for me and I kicked myself for having been so out of touch that I'd missed out on the release of a new Cassandra Wilson album. I decided to try to do a guest show at WHRB, to get back into things.

So.

There I was about to simply review the concert I attended last night and all of these things came out.

Music is like that. It's a social thing, conveying a sense of time, of place and of comfort. It triggers memories. It's that thing we call soul. I could go on about the vicissitudes of that year, about Boston, about friends and family, about jobs, the travails of finding an apartment and more. All those things came flashing back. I won't though. I'll simply note an album that was part of that year's soundtrack, a mood marker. And I'll hold on to that detail: the album cost $3.13 after tax.

So yes, The Cousin and I were warmed by Maxwell and his 10 piece band last night at the Paramount in Oakland. Escapism from the work week for 3,000 or so souls. It was well worth it. It was, to recycle that phrase I've become fond of, a comfort suite.

I'll leave the detailed reviews to others. It was a great show like all others in this tour. The horn section gave an organic feel, the guitars and bass were just right, the percussion was on point, the background vocalist gave nice accents. Briefly stated, the band is tight. When you think about Maxwell, don't just think of the man, the band is as important as the front man. All of them are enjoying the comeback and the overwhelming love from the audiences.

They played most of the favourites from his songbook and previewed a few new songs. His falsetto is still as pure as ever, he can do the Sam Cooke thing when he wants, or the Prince thing, or the Al Green thing, or the Marvin Gaye circa 1974 thing. There's the dancing and showmanship ala James Brown, he's no longer as skinny obviously, but he still gets down. If he was Mr Mellow Smooth in the past, there's now an additional edge to the performance and to the sound. There's now some experiential blues in his brand of soul. He still thinks in terms of suites, of capturing a mood, and will run with that feeling through its course.

Most of all there's the warm feeling in the music - it's like that groundswell that builds when Maze featuring Frankie Beverly come onstage in D.C.. It's in the crowd too - everyone knows the lyrics and wants to be seduced anew. By the time he got to covering Al Green's Simply Beautiful, he was simply making his intentions explicit. Call it melodious melodies or sensual soul - to pick titles of mix tapes I've made featuring Maxwell.

The ladies in the audience were all captivated. The panties were thrown on stage. The atmosphere was headier than a Robin Thicke concert. As expected, The Cousin paid me no mind throughout the concert, absorbed as she was in the aura like many others in the audience. I laughed at some of the scandalous things that those two women in front were screaming. It wasn't just nostalgia however, the music was truly that good. This Woman's Work made me tear up, Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder) hit the soul spot. Sumthin' Sumthin' got us dancing. Lifetime made us sigh. What more could you want on a Tuesday night?

Seven years is a long time out of the limelight but brother man delivered the goods. He's back. The demons are conquered. It was worth it. There'll be more suites in the near future and everyone is on notice that he'll be setting the bar high for all to follow. I'm expecting the same elation when that other guy finally resurfaces but for now, pound for pound, Maxwell's a heavyweight soul champion.

File under: music, soul, concert, review, Maxwell, memory, life, observation, toli

Mindless Speculation

2008-10-27T00:54:00.008-05:00

I. Geopolitics

The fellow with the fufu usually moves over to the man with the soup, never the other way around.

— Elechi Amadi, The Great Ponds

This delightful Nigerian saying distills a lot of economic insight - and it translates quite well even if you've never had the pleasure of eating fufu and light soup. It's a folk lesson that is learned very early in human life and certainly ingrained by the time you master the hard knocks of school playgrounds - or streets as the case may be. Gil Scot-Heron once phrased the sentiment as "all consumers know that when the producer names the tune the consumer has got to dance".

In times of crisis, economists talk about the "flight to quality" or deleveraging; political scientists, in turn, form models about the calculus of power relations. It's not quite a matter of rats and sinking ships but it surely comes down to the perception that the pepper soup would greatly enhance a depleted stock of pounded yams, cassava or plantain fufu.

Anecdotally, we then start reading articles about Americans (belatedly) trying to find jobs in the Middle East

Europeans in investment banking and other financial fields already have been flocking to the oil-flush Persian Gulf for months, propelled by the hope that emerging economies of the East will ride out any global recession better than New York or London. In a phrase often cited by British brokers and bankers, "it's Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, or goodbye."

This is at the level of the individual response but presumably this phenomenon extends to the societal scale. Tribes, companies, and countries the world over are now searching for soup.

These days, the men with the soup - or capital, or cash, or credit, or liquidity, or savings, or solvency if you prefer, ostensibly live in places where phrases like "sovereign wealth", "nation of savers", "oligarchy" or "oil producers" are bandied around. If they are called to finance bailouts, they might well extract their pounds of flesh - to continue on the metaphorical route. And yet that is the crux of the matter: who is going to finance bailouts and on what terms?

Warren Buffet is a happy shopper and is very exacting with the terms he demands before deploying his checkbook. Japan's Mitsubishi banking group almost caused Henry Paulson to go into cardiac arrest when it started renegotiating the terms of its proposed bailout of Morgan Stanley. Iceland, to take the other obvious example, was even negotiating with Russia for its bailout before others finally stepped in - the price of Russian army bases on the soil of a NATO member is too high apparently.

Negotiations are always tricky things of course, but when you have the soup you have the benefit of knowing that others will come to you. In this respect the most poignant geopolitical maneuvering has been pointed out by Bernhard of Moon of Alabama and it concerns China and Taiwan.

Item: Selling Out Taiwan To Finance The Bailout

"The Chinese president also praised the good momentum of the development of the Sino-U.S. ties in recent years in various areas.

He said China is ready to work with the U.S. side to intensify dialogue, exchanges and cooperation, and properly handle issues concerning mutual interests and of major concern, particularly the Taiwan question, in a bid to push forward the sustained and steady development of the Sino-U.S. constructive and cooperative ties."

Translated from diplo-speech: "Give us Taiwan and you'll get the loan."

Dig: the reaction was swift

Regulators in Taiwan ordered insurers to limit their holdings of Freddie, Fannie, and Ginnie Mae paper...

The Taiwanese also have some soup they can withhold it appears. These are fascinating times for geopolitics, everything is being laid bare.

When confronted with empty bowls and covered pots, you really start to wonder if indeed there is any soup available. More to the point: who's got the soup?

II. Estate Planning

Apropos the notion of death and taxes I was thinking recently about the sad and tragic death of Kenneth Lay, former CEO and erstwhile looter of Enron. I was reminded of the mindless speculation about its timing, for indeed, from some points of view, it was a very convenient death for his estate, coming as it did after his fraud conviction but, and this is crucial, before his sentencing, which meant that said conviction was abated - and the prospect of punitive damages and restitution to those who suffered at his hands disappeared in a coronary heartbeat - or lack thereof. Of course one shouldn't begrudge his family in their time of loss for the consequent beneficial preservation of capital. Still it would have been good to be able to hear his expert opinion on the current "global financial crisis" (as the BBC have branded the current mood - sidenote: the Motley Fool term it Panic 2008) and speculate as to its causes...

The mind is a funny thing and I then remembered the part of The Godfather II where Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen pays a visit to Michael Gazzo's weary Frank Pentangel on a military base and reminisces about the old school Roman solution for unsuccessful conspirators. The good soldier subsequently took those musings to heart. That scenario is the kind of thing that only happens in fictional movies - even if these days people worryingly encourage it in their anger. Moving right along...

Along the same lines, the always astute Floyd Norris was indulging in some mindless speculation himself recently

If Congress takes no action in 2009, the estate tax will fall to zero in 2010, and then bounce back to 2001 levels in 2011. That would create what the Tax Policy Center report, written by Leonard E. Burman, Katherine Lim and Jeffrey Rohaly, delicately calls "grotesque tax planning initiatives." What they mean is that there would be a great temptation to do in dear old (very rich) dad before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010.

There hasn't been much remorse among those who have made out like bandits in the bubble years, it seems however that the gig is up - or at least, pace the observation about who now has the soup, that the shell game will have different winners in the near term.

One starts to wonder what will get in the head of the dissolute offspring of modern day aristocrats when they contemplate the prospect of ill-gotten gains disappearing by fiat as the mandated clawback (albeit a quite lenient clawback) begins. It is quite fitting that those who thrived on moral hazard might find themselves targets of the ineluctable financial logic of perverse incentives. Time will tell, I suppose, if this idle speculation has any grounding.

On a slightly related note I was reminded of the following poem

Lord Finchley

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric light
Himself.
It struck him dead: and serve him
right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

— Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses

Periodically the social compact that Belloc identified a century ago is forgotten - that is the realm of trickle down economics. When The Masters receive their comeuppance, the reaction is not necessarily one of class warfare - everybody knows their place in society, but rather it is a distinct lack of sympathy for those who fall from grace. A debacle prompted by overblown real estate leads, as it were, to some furious estate planning.

III. A Pepper Soup Soundtrack

DJ Palm Butta - Fufu N Soup
The message delivered in this cheeky Liberian hiplife reworking of the Chicken Noodle Soup fad is clear: "with some okro on the side... that fufu and soup is sweet". True enough, we live in an era of microwave fufu, but even with such modern conveniences, we also need some soup. It goes without saying that Palm Butta also has the follow up track Cook My Pepper Soup which dives into the heart of the matter.
Eastern Ministers Guitar Band - Uwa Tuto Uwa Fufu
As discussed at the indispensible Likembe, the literal translation of the title is "The World is Sweet and Painful", the fufu of the the title is perhaps the pain, the soup is the sweet.
Digable Planets - The Art of Easing
You had to be there perhaps, but if you flowed with the vibe that was the Blowout Comb album, you'd know all about the art of easing, of laying back in the cut.
James Brown - Escape-ism
Some hot sauce to go with some hot pants, JB delivered wisdom in spades
You know when you forget that grits is... when you forget that grits is groceries and that eggs is poultry, you lose your thing. Now, you can lose your thing out there wandering around.
Fred Wesley's horns and the various incarnations of the JBs band were the soup to James Brown's fufu.
Donald Byrd - Fufu
Donald Byrd's 1973 album Kofi is one of my favourite in the jazz funk canon. Perhaps the excursions trips to Elmina and the consequent African-inflected rhythms place this music on the funky jazz side of the spectrum. Whether it is the driving soul jazz of The Loud Minority or the intricate interplay of title track or the blowing session that is Fufu, this is simply inspired.

I could listen to this for hours on end and indeed, to harken to another song on the album, I do have Perpetual Love for Byrd's music.

The received wisdom is that it was mindless speculation that got much of the world into our present belt-tightening. As things take on serious notes, one hopes that we can at least comfort ourselves with some mindless speculation. I've made my opening contribution, I await yours.

Let's place this note as part of an occasional series, observers are worried.

File under: observation, economics, culture, decline, fall, USA, bubble, power, politics, toli

Mood Markers

2008-10-11T21:31:00.002-05:00

These three songs and a stanza captured much of my mood over the past week. I wonder, what was your soul therapy?

Winter in America by Gil Scot-Heron and Brian Jackson
The full lyrics paint a picture of decline and fall. A harsh season has arrived early and, from all appearances, doesn't want to leave anytime soon.
People know there's something wrong
Feels just like winter
It's winter in America
Truth is there ain't nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows what to save
I used to mishear that last line as "cause nobody knows what to say" and was glad for the ambiguity: say versus save. Are these pieces of the same thing? Which is preferable: being tongue-tied or overwhelmed? Is it the sound of sirens or the sound of silence that is more disquieting in these time?
Anger in the Nation by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth
Well the title says it all doesn't it? I'm not normally a believer in ritual humiliation nor indeed the incantation of politics as theater, but I did find solace watching a few investment bank executives squirm under the questionning of US congressmen (notwithstanding the fact that said congressmen have been poor regulators). Thinking about the collateral damage that friends and family have already experienced made me appreciate the spectacle of these small discomforts and the promise of more to come. Of these small things are made comfort suites.
All Your Goodies Are Gone by Parliament
The languid rhythm of the track belies the message namely "Let hurt put you in the loser's seat". A essential soundtrack for anyone who deals with the stock market in the year 2008.
Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly is often cited as the great anti-war lament, I rather harken to his characterization of moneyed charlatans and the damage they do
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Perhaps the silver lining of the current moment will be some good art. I certainly look forward to it.

Next: Heart of Darkness, a playlist

File under: music, quotes, culture, observation, decline, fall, anger, economics, USA, toli

Sunday Night with Amel Larrieux

2008-09-24T23:56:00.004-05:00

Soul singers seem to dig Oakland. Something about the city's vibe resonates with them. Their appreciation is always reciprocated and audiences move rapidly from laidback contemplation to active engagement. Somehow I managed to catch Amel Larrieux and her five piece band last Sunday night in performance at Yoshi's in Oakland. Thus I can share a few notes on a comfort suite...

An electric bass guitar begins warbling, sounding something like an ethereal sitar by the time Amel walks on stage. She hums and launches into a warm acoustic rendition of Morning, the title track of her most focused album. Right out of the gate her voice grabs you as if to say "Pay attention. Get ready for some soul music". She doesn't intend to leave anything on the stage.

Trouble, is done Latin style with, as is typical in her live performances, an impromptu ending in which she starts scatting with abandon. "Louis Armstrong", she later explains, "All those years trying to be like you". She adds, "Lena Horne too". Well she's a singer's singer, it stands to reason that she has impeccable taste.

Giving Something Up is a bassy funk groove overlaid with increasingly abstract vocal stylings as it progresses, the arrangement is a mixture of jazz, soul and hip hop. Then almost improbably she breaks into Amazing Grace - a song that has never been done in this mode, urgent futuristic blues. How, the listener wonders, can a song contains such multitudes, rendered so seamlessly?

All I Got is an effortless follow up, a march reflecting on our condition. The refrain is all about the set upon (when she sings the passing lyric "slapped down a racist fool", those darker than blue in the Oakland audience respond knowingly). It's about standing strong and living without expecting any big bailout or "helping hand" as she sings: "this is all I got" indeed. As she riffs on the economic climate, "we're thoroughly spent... our credit's jacked up", there is complete empathy with the five piece band. They follow her on that the long walk with those worn shoes.

She gives a stately take on Magic and the zingers are fired rapidly: "still paying for your education when you're sixty six". Again the chorus is revelatory: "stress level's high and the morale's low". It's a blues for our time done with minimalist instrumentation. She ends with a turn as a choir director enlisting the audience in three part harmony. This kind of crowd participation is fun: we all need to "tap into that magic" to overcome our subprime present. Indeed that has been the theme of the whole concert, acknowledging what is going on in the world and finding humour to deal with it. Amel is an unpretentious artist, she makes everyone feel at home. It doesn't hurt that she's very easy to look at, the word chic describes her clothes and the long hair is doing all the right things.

A cheer of recognition greets the start of For Real, the ballad being one of the perennial fan favourites. With deft piano playing in the background, she floats into the upper registers displaying her Minnie Riperton credentials. After welcoming a a few bars from a guest soprano in the audience, she takes over. Her vocal control is breathtaking. Game, set and match, I'd say. To top it off she provides three or four different takes of the song - live remixes on stage. I'm always interested in the way singers manage to keep their trademark songs alive; somehow Amel always comes up with new arrangements subscribing to the jazz improvisation aesthetic. The jazz inclination will keep her in good stead with her audience.

We Can Be New is a warm poem, a melodious ballad very beautifully sung and ends with a reggae tinge. It must be the band's trademark to provide full glimpses of her range and musical comfort zone.

She debuts a new song, Have You?, a lover's lament peppered with humourous lyrics "I've mixed denim with whites, have you?". By this stage we are all spellbound. The elements of her appeal are simple: sympathetic piano, the light accents of her backup singer (Amira) and a singer at her peak. Amel is in full effect.

Then I almost died of joy: she sang Gills and Tails - my favourite song, the very definition of virtuosity. The vocal performance is wonderful; what the professionals would call her cry is a thing to behold. It's emotional, it's cerebral, it's quietly devastating. It's everything I like in soul music.

Wild is the Wind from her album of standards, shrewdly titled Lovely Standards, is done as a homage to Nina Simone. It's just her and the piano player; she has got the audience clinging to her every note. As the song starts to wind down she brings in the rest of the band and they add a dance groove - whoa, she can do house music, what can't she do? - the groove then morphs into Dear to me. House music man, just for the heck of it. She took a jazz standard, did it with flair and, just to show how fearless she is, she gives you some house. I give up, I'm joining the street team, Amel.

As if she read my mind, she then covers Prince's Pop Life, it's a party pure and simple - she reminisces about the Purple Rain to Parade Revolution era of His Royal Badness (she notes that she even digs Tambourine! claiming by this revelation membership in that purple secret society) and talks about the rush she got performing Take Me With You with Kamal the Abstract a couple of weeks ago.

She closes with two crowd favourites: Get up, the monster club hit from Bravebird and Tell Me (from her Groove Theory beginnings). We're all dancing and singing along. It's a celebration. There's a community feeling. We'll be holding our head high in the weeks to come, smiling on Manic Mondays and Black Tuesdays, lifted above the fray, fortified by some soul music, a soundtrack to our struggles, "this great Mountain of When". This is her thing, this is what she does best: two ninety minute sets, three nights in a row in an intimate jazz venue. Every show sold out, the audience in the palm of her hand, the soul singer performs. Amel Larrieux has done it again.

File under: music, soul, review, concert, live, jazz, virtuosity, Amel Larrieux, toli

A Seminal Lunacy

2008-09-16T23:50:00.004-05:00

No one was responsible for the great Wall Street crash. No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of the free choice and decision of hundreds of thousands of individuals. The latter were not led to the slaughter. They were impelled to it by the seminal lunacy which has always seized people who are seized in turn with the notion that they can become very rich.

— The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith

I was reading Galbraith's tome last summer in an attempt to clear my thinking about bubbles and their typical aftermath. Later in his life Galbraith would cover financial euphoria more closely, but here it was all about its counterpart: the crash. He surely had a twinkle in his eye as he made his felicitous coinage of "seminal lunacy", lowering the reader's guard before proceeding to skewer at will. The book was a tonic for him to write and it is accordingly a tonic to read.

News headlines are replete with mantras about sound fundamentals, healthy economies that are resilient, innovations that are safe, disruptions that are contained and so forth. On this trend he had some cutting observations:

By affirming solemnly that prosperity will continue, it is believed that one can help insure that prosperity will in fact continue. Especially among businessmen the faith in the efficiency of such incantation is very great.

Stated another way, this is merely a tactic for dealing with ignorance.

That much of what was repeated about the market - then as now - bore no relation to reality is important, but not remarkable. Between human beings there is a type of intercourse which proceeds not from knowledge, or even from lack of knowledge, but from failure to know what isn't known. This was true of much of the discourse on the market.

It is often effective.

We are a polite and cautious people, and we avoid unpleasantness.

Social beasts that we are, we follow the herd.

Others pointed out that the prospects for business were good and that the stock market debacle would not make them any less favorable. No one knew, but it cannot be stressed too frequently, that for effective incantation knowledge is neither necessary nor assumed.

There is perhaps an echo of Walter Bagehot's observation in Lombard Street

Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected.

We have the spectre of bemused and gray suited serious technocrats making pronoucements with great alacrity. And a wary public begins to ask whither regulation. But that is by the by

One of the oldest puzzles in politics is who is to regulate the regulators. But an equally baffling problem, which has never received the attention it deserves, is who is to make wise those who are required to have wisdom.

The great crash, like other seminal lunacies, caused much revision of the conventional wisdom.

What six months before had been a brilliant financial maneuver was now a form of fiscal self-immolation. In the last analysis, the purchase by a firm of its own stock is the exact opposite of the sale of stocks. It is by the sale of stock that firms ordinarily grow.

There are likely many contemporary equivalents to the deficiencies pointed out about buying your own stock. Modern finance has been shown to favour opacity over transparency and the consequent costs are mounting.

Looking forward we can expect lots of hearings, meetings and busy work. Politicians shown to have been asleep at the wheel will now demand answers.

The rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business... one of the oldest, most important - and unhappily, one of the least understood - rites in American life.

Action is the theme of the day

Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

When histories are written about our present disillusionment they will surely read like Galbraith's summary of the reasons behind the crash:

In 1929 the economy was fundamentally unsound...
the bad distribution of income... highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent on a high level of investment or a high level of luxury consumer spending or both...
the bad corporate structure... the vast new structure of holding companies and investment trusts...
the bad banking structure...
the dubious state of the foreign balance...
the poor state of economic intelligence

By harkening to "fundamentally unsound" and ending with a note about "economic intelligence", Galbraith puts the knife in Herbert Hoover and others of his ilk.

It requires neither courage nor prescience to predict disaster. Courage is required of the man who, when things are good, says so. Historians rejoice in crucifying the false prophet of the millenium. The never dwell on the mistake of the man who wrongly predicted Armageddon.

There are lots of emotions when it comes to finance, concern chief among them. During a crash or panic, emotions turn darker and this can be a perilous time.

Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power. There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented. But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities.

And a parting warning for those erstwhile masters:

One trouble with being wrong is that it robs the prophet of his audience when he most needs it to explain why.

Shell games do have costs.

A brief soundtrack

Ralph Tresvant - It's Goin' Down
Public Enemy - Shut 'Em Down (Pete Rock Mix)
The best remix ever. Period.
Abbey Lincoln - Down Here Below
Abbey sings it best: "the winds of change are blowing through the weary night".

File under: economics, zingers, quotes, observation, culture, bubble, panic, depression, crash, credit, finance, Galbraith, USA, literature, toli

Bite-sized

2008-08-27T01:25:00.003-05:00

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

— Saki, The Comments of Moung Ka

It's so convenient when one can tell the truth.

— Graham Greene, Travels with my aunt

Honesty hath no fence against superior cunning.

— Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

It is always a relief to believe what is pleasant, but it is more important to believe what is true.

— Hilaire Belloc, The Silence of the Sea

These clippings from some recent reading were meant to anchor a number of pieces I've been working on. It struck me however that the verbiage that I might have attached didn't add much, and the plain juxtaposition of these bite-sized pearls sufficed. The first two statements, weighing the expedience of honesty, are paradoxically uttered by notorious dissemblers in the context of the stories in which they appear. Saki and Greene's mouthpieces share their author's sense of irony. In contrast Swift and Belloc are more satirical. [Insert disclaimer: we've all learned that honesty is the best policy.]

He was as American as folding money and waging war.

— George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener

He liked his epiphanies American: brief and illusory.

— Colson Whitehead, Apex hides the hurt

These last musings on America, by two of the sharpest and hungriest current wordsmiths, seem a little bleak and capture a certain malaise about the country. In the same book (it's nothing too weighty incidentally, and hopefully his next novel will have a greater impact), Colson Whitehead adds this choice piece of cynicism:

It was a good place to make a bad decision, and in particular, a bad decision that would affect a great many people.

I think I'd call this Blues 2.0 - we might as well add a version number to the sentiment.

Soundtrack: Me'Shell NdegéOcello - Elliptical

Taken from an album with the paradoxical title The world has made me the man of my dreams, this is one of the most fluid musical movements I've heard in the past couple of years.

File under: zingers, quotes, observation, culture, perception, literature, honesty, strategy, toli

Lunchtime Heist

2008-03-07T04:32:00.005-05:00

Something didn't look right. There he was on his hands and knees in the corner next to the ATM ten feet inside the burger joint. It gave you a little pause but you thought you'd proceed regardless. Someone at the front table was muttering something to him, the sounds lost amidst his chewing. Your bag got stuck in the doorway and, by the time you got unstuck, he had gotten up, turned around and was now facing you as you entered. 2:15 was later than normal for you, the upside was that you had missed the lunchtime rush: the place was a little empty.

For whatever reason you looked him up and down and took in the rest slowly. It didn't feel right. A gray hat haphazardly lay atop his head. A jacket: not quite a technician's jacket, nor even a UPS jacket, more like a fashion piece. You looked downwards as he stepped towards you. His hand brought up a bag from behind, he was gripping it tightly. You'd seen the money bags that the couriers use - this was the financial district after all, you see the couriers all over downtown San Francisco. This wasn't a regular bag. Puzzling.

And of course there was the sheepish grin that he was sporting. That definitely looked out of place. No gun that you could see... Still you dismissed your impulse to tackle him. "Whatever, you're imagining things." You walked past him towards the counter. He nodded imperceptibly as you crossed - still smiling you noted, and began to walk out.

As you made your way to the front counter, you continued to put it all together. "Must be missing something. Didn't look like a technician, nor a armored car courier... Surely he won't walk out of here just like that. Wasn't holding a gun, but could he? Why the smile? Anyway let me order."

Just in case, you tried to fix his features in your memory, late forties, brown hair beginning to gray, white guy, looked a little like Chevy Chase. You wondered if you'd make a good witness.

"May I take your order please."
"The special. No drinks... Hmm..."

You figured you should vocalize something about your disquiet. "Umm ... The guy..", you gesture. "Umm, the ATM.. the machine. Umm"

You turned and looked back to the front of the restaurant and noticed that the guy had indeed walked out. Oh well. Then the clincher: the ATM didn't quite look right. You turn towards the server and begin again: "Umm... The guy..."

Someone appeared by your side, impatient and loudly put the words out there:

"You know that someone just robbed your ATM machine."

That's it, that's what didn't look right. The bottom half of the ATM had swung out into the lane. The cheek of it, he even left the door open. You gesture. The newcomer repeated his words:

"You know that someone just robbed your ATM machine."

The woman taking your order was a little perplexed at first - perhaps it was the language barrier. She was also a little annoyed. The two men in front of her were departing from her script. You remained tongue-tied but Citizen Alert proceeded to spew out the details. Eventually, as he got no response, he asked, "Call the manager." She gestured to the manager and the other servers and grunted a name. Then:

"May I help who's next?"

You never quite liked that awkward formulation, surely she could have said "whoever's next" but the grammar pedant in you, let alone the intrigued potential crime witness, decided to step aside. Your order would be ready in a few minutes.

"Next."

You shuffled to the side and turned to look again at the front of the restaurant. Those now entering the restaurant all raised their eyebrows as they passed the evidently-open ATM. An alarming sight you assumed. You'd never seen the inside of an ATM before - well perhaps on the way out. A few diners started pointing towards the ATM but on the whole, there there was a lot of apathy in this joint. Perhaps it was the time of day, perhaps everyone needed a siesta. Or maybe it was just the nature of the place. Lee's is a tad above a McDonalds but it isn't quite a gourmet Barneys. Well you get what you pay for. You decided to take things in.

The manager eventually sauntered out from behind the counter and walked towards the front, chatting all the time on his cell phone. The newcomer accosted him, as did a few others: amplifying and explaining their consternation. The manager didn't seem impressed and continued his phone conversation. Minutes passed and a little group formed around the ATM bending down and examining it. One guy kept saying "ATM machine" and this again bothered you: you thought "machine" was redundant given the acronym. Eventually someone decided to call the police.

Your order arrived, you picked it up, thanked the server and walked over to the gathering at the front. You wanted to get a look at the ATM. Well, who knew?

You wondered how the robber managed to open the ATM and how long he'd been fiddling with it. Did he have a key or tools?

You heard someone say "He must have been a technician."

At that you smiled and shook your head. You said to no one in particular, "He just walked out with a bag of money and left the ATM open! Come on now."

You wondered how many other joints the robber would be targeting. It was a pretty brazen heist but it worked. The managers would be like the present one - unconcerned since the ATM had nothing to do with them. The clientèle would likely be as lethargic as today's version and, well, no one would be a hero. Indeed you were one of the few people who noticed anything anomalous or could have even attempted to stop it. Of course you didn't, proving the point.

You wrote your name and number on a sheet of paper and gave it to the manager in case the police cared - you didn't have time to hang around for them. Four or five others claimed to have gotten a good look at the guy and they all looked excited about their brush with notoriety. As you reached the office a few blocks away you started to hear the sirens.

You've been hibernating for the past few months; perhaps you too have been behaving like everyone in the restaurant: quiet and simply minding your own business. You need to get back into things, find your voice again. Don't let others just walk all over you and snatch your soul. Come on now.

You passed by the joint the next day and noticed that the ATM was no longer there. You kicked yourself for not having photographed the open ATM. You went to another lunch place. The sign was still outside however: ATM inside.

Soundtrack for this note

Nas - Thief's Theme

File under: life, crime, heist, theft, brazen, apathy, San Francisco, toli

Timepieces

2007-12-08T17:38:00.001-05:00

I present the following item from the Remembrance of Rogues Past collection: a campaign watch for the YEAA '98 campaign, namely the Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha shell organization that supposedly was spontaneously formed to campaign for that suffocating, murderous and dictatorial rogue, General Sani Abacha — late, unlamented and so forth.

I'm a avid collector of this kind of historical artifact and you'll sometimes find me bidding for a mint copy of the Franco sings for Mobutu album, to take a recent example and different rogue (quite a good album actually). The Abacha watch, while in the mode of praise singers and sycophants, is not your standard piece of dictator chic, it's much more functional and thus perhaps more insidious. In any case, it's worth some brief notes.

Back in the twilight zone of military rule in Nigeria circa 1998, it appeared that the dictator was feeling some pressure to make gestures towards democracy. The response was of course to think about how to hand over to himself, accordingly he devised lots of gestures. Having outlawed all organized opposition, the general decided to organize two approved political parties, "one a little to the left and the other a little to the right". Manifestos and constitutions were written, ostensible political philosophies were crafted and so forth, all by the military. The remaining question was who would lead these newfangled parties and there were any number of sycophants auditioning for the right to head these organic parties sometime in the future, if indeed elections would ever be held.

This is where the Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha came in.

The first order of business, as if this stage managing wasn't enough, was to start a whisper campaign urging both parties to nominate said dictator as their flagbearer. When more than whispers were needed, YEAA was to be the public face of the campaign, ready to whip naysayers into place. The idea was to coronate Abacha and win by acclamation the nomination from both of the parties a little to the left and right. A man of the people, he simply wanted to underlie that the youth wanted him to serve them and, moreover, that they were energetic — an obvious warning to anyone who might oppose the general. The thought was that he would face off with himself in new elections and succeed himself, or something of the sort - the main point was to hold elections.

On the one hand these actions were crude and ridiculous, on the other, they are simply sad. Whenever I look at the watch I think to the whole contingent of lobbyist firms, replete with consultants, who came up with the strategy and the inspirational name (Yeah!), the graphic designers called in to design the logo with the arrow and the wheel mechanism (perhaps fitting, for Nigeria under Abacha was on a road to nowhere), the coinage of the snappy slogan, the time spent uploading artwork and discussing typography with the design firm in California, the negotiations with Singapore factories for the production of watches and other insignia (for there were many containers worth of this stuff produced, T-shirts, key tags etc.), the shipments to Nigeria, the distribution of this largess around the country... The watch is like an open wound in the Nigerian body politic, testimony to the workings of a global criminal enterprise.

No one advocated for Abacha unless they were paid. Youth Energetically Advocating Abacha is a simple byword for coercion, cynicism and an illustration of the lengths to which people can go when in the grip of greed. The depressing thing is the sheer energy of this huhudious regime and the scale of the graft (billions of dollars were stolen for sure) — one wonders how many millions were spent on similar minor accoutrements. What a waste but perhaps such is the world of riches.

From all accounts Nigeria is much changed these days and a few of the victims of the regime are even (belatedly) getting their day in court. Perhaps it's best to move on and call this ancient history, perhaps one's outrage should be curtailed; let's leave it for the historians.

For the record, the battery never worked.

II. Measuring Time

Helon Habila in his second novel Measuring Time continues to make a claim for prominence in the roster of young lions in African literature. Instead of the claustrophobia of Waiting for an Angel (which I recently discussed) he stretches his shoulders and decides to take on entire decades of African history.

His writes in a deceptively simple style and focuses on storytelling. There's no overt lyricism; he'd claim that he is simply channeling the many stories that come to him. Still his is an ambitious agenda and he covers a lot of territory, after all his subject is modernity in Africa and all that means.

The options available to the two twins who tell the story of Measuring Time is a simple statement about Nigerian society. On the one hand, there is life as a mercenary soldier following warlords like Charles Taylor from Chad and Libya to the messy Liberian civil war. For a political junkie like me, this would be enough to focus on for an entire novel, for Habila this is merely interstitial.

On the other hand, the bulk of the book and the other twin's story is about stagnation and making do at home. There is lots of striving but precious little light. Yet the stories of the past need to be told, the politics need be engaged in - however programmatic they may be, the youth need to be taught, we all need to fall in love. There's no time to dance or to succumb to navel gazing. Life has to be lived in full.

In his populist writing mode Helon Habila is perhaps heir to Cyprian Ekwensi whose favourite subject was city life. Like Ekwensi he has a talent for empathy with his characters and draws you in with detailed portraits. He really knows how to capture moments in time. I am also reminded in this novel of another ambitious second novel that packed a lot of ideas albeit in a different genre, Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days. But perhaps we shouldn't tie a talent like Habila to others. He's writing delicate novels of ideas disguised as unvarnished, personal stories of Nigeria; the whole world is his.

III. Wasted Time (a soundtrack)

Me'Shell NdegeOcello - Wasted Time

Wasted Time, my favourite song from her appropriately-titled album, Bitter, finds Me'Shell in a suitably bitter mood. She has an unerring way of capturing an atmosphere in song. Bitterness is a transient emotion but one that is intense when one is in its grip. It's the only vaguely uptempo song of the album, building up the groove slowly as she reflects on a break-up. It's not quite a lament and she hasn't yet resolved the episode. It is a raw meditation on wasted effort. Fittingly the song cuts off abruptly, unsettling the listener. Wasted time never to be recovered.

Update: A good friend sends along a Cambodian twist for the collection: a Dictator Hun Sen "fashion" watch. He notes, "Never tried wearing it. Battery assumed dead".

File under: Nigeria, rogues, Africa, corruption, politics, history, memory, culture, cynicism, literature, toli

By Way of Ionesco

2007-10-29T00:46:00.001-05:00

It must have been a few months ago, I was heading home after work; it was the usual thing, a perfectly ordinary evening. As usual, I was fumbling with my various bags, headphones and such. As I switched trains at Oakland, my sharp elbows ensured that I obtained a seat; I find it pays to be equipped at rush hour. I settled down, rummaged around and found my book. I opened it and relaxed; there's nothing like getting lost in a good book on the commute. A muffled announcement predicted a delay. Oh well, I settled in for the long haul. After a few moments, I heard someone muttering from across the aisle: "Ionesco" or something.

"Yes, yes", I gestured at the distinctive cover of my book, "Ionesco".

The guy continued talking but I couldn't quite hear him since I was listening to music. As I fumbled around with the controls to the cd player (no ipod as yet), it struck me that I had been speaking in French. What I had actually replied was "Oui. Oui. Ionesco... C'est La Cantatrice Chauve."

As I finally removed my headphones (those tangled wires), I realized that the other guy had also been speaking in French.

Well, no matter. If you're reading a French book on the subway, odds are that a passing Frenchman would notice and engage you. Perhaps you look vaguely francophone. It would stand to reason that you would start to speak in French also. Indeed the reason I had been reading that book was one of my periodic attempts to keep up my French. Still it was uncanny how I had unconsciously slipped into that other language, perhaps a switch had been involuntarily flipped as sometimes happens to polyglots (pdf). I don't get to speak the language much these days - I am awful about keeping up with the part of my family in France. True, every few months or so I dream in French (don't ask, don't tell) but I know that my fluency in conversational speech is at risk.

So anyway, there was a little pause as we both assessed each other. A couple of relatively thin thirtysomethings, hungry engineer types. Not many people chat on the subway, one is always wary about being solicited or otherwise bothered. As the song goes: don't talk to strangers. How often, however, does one find someone interesting on the commute?

Well, the conversation began in earnest. Ionesco it was. His plays, his ideas, the theatre.

What do you know, I was sitting across from someone who had directed four Ionesco plays; a fellow Ionesco afficionado no less. I'd acted in Les Chaises during my brief theatrical career at school. Heck I still sometimes view the world through his jaundiced lens. The guy was clearly a creative type, steeped in the stage. A man after my heart. And he knew his stuff it seemed.

Pretty soon we were getting into the intricacies of Ionesco's world. What we liked: the playfulness of the language, the sense of rhythm, the stacatto effects that leapt from the page. The often startling juxtaposition of mundane minutiae with profundity. The pauses and the fumbling to find meaning and the consequent resort to words that obscure rather than reveal. Heady stuff in other words.

My spoken french is a little rusty and, a couple of times, I too struggled to articulate some of these thoughts. It's one thing to write or read about the intricacies of art and another to verbalize them even forgetting the setting. Still it was coming back slowly: the quintessential abstractions of extinct philosophers. The accent too - I was a scion of la Lorraine, straining my 'ains'. Perhaps the long lamented fluency would be returning soon.

Somehow we got onto the nomadic element in Ionesco's writing and the fact that he was Romanian and first gained fame writing in french in a piece about observing the English. What is it about outsiders being such stylists? Why are they often the best bridges and windows on society? Perhaps the margins provide a good standpoint for cultural observation. But what are the downsides of the lives of exiled souls? Does multi-lingualism or the crossing of linguistic borders sharpen one's outlook? We weighed the evidence. I brought up Nabokov who in later life turned out to be perhaps one of the great stylists of the English language. He wasn't impressed, he felt that Ionesco got closer to the gypsy element of modernity than Nabokov ever did. I demurred, both, I thought, were modern travellers that disdained boundaries and pushed the forms in which they wielded their pens. The response: well Ionesco carried less baggage. Anyway we got back to the plays.

He liked Rhinoceros and Les Chaises for their theatricality but for him La cantatrice chauve was the most playful with the language. We went back and forth on whether it was a play best performed in French. He didn't like the English productions he'd seen and claimed that they got the zaniness all wrong. I thought that so long as you got into the spirit of things, it didn't matter. To him the confusion started with the way the play's title was translated: he preferred The Bald Prima Donna to The Bald Soprano. Thus we found ourselves seriously arguing away in French about which English translation of a nonsensical phrase a Romanian playwright had promulgated was truer to the essence of the play. I can't imagine how we must have sounded to the rest of the train car: flurries of French intermittently interupted by English exclamations: "The Bald Soprano" or "Mais non. The Bald Prima Donna". C'est ridicule, n'est-ce pas?

Funnily enough we never actually mentioned the word absurd although the theatre of the absurd was our ostensible subject. Nor indeed did we get to Beckett who looms large in such matters. To my mind, Ionesco is the more formidable pillar of that theatre, if only because his conceptions weren't as arch as those of Godot's father. The discongruities of modern life are presented simply and with wit. I love Beckett to death yet his edifices were intricate constructions. Ionesco makes the absurd more mundane, it is through almost imperceptible distortions that you find yourself in the realm of the improbable. Each step on that road makes sense.

There was a brief diversion onto Sartre - we discussed Huis clos, and judged him impractical. More to the point, his dilemmas weren't weren't of the everyday variety nor indeed did they work on the stage. No, not quite.

I hipped him to the show I'd seen in Boston a couple of years ago, Ionesco not Ionesco, three rarely performed plays. The takeaway message: Ionesco as the aspirin for modern day life, the playwright of the fringe, the governor of the borderlands. You are easily underestimated if there is a humour to your approach and many did underestimate the fugitive notions of the man.

I forgot myself for a moment, soaking in the discussion, and looked around. The rest of the car looked utterly bemused at the sight of these young men vigourously discussing French literature in their midst, throwing out existential themes — the left bank transplanted to the subway car, heck all we were missing were the berets. No matter.

It was the week of the French elections and I mentioned the story about those old campaign posters of Mitterand that were being resurrected twenty years later as ironic commentary on the choices facing the French. He liked the idea and applauded the juxtaposition. A François Mitterrand 2007 campaign seemed appropriate for this dark time. We wondered how many votes he would get.

The Cold War deserved a Ionesco. The nuclear age deserved a Ionesco. Gremlins and parasites, thine playwright is Ionesco.

We wondered who were the heirs to Ionesco's ethos. We decided that there was something to be said for plays even in this TV and film era. That the stage often had the right level of pathos for the strange incongruities of the human condition. As we parted (he gave a card, I told him to google me), we resolved that we should get back to the theatre, support it in whatever way we could. Who knows maybe we'll put together a production some time soon. It need not be Ionesco. Heck we would write our own plays.

...

When a week or so later, I received that secret tape of Negroponte meeting Gaddafi, I was struck by the element of malign play among in their discourse and world views. As I transcribed, I found it was all there: words intended to obscure, words that ostensibly communicate were instead combined into phrases that mangle reality: constructive engagement, collateral damage and so forth.

The playground of misdirection is often dominated by politicians but others too have their niches. The lowly bureaucrat and the well-meaning citizen play their part is adopting the language of bromides. Ionesco would have loved the notion of recent non-specific general threats and the obfuscation of the language of homeland security.

In any case, it stands to reason that I am now being read by folks from both the US Navy Marine Corps and Libyan embassies around the world. I do try to bring people together in my writing. A belated welcome to the toli. Enjoy your stay. Excellent. Excellent discussions.

Salut Alex.

File under: Ionesco, subway, conversation, observation, culture, theatre, literature, language, French, France, absurd, art, life, Bay Area, toli

Conundrum 65: Taxi Driver Braking Style

2007-09-05T01:10:00.000-05:00

The burning issue that has been exercising my mind for the past few hours is the way in which taxi drivers apply brakes to their cars. Thus I give you another entry as part of an occasional series, briefly noted...

So. Why do taxi drivers brake the way they do? What accounts for their peculiar relationship with their car's braking system? Why is that taxi drivers never want to idle their cars? And so forth...

When a cab driver sees a red light, she will do one of two things:

Accelerate and simply speed through the light - daring oncoming traffic in a game of chicken.
This behaviour is almost de rigeur if you want to obtain a taxicab medallion - an initiation rite of sorts. When your car is branded as a taxi, it is a signifier, almost a warning signal of recklessness to other drivers, and you can trade on this reputation to bully through most intersections. Such are the fringe benefits of every profession.
Slow to a stop at the light if it is obvious that one can't beat the light.
In this scenario, you'll almost see the subliminal scowl on the driver's face in the mirror and the accompanying sound of disgust under their breath.

It is the manner in which taxi drivers slow to a stop that is the source of today's conundrum.

A taxi driver never simply slows down to a stop like other drivers. There's an eccentricity to the gradual manner in which they apply their brakes. It's a little hard to describe exactly how they brake but it is different enough that I always notice it; let's simply posit for our purposes a Brake Eccentricity Index ™ and assign taxi drivers the maximum value, 10, on an admittedly arbitrary 10 point scale. Still, why do they brake in such an unnatural fashion?

Theory 1: Maximize the fare

I should be a little bit more precise about this, namely that I've mostly observed eccentric braking styles in cities that have metered fares for taxis. Of course correlation is not causation but I've always thought that it was the fact that meter fares are lower when the taxi is idle than when it is moving that drove taxi drivers to this behaviour.

The notion here is that by keeping the taxi moving for as long as possible you will reap fiscal rewards. Amortized over the length of a typical shift, perhaps you can sneak in an extra hour of fares at the higher, mobile rate. If you consider driving a taxi as a purely revenue maximization enterprise then the optimal economic strategy is all about minimizing engine idle time and maximizing the amount of time the car is moving. The braking style then is simply a matter of arbitrage; 5-10% extra revenue will be nothing to sneeze at (handwaving at the exact amount).

One piece of the puzzle however is that I sometimes observe as much even in countries where taxi rides are not metered transactions. What gives?

Some control experiments: presumably there should be increased eccentricity in braking style the larger the difference between moving and idle fares. Drivers in cities with greater idle premiums would exhibit a higher brake eccentricity. Anecdotally New York and Boston are more prone to the phenomenon than San Francisco.

The web being what it is, an armchair economist such as myself can validate such intuition...

Consider this table taken from the San Francisco Taxicab Industry Report 2006 via the invaluable Taxi Library site. It is a survey of rates charged in various US cities.

We'll codify a proxy for our braking eccentricity quotient as the ratio of mileage rate to waiting time rate. In New York, this ratio is 10 (mileage rate per mile is $2.00 and waiting time per minute is $0.20). In San Francisco, the ratio is 5 (mileage rate per mile is $2.25 and waiting time per minute is $0.45). This would confirm the greater propensity of New York cabbies to work the brakes and even assign them 10 on our admittedly arbitrary index.

Out of interest, we have the following results: Chicago at 5.45, Houston at 5.67, Los Angeles at 5.5, Oakland at 6, San Jose at 5.95. In my experience, Oakland taxi drivers are more eccentric than San Francisco cabbies so this seems to be about right. The rate structure of fares provides serious incentives to taxi drivers to do everything possible to keep in motion, it is no wonder that they are irritated at having to wait, idle time literally robs them of revenue.

Theory 2a: Minimize fuel consumption and/or 2b. minimize wear on the car's brakes

Part of the utility function that a taxi driver has to account for is the impact of fuel consumption. With conventional internal combustion engines, the fuel that is used when the engine is idle is pure waste, hence it makes sense to minimize fuel consumption as part of the profit maximization function.

Wear and tear on the brakes is also something drivers need to worry about; perhaps it is indeed easier on the brakes to slow down the way they do. No one tells you that when you learn how to drive so this might well be a trade secret of sorts.

This last theory is counterbalanced by the frantic way brakes are applied when the driver misjudges and almost causes an accident (all too frequently judging by the statistics of road accidents involving taxis). Frequent near misses and even accidents are almost a cost of doing this kind of business and in those cases, brakes are manhandled. So a question for auto engineers, what is the best way to apply brakes? Incidentally I wonder if there is any research on the incidence of heart attacks amongst taxi drivers, but I digress...

Some control experiments:

hybrid cars are slowly being adopted into taxis fleets, these are cars in which the cost of idling has essentially been eliminated. Minimizing fuel consumption in one's Prius is thus a matter of running for as long as possible on electricity rather than on the conventional gasoline engine. Presumably Prius taxi drivers would not be as prone to brake eccentricity and the new technology might provide an insight into the relative importance of the fuel consumption factor. One should monitor the situation as hybrid adoption rates increase.
rising petrol prices should increase the fuel consumption premium so there should be increased eccentricity when we have higher prices. Metered fares after all aren't indexed to petrol prices and are only updated episodically. Anecdotally again, I've been noticing more braking shenanigans during the Bush years with the concomitant high oil prices.

With this in mind, perhaps we can add some additional dampening factors to our braking eccentricity index. I welcome your mathematical input.

Exegesis

The obvious thing to resolve this conundrum is to simply ask taxi drivers why indeed they brake the way they do. The thing is that whenever I've observed this behaviour, I've typically been annoyed because I tend to lean towards the first theory, namely that the driver is engaged in an attempt to wring an extra dollar or so out of my inconsiderable wallet. With that at the back of my mind, it will come off adversarial to ask the driver about this, no matter how academic the concern is. Also you might change the behaviour merely by asking and make the driver self-conscious. Moreover, there's always something more pressing to talk about: politics, the economy, real estate, cars, relationships etc. In any case, small things like taxi driver braking styles are appropriate fodder for blog entries. I hope I've made a plausible economic case of cabbies being rational economic actors but of course I may be missing the plot. Perhaps others can come up with better analyses. The floor is yours...

On Metering and Automation

Now you might well wonder why indeed I'm spending time and virtual ink on this matter. Well it is in aid of a book of toli. The low end theory posits that one should temper the human factor to encourage adoption. Thus I've been digging around matters of human factors and automation. The obvious case study of the human factor in technology adoption is with taxis and the introduction of metered fares. A little digression and that's all she wrote.

The idea of meters, of standard fares introduced through regulation, meshes with an attempt to eliminate the vagaries of human discretion and bargaining around the negotiation of payment for rides. Prior to their introduction, one was at the mercy of one's skill and knowledge of prevailing rates when discussing fees with cab drivers, and often one would be at a considerable disadvantage in the conversation. The drive towards standardization and automation was almost inevitable in many communities; electronic meters were the technical solution to the legal and cultural problem. By metering you could reduce the amount of price discrimination that taxi drivers could do and gain some amount of consumer satisfaction at not having to bear the mental transaction costs.

Recently also there has been the introduction of GPS-driven radio dispatch into the taxi business in. One virtue is that this might prevent certain dispatchers from rewarding their favourites with the best jobs. I know that in the Boston area, Haitian cab drivers would always curse the often 'native' dispatchers, claiming that they wouldn't give them (the immigrants) jobs even if they were closer to the customers. Presumably technology in the form of location-aware optimization algorithms could add a measure of impartiality to the dispatching process along (potentially) with some extra efficiency. Of course as with all things in which the human factor applies this is not the end of the story. Wherever there is human discretion we will see the usual social and cultural cues and biases assert themselves in one form or another. For one, it all depends on what is coded and who gets to make the decision.

Indeed New York city taxi drivers will be going on strike against GPS devices in coming days:

The Taxi Workers Alliance opposes the installation of high-tech touch-screen video systems that will allow passengers to watch television, make credit-card payments and — using a global-positioning device that tracks the cab - follow their ride on an electronic map.

Some drivers have said that the global-positioning devices and the automated trip recording system are an invasion of privacy, and that the use of credit cards would diminish drivers' incomes, given the card transaction fees.

They also say they will take in less money because the system requires drivers to log on before each fare, and they object to the television noise and the heat from the monitors.

This last case is interesting in the bundling of two technologies, electronic payment systems and location aware devices. In both arenas, the proponents highlight the benefits in terms of consumer convenience: additional payment options and additional information (map data) that can empower the rider in the transaction with the driver. For example, a tourist, able to see a realtime map of their journey, will now be more liable to ask "Why the hell are you going in this roundabout way to my hotel?" and reduce the unscrupulousness of drivers.

Detractors similarly highlight the effects of payments and transaction costs. By introducting credit cards into the billing systems, the authorities are passing on increased costs to drivers, a tax of sorts. A slight digression here: the taxi profession has typically been a cash-is-king affair - hence for example its appeal for the informal sector often the domain of transients and immigrants etc. (e.g. for an extreme case of 'informality' you can read James Ellroy's novels on the appeal of taxi ranks for the Mafia).

Both sides of the debate conflate things. Who really wants to watch television in a cab? That is surely a byword for yet more advertising. And yet that is what Mayor Bloomberg is touting even as the agenda of the authorities is plainly to exert additional control on the profession. On the one hand, the argument about privacy that the drivers advance is probably not the core objection, it is rather the issue of control, about losing discretion in the way they do business and the burden of additional transaction costs (which can even be mental costs).

A few centuries ago, the Quakers brought sanity to the systems of measurement with their reputation for probity in the standards of weights they provided. Eventually, social norms and mores were codified in laws, regulations and sometimes in technological standards. It is interesting that we are seeing lawmakers seeking to impose technological standards to achieve social ends. As we have seen in the case of braking style, there will still be behavioural attempts to game the system — that is the realm of the human factor. In the low end theory framework, the best you can hope for is to temper these things.

This year in Accra, the Accra Metropolitan Authority introduced medallions for taxi cabs and even imposed a dress code on taxi drivers (although from what I understand, the dress code is not that widely adopted). The introduction incidentally lead to an immediate decrease in the typical crime methods where criminals would use cabs for their robberies. By getting control of licensing, the AMA has managed to better understand the scope of the taxi market, the public also can better identify taxis and further norms can be codified. One wonders whether metered fares will be the next regulation to be adopted in Ghana. As anyone would tell you, a large part of the experience of using public transit in Ghana is the bargaining that one must do. Taxi drivers will quote exorbitant fares to those they perceive as well-heeled or unaware of the prevailing rates - and you don't even need to be an obroni to feel cheated at times. Metered fares would have undoubted benefits in reducing this kind of price discrimination and the associated transaction costs but might also remove social and cultural lubricants, those aspects of conversation and market traditions. I wonder if this is a trade-off that should be made. What say you?

I'll close with a further digression... You might have seen me point to this Lion King decorated taxi a couple of weeks ago. The Wife caught it parked next to the zebras and kitsch taxi displayed above. I quite like the serendipity of the photos and the varying images of Africa expressed in taxicabs.

Abercrombie & Kent are merchants of "Inspiring Experiences of Namibia" hence the zebras crossing they use to advertise their escapist travel services. The Lion King of course is pure Disney nostalgia. Such are the types and faces we use on our taxis about Africa that mysterious land. The fantasy of Brand Africa.

A Taxi Driver Soundtrack

Loose Ends - Slow Down
Apropos braking, we'll start our playlist with Slow Down, the brilliant showpiece of Loose Ends' Zagora album. Classic 80s soul music, eminently danceable and with an infectious chorus. It is often paired with the lead single Stay A Little While Child and the titles are fitting for the laidback theme of the band.
The La Drivers Union Por Por Group - Trotro Tour Of Ghana

We'll continue with some music by taxi drivers, some honk horn music from Ghana. It's unlike almost anything you've heard, simply consisting of the horns and drums that you might here on the streets as these drivers vie for your trade and seek to attract your attention. This horn group has a 50 year history amongst other things, wielding their honk horns against the colonial regime. They continue to make music from the most unlikely of instuments.

I quite like 'Driver, Take Me, The Train Has Left Me Behind' and the Kpanlogo Por Por Medley but perhaps it is "Trotro Drivers, We Love You So" that is the best song on the album. You can listen to the slightly more conventional yet still exuberant Trotro Tour of Ghana here for the next week.

File under: taxi, economics, observation, markets, billing, transaction, costs, pricing, regulation, culture, conversation, technology, automation, adoption, human factors, price discrimination, toli

Rapid Transit

2007-08-28T11:06:00.000-05:00

I. Wide Load Coming Through

A truck loaded with corn is parked on the side of a road in Mogadishu, Somalia. The delapidated city is the capital of the failed Horn of Africa state, where motorists have the choice of driving on the right or left hand side of the road, such is Mogadishu's anarchy. (Reuters). Circa 2004.

I've always wondered about this clipping, taken a few years ago, that The Wife used to have on her wall. At first I thought the scene was staged and that no one could possibly load a truck in this manner except to get the attention of foreign journalists. But it struck me that Somalia has indeed been party to this kind of nonsense for a generation or more thus anything goes - not to mention that this scene is only a matter of degree away from what I've witnessed in my own country, Ghana. It is the very definition of absurd.

II. A Heavy Load

A relatively famous scene from the Libyan desert circa 1978 (actually isn't Libya mostly desert?), fodder for picturesque postcards... I find the image interesting for the wide variety of bags that are attached to the truck. As you might know bags are my kind of thing.

III. Rural Concerns

credit: Robin.Elaine

credit: Johanne, licence: CC

A few months ago, there was lots of discussion about the transport of cattle in Africa. When you have mostly agrarian economies, you use whatever is expedient to transport goods, hence the sight of cattle on roads or on our trucks is nothing special. In the West per contra, you almost never see the animals from which your food is derived. Agribusiness is the rule rather than the exception. You receive your cold cuts of meat in the sanitized glass displays of your grocery store. The network of cattle cars, hog "finishers", meat renderers are an afterthought. Even the word butcher seems to be coming into disfavour such is the alienation from the practice; blood is taboo and it's simply the "meat department" in the grocery store.

The last few centuries have seen a sharp decrease in the segment of humanity that has to deal with food production. In the developed world we are reaching neglible percentages and in recent decades, especially in China and India, millions are trading in rural areas for urban slums. We are slowly losing the folk memory of agrarian past. Yet when it comes to food, we still have the visceral connection to the means of production in our ancestral past. That is why it is still theatrical when, every few summers, the French farmers go on strike and bring cattle into town to protest in front of city halls. The strength of the farm lobby will remain undiminished since they can always call on that hard-wired cultural connection.

IV. Infrastructure

credit: ellaroo

Ever since the troubles in Cote d'Ivoire started, there has been a massive increase in the road traffic in Ghana as the landlocked countries of West Africa, Mali and Burkina Faso chief among them, have been forced to divert their essential trade routes through Ghana. Even after the past few months of stability, it is a case of once bitten, twice shy - the Ivoriens may have blown it for good. The result has been that Ghanaian ports and roads have been struggling to cope with the extra flows.

Thus such scenes are a commonplace on the roads from the coast to the north: the heavily loaded trucks and the boys hitching a ride wherever they can. "Man Sit Down" is the slogan, fasten your seatbelts, you want to say.

For 30 years in Ghana and much of Africa, we were told by the traditional donors that there was no point to build dual carriageways and that our economies wouldn't support it. Apparently the great infrastructure buildout that separates the developed world from the developing world wasn't on the agenda. Instead we needed to open our markets, lower trade barriers, do structural adjustment and so forth in order to be good global citizens. Now our aid partners are changing their tune and well, those unfussy Chinese have had 15 years of slowly building up expertise doing infrastructure in Africa. They'll be the ones getting the contracts. Now even the DFID (England's development agency) is thinking about sanctioning major infrastructure as opposed to the small scale and NGO-focused approach that has been in vogue... We may even get a West African highway and the long-overdue regional integration out of this situation... Incidentally, only the Chinese seem to be interested in funding railways and it has been a very lonely 6 years for our Minister of Railways and transportation.

African leaders didn't inspire much confidence in the past but the messy business of development is all about infrastructure. The hope is that with the renewed focus on infrastructure in Africa we'll eventually have decent roads and transportation options and the rest will follow: cars that are roadworthy, drivers that are car-worthy and so forth. Baby steps...

Soundtrack for this note

Portishead - Roads

I've been thinking about Portishead - the band that is, and have been trying to find a way to weave them into the fabric of the blog. Roads, a deeply personal song seems apt as a soundtrack for mass transit. I still remember hearing their debut album, Dummy, for the first time. It was a promo cd lying around the radio station (WHRB) on a pile presumably to be discarded. I threw it in the player and was frankly stunned when I listened to it.

The first element of their appeal was a voice that seemed slight, ethereal and perhaps pained (or at the very least emotional). The lyrics come from some kind of turmoil deep inside Beth Gibbons. The drums are in the hip-hop vein, yet laidback and lazy. Geoff Barrows added all sorts of sonic niceties that befit a Bristol crew - samples of film dialogue, Isaac Hayes snippets, scratches, guitars and moog keyboards that made you feel you were in an old-fashioned movie theatre screening a film noir.

Of course we know that this became a "genre" and record companies quickly labeled works of this type "trip hop" that was a subplot to the 90s and indeed Portishead's music would be picked up in movies.

There wasn't a cover booklet with the cd which meant that it took some investigation to figure out the other ingredient that had so tickled my ear. The secret ingredient, the secret sauce, of the group was the theremin: it appears on perhaps a third of their songs - hence the cinematic connection.

Listening to Portishead play Mysterons or Roads is unnerving. You can hear the audience reaction on the Live: Roseland NYC album. The music is well, how to put it, haunting, mournful and more. It's the essence of the noir aesthetic - mood and cinematography translated to sound.

To me the theremin (or its Moog substitute) straddles worlds, creeping up on you and drawing your attention to something that lurks beneath, or that dwells in the shadows. I find comfort in the shadows of this music.

Oh, and I still don't have the dust jacket of that first Portishead album.

Obligatory video links: Roads, Mysterons

Alternate soundtrack: Fela - He Miss Road. Well, that's the African take on things...

File under: humour, photography, image, Africa, transportation, truck, bus, infrastructure, development, observation, music, Portishead, toli

Wist

2007-08-25T15:10:00.000-05:00

We the people, having survived for so long on so little, and done so much for so long, are now qualified to do anything... for nothing.

I found the above musing in an old notebook of writings circa 1992. Spring cleaning, even if delayed until summer, does turn up the occasional nugget. It put me in mind of wist, hence some further musings on indigo moods.

The above painting reminded me of the following photo from the African Futurist of fishwives in the morning in Elmina, Ghana.

The stories they have to tell, the perspectives they could share. I want to have a conversation with them, simply sit with them in the middle of the day - in the brief moment before they get back to the important things on their plate. We the people indeed.

It also brought to mind the women who were dyeing cloths in those courtyards in Bamako, Abderrahmane Sissako's film that is, while the World Bank and international institutions were being put on mock trial in the foreground. The women and their work were meant to be the background and yet, from my standpoint, their stories and experiences were the foreground.

Wist is perhaps the attitude that best suits these unsettled times, we are all holding our breath and tightening our belts, bracing ourselves for who knows what.

In the USA especially, I sense a lot of wist in the air. Conveniently timed gut feelings abound all round, we have banned liquids and have to resort to zip-loc containers and long lines. Americans now need visa stamps and even passports. Heck, you can't even get out of the country if you want to without bribing passport expeditors or calling your congressman. When you take that trip to Brazil, you'll need to give up your biometric data, the reciprocal wages of bureaucracy and inconvenience, just like those visitors to the States have had to since it became a matter of Homelands and Security. If you stay in the country who knows who will be watching you or listening to your conversations. When you're on the subway, you need to be mindful of recent non-specific general threats. Suspicious people are everywhere - they could even be (gasp) next door! I think a lot of wist is in order.

There is a danger however: when wist devolves into nostalgia it becomes reactionary. Too much wist and you start dwelling on those good old days that never really were. Your thinking will get wooly and, without moderation, you are liable to be bamboozled into who knows what and then be left picking up the pieces, singing the inflation calypso as the chickens come home to roost. You really don't want your entire society to start behaving like actors in B-movies. The director may not cut the scene.

Hold on to wist I say. Wist is clear-eyed and lyrical. Wist is wary, wist is weary, yet while being realistic, wist embraces the here and now, the tense present and a better tomorrow. At heart then, wist is an optimistic sentiment.

The dictionaries present the word wist as obsolete and would direct us to to its adjectival compere, wistful. Of the latter I prefer the meditative, pensive and forelorn senses, but of the former, it is that still small voice of wist that attracts me, that quiet and attentive outlook.

In my book, wist is stoic and, at its best, eschews melancholy. When wistful, one is pragmatic yet hopeful. The British and the French know a lot about wist as their empires have seen better days. Others however are still seeking the black gold of the sun. Would they take a moment to be wistful? Wist is about humility, about acknowledging the small steps towards the wonders that are still to come.

Wist presents an opportunity for resolve, it is a brief respite in that moment as you gather yourself up for the next task, the next struggle. Wist is a flight to quality, a premium bond for these subprime times. Wist is soul insurance that actually pays you back when you file your later claims.

I'll prognosticate here. Those in the developing world are actually at an advantage in these wistful times. Of necessity, we are afficionados of wist, world-weariness has long been our lot. A lifetime of almost always expecting the blows coming your way will leave you better equipped to deal with this harsh world. The school of hard knocks is our neighbourhood and our response is communal not unilateral. Sissoko would say "we are all responsible". One shouldn't strike out on one's own just because one can, rather we find strength in community. Burning Spear would add: social living is the best.

A Wistful Soundtrack

Musically, the quality of wist is a step up from the blues however the blues tend to get more love since they are more dramatic and keenly felt - wist is merely transistional. In compiling a wistful playlist for this note, I initially thought to songs about holding on. To "hold on" is indeed the most resolute response to wist and I have many songs on that theme (Lisa Stansfield, Dennis Brown, Ann Nesby, Dwele and others can school you for a good hour about holding on). Shuffle serendipity struck however and instead I found my wistfulness encapsulated in the following songs.

Sam Cooke - A Change is Gonna Come
This song is perhaps the definition of soul music - the point at which the genre coalesced and departed from gospel and the blues. It is fitting that wist was the first vein in which Sam Cooke made out his soulful sound. There is both a spiritual and a bluesy feel to the song. Watching Talk to Me last night, that wonderful film about the life of Petey Greene, that ex-convict turned radio disc jockey, it was no surprise that A change is gonna come was the song that he played to sooth the soul on the airwaves in Washington D.C. that night after Martin Luther King Jnr. was assassinated. It speaks about optimism even in the face of setbacks. The vocal performance is one that few can equal although many have tried. A few sublime minutes of yearning and longing (the obligatory youtube link).
Duke Ellington - Mood Indigo
The Indigos album is one of my favourites in the Ellington catalog, featuring wistful tunes throughout. The only vocal track on the album is of course Autumn Leaves that paragon of remembrance (see also the autumn soundtrack). Prelude to a Kiss is all about the lyricism of Johnny Hodges, as is the old faithful, Solitude. The song I'll highlight however is the title track, Mood Indigo. An economy of emotion, it features a perfect trumpet solo full of whimsy and reflection by Shorty Baker. That wondrous portion when the rest of the band join in is ecstatic. An earlier performance is on youtube with ~~Jimmy Hamilton~~ Willie Cook (see corrections) doing the deed on trumpet and with a more prominent piano solo by Ellington. Indigos are not quite the blues and the Duke's band prove that indigo is the colour of wist.
You can listen to the mp3 for the next week: Duke Ellington - Mood Indigo
D'Angelo - The Line
The crown prince of soul put it on the line seven years ago. The elements of the song are simple: Questlove's steady drums, James Poyser and D'Angelo's keyboards and Rhodes, a little boom bap from the bassist and above all the vocals. I hear Sam Cooke, I hear Al Green, I hear Prince, Curtis, Donnie, Marvin and more. It is a tour of the sounds of his favourite vocalists wrapped in his own stylings. It's the moment of truth, the stakes are high ("Will I fall off or will it be banging?"), he steels himself: "all I got to do is hold on". He'll stick to his guns, resolute to the challenge ahead.
James Carter - The Intimacy of My Woman's Beautiful Eyes
Perhaps the hungriest of the young lions of jazz, James Carter can also be the most tender when he want to. The musical scion of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, he isn't afraid to engage in matters of the heart, albeit with a wink and a certain swagger. Hence this song is a study in contrasts: the wistful tone of the music set against the premise of the overwrought title. After a fairly subdued opening solo, the piano takes over and the bassist prods him along and what a piano solo. When Carter's saxophone returns wailing, or rather growling, the notes are urgent, longing and attentive — wistful in short. One hopes his woman forgave his missteps, the music is a plea for a renewed intimacy.
Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins - Mood Indigo
Apropos tenor saxophonists, there is another version of Mood Indigo that I'm very fond of: this intimate meeting of jazz giants. Ellington introduces the theme on piano and the band step in smooth as usual. After a while Coleman Hawkins steps up and delivers the goods. His solo is discursive, breathy and virtuosic. This is someone who has lived body and soul. Duke's accompaniment is subtle, encouraging Bean to find the emotional depth in the melody. Simply magic.
Charles Mingus - Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
Mingus recorded Mood Indigo twice, recognizing as he did, the genius of Ellington's composition. Each occasion elicited typically sensitive bass solos from him. I'll focus here on his own composition, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, his tribute to Lester Young, written right after he learnt of Pres's death. It captures the mournful and elegaic tone of loss, Mingus' great band remembering the arch tones and oblique art of their friend who paved the way for them. In the hip-hop vein, I suppose the closest would be Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.) although that arguably leans more towards nostalgia than wist.
Amel Larrieux - Weary
The lead single of last year's opus, Morning, this song takes on the notion of hard experience in life. She takes her time to warm up as the song progresses and only really starts letting her hair down vocally at the midpoint. She's in control throughout observing the vagaries of the mood, a midtempo soul excusion. Watching the video (slightly lower quality on youtube), you see that she has a lot on her mind ("A woman is getting weary"). Ultimately she finds comfort around her friends and family as it should be. The song ends as it starts with Amel walking down the road. Perhaps the weariness has been lifted, in any cases she has given us music for a long walk.
Cannonball Adderley Quintet - Walk Tall
Like the country preacher declaimed:
The most important thing of all is that no matter how dreary the situation is, and how difficult it may be, that the song really doesn't matter until the song begins to get you down.

So our advice to you, the message that the Cannonball Adderley Quintet brings to us, is that it's rough and tough in this ghetto, a lot of funny stuff going down. But you've got to walk tall.

Walk tall. Walk tall.

Wist, the ineffable sentiment for our times.

Next: Resisting Nostalgia

File under: wist, mood, colour, language, emotion, indigo, observation, culture, music, jazz, soul, life, Ghana, Africa, art, Social Living, Things Fall Apart, toli

Home Economics

2007-08-14T23:36:00.000-05:00

The Wife and I have been thinking of buying a house for the past year and, since spring, have been mostly bemused at the huhudious prices that were being quoted to us (with straight faces, mind you) for mostly depression era houses. Thus we've been getting an education on the hard sell during our few months of attending open houses, and also some lessons in home economics.

The New Mathematics

After last week's action, some new mathematics is in effect. We have the following equation:

Maximum prudent ™ house price = $521,250 = $417,000 (maximum federally-insured mortgage) + 20% downpayment

Note: prudent ™ denotes a conforming loan and home financing deal that wouldn't raise the eyebrows of even the staidest banker.

Note: the days of 20 percent downpayment have been out of fashion for a long time (we live in a subprime era) so we'll relax our stringent banker conservatism and use a 10 percent downpayment as our baseline. This reduces the maximum prudent house price to $463,333.

Note: the conforming loan limit of $417,000 is the maximum federally-insured mortgage above which point we are in the realm of jumbo mortgages which have all of a sudden become quite scarce.

Voodoo Economics

The median price of housing listed in the Bay Area was said to be $785,380 in February 2007 when we started looking in earnest. That was the listing price and not necessarily the sale price but, regardless, that was sticker shock by any definition.

In June 2007, the median housing price paid in the Bay Area was $665,000, a new peak. See also a trend graph of an earlier data set.

The typical monthly mortgage payment in the Bay Area was $3,219. "adjusted for inflation, current payments are 24.0 percent above typical payments in the spring of 1989, the peak of the prior real estate cycle." Jumbo mortgages "represented 62 percent of the purchase loans" made in the area.

Jumbo Jitters

Putting these things together, it is clear that something does not compute. The force of gravity will make itself felt and the $200,000 gap - the fat on which the housing sector in the Bay Area has been feasting on for the past 15 years - will of necessity be closed. The only questions are how much the gap will narrow and how long it will take.

The typical price of the only reasonable houses we have seen during our search was $750,000 (The Wife has called much of the rogues gallery that were shown to us "illegal dwellings"). We thought we'd seen an overheated market in Boston but the Bay Area has redefined our perceptions on that front. A software engineer and history professor ought to be able to afford a starter house.

The hard sell and the real estate shell game was in earnest and it was as if the whole town was in on the con. The pinnacle was the university housing officer who advised her academic client that we could easily afford a $700-800,000 mortgage - if you ran the numbers, monthly housing payments (circa $5,000) would far exceed the salaries of most academics which prompted said academic's quip "I'm not going to spend that much on a depression era bungalow" to the surprisingly-shocked agent. I suppose I would have put it as the Emperor has no teeth.

Even if we could afford such imprudent things we'd rather spend our money traveling to more congenial settings, we are modern travelers and exiled souls after all. The funny thing is that if you spend enough time talking about housing in the Bay Area, you could almost convince yourself that everything was normal. Nobody blinked in conversation; the stratospheric prices were just the way things were — indeed it was so surreal and you could very easily allow yourself to be bamboozled — there was a week where we almost succumbed. Almost...

There's lots of moral hazard in the mounting chorus to bail out the fiscal wizards. Many are lobbying for the limits on Fannie Mae and the like to be lifted or for interest rates to be cut. Sidenote: the language of financial panics is always interesting: credit crunch, mortgage meltdowns, debacles etc. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has been known for his "cautious experiments" in the past and will surely come up with some kind of intervention. When well-heeled bankers start invoking the spectre of millions out on the street you can almost hear the subliminal "think about the children" message. John Kenneth Galbraith is sorely missed.

In any case, we continue to search for a home... For the first time last week, we saw advertised a condo in a nice neighbourhood that was priced under the new mathematics at $469,000 - some sellers obviously need to cash out quickly (similar houses were priced at $650,000 just a few months ago). Hopefully we'll start seeing more of these things and it might even become a buyer's market. I won't hold my breath however; there's a surplus of unreality in the Bay Area.

In closing I'll note that Ikea was packed last weekend — everybody is doing home improvement, it seems. I don't think much of it was about putting a shine on show houses that you needed to flip ("one last try"), rather I suspect that it was belt-tightening at work, and making do with what you have. Time will tell and we'll be waiting this one out in our rented nest.

A Subprime Playlist

Some music for those inclined to home economics...

Dionne Warwick - A House Is Not A Home
Dionne really came into her own when she sang the Burt Baccarach songbook. It was a sublime case of pathos, operatic pop as it were featuring Baccarach's lyricism distilled in that delicate voice. All her later monetary triumphs stemmed from the magic of those wonderful interpretations.
Kool Moe Dee - They Want Money
I was going to pick Money Jungle by Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus and Max Roach for this playlist - the song (and album) is suitably jarring and tense, but I thought that Kool Moe Dee would be more appropriate. The title of the album is a key indicator: Knowledge is King. Laymen are always the last to get bailouts hence education is key to prepare for the periodic shocks of the grifter impulse. They Want Money is the soundtrack for Jim Cramer's crew, its blaring horns an ode to Alan Greenspan's politically expedient teaser rates, its rapid-fire lyrics are dedicated, with respect, to all those who have been selling a bill of irresponsible goods in the housing market.
Simply Red - Money's Too Tight To Mention
Social commentary of hard times and explicit lyrical harkening to Reaganomics. Mick Hucknell saw the darker side of trickle down economics and told it like it was. There are of course thousands of "no money" blues but when rendered in this pop vein, never have they been so upbeat or danceable. Perhaps one should also mention here Money to Burn by Wrinkars Experience in the reggae vein and round things off with the Wu-Tang Clan's C.R.E.A.M. ("Cash rules everything around me, cream get the money, dollar, dollar bill y'all")
Luther Vandross - A House Is Not A Home
I really need to do an appreciation piece on Luther who, like Aretha, had the uncanny ability to make any song his own. Simply put, his version is the definitive version - it's not even close. Soul music with all the accoutrements, lush and emotional.

A house is not a home, how true.

File under: economics, housing, mortgage, Bay Area, California, Berkeley, observation, home, money, finance, debt, subprime, shell game, USA, toli

Africa, 1999

2007-08-08T11:38:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd share this poster of African leaders circa 1999 which has been lying around my study for just such an occasion — actually, I was cleaning things and stumbled upon it...

I've been mulling a piece on Africa in 1989 to give some depth to my ongoing series and trying without success to find the equivalent poster from that year - the high mark of rogues in Africa, hence I'll start with a request: does anyone have any similar photos from 1989? Photos of any OAU meeting would work for my purposes. As to the matter at hand, I suppose the more recent history of 1999 will do as a stopgap measure.

So. Africa. 1999. Here goes...

Posters of this sort are quite popular in Africa (large size), you'll find them at many of our newstands. I don't quite believe in the Great Man theory but, when it comes to Africa in 1999, one has to admit that leadership still mattered a lot unlike in other regions of the world. To take an obvious example, no one in their right mind would be putting up similar photos of EU leaders on the walls of their houses. Public apathy to leadership in the West is rightly the norm - modulo the occasional gremlin. In West Africa especially, where we know all too well about Big Men - and they are all men in the calendar, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was barely on the horizon at that point, these posters serve as a kind of palliative: "Get to know your local strongman", wear their political cloths and so forth.

Even the good guys were larger than life in 1999; that was the year Nelson Mandela stepped down as president of the New South Africa proving his George Washington bonafides, the Good "Father of the nation" as the poster notes. In 1999, we didn't have many technocratic Thabo Mbeki or John Kufuor types as we do presently. Instead you'll note a lot of military uniforms and panache. The 2007 contingent are a mostly dour bunch other than say, He of The Little Green Book - Gaddafi that is, or Robert Mugabe, and Bad Bob has always worn a gray suit since hanging up his rebel spurs. That dourness is paradoxical progress, you don't want to live in revolutionary times. By contrast the typical words used in the western press about our leaders in 1999 were things like "mercurial, flair and flamboyant".

Strictly speaking it's not 1999, the calendar was produced in late 1998 as evidenced by the presence of the late, unlamented General Sani Abacha of Nigeria on the right hand side who died just months earlier. When people literally celebrate your demise to the point of dancing in the streets (as they did even in nearby Accra, Ghana), you've obviously been smothering them.

Still the 1999 crop of African leaders were a definite improvement on the 1989 crop but you could still see a high percentage of strongmen, thieves and incompetents. Even with the comforting gaze of Kofi Annan and Desmond Tutu (Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah are on hand to round out the nostalgia quotient), there is precious little comfort in this poster.

The Rogues Gallery

Charles Taylor (top left) was then president of Liberia, a decade after starting his mischief in the sub-continent. He had reached his peak of warlord power having coerced a terrorized populace into voting for him or else. And it was a case of "or else" that he proceeded to display: the white suits were flowing, the timber and blood diamonds were in abundance, the concessions had been granted to Pat Robertson, and the flowering friendships with Jesse Jackson and company proceeded apace. But he wanted it all, so Sierra Leone, Guinea and even Cote d'Ivoire would pay the price. May he suffer a lifetime of legal action, and the company of lawyers and bureaucrats.

Laurent Kabila the First, had been installed a couple of years earlier in Congo and was taking bids on concessions in the fashion of his predecessors in mischief, Mobutu and King Leopold... He was a disappointment to his Rwandan and Ugandan sponsors, refusing to deal with the Hutu génocidaires and indeed allying himself with them at times. The consequence of the free-for-all his inaction spawned was that the armies of 13 countries would scramble to get the spoils of Congo in the middle of Africa's world war. Sadly the headlines are much the same almost a decade later. The heart of darkness...

Gnassingbé Eyadema, the Prince of Darkness is ominous at the bottom right and for once depicted without his dark shades. To this day none of my Togolese friends discuss politics with me, so long a shadow does he (and now his progeny) cast.

Jonas Savimbi, Jerry Rawlings and Gaddafi are their customary gremlin selves - merchants of grist.

Jammeh of Gambia, in army gear (red cap just above the Africa maps), is holding up a little prop (sorry, I meant a little boy) - he wasn't claiming to cure AIDS back then (as was the case last year), but the visions of grandeur and the lucrative arms smuggling were going well.

The leaders of the various Guinea countries were grim. Conte of Guinea was simply corrupt - he still is. Joao Bernado Viera of Guinea-Bissau, having survived a 1998 coup and minor civil war, was cracking down on the opposition - he would fall in mid 1999 (he is back in power currently). The less said about Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea the better - 1999 was a typical year for his brand of malfeasance.

Al-Bashir of Sudan with the army uniforms behind him headed no-nonsense and efficient killers.

Buyoya of Burundi wasn't up to much good.

The military leader of Niger, Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara would be assasinated in April 1999. His replacement wasn't much better.

Kleptocrats and Autocrats

The usual suspects are there. Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya - stylish and mercenary, Paul Biya (and Wife) looting Cameroon, Hosni Mubarak the Egyptian hardman as usual. Like Mubarak, Ben Ali of Tunisia and bad old King Hassan of Morocco kept a lid on things in their countries. Too exuberant your expression of liberty and you risked the secret police. Algeria too was in the midst of that savage civil war; Liamine Zeroual, backed by the army — "Les décideurs" was what members of that cabal were called, was deciding for everyone. Idris Deby of Chad was caught between a rock and a desert and had no imagination. Blaise Campaore of Burkina Faso and Didier Ratsiraka, the canonical Big Man of Madagascar (the nickname: the Red Admiral) had quiet years. Omar Bongo was as usual enjoying and corrupting, spreading enough money around to compromise any opposition - as he continues to do, the Head Suborner. Nothing much to see here, let's move on...

The Disappointments

The biggest disappointment was Henri Konan Bédié of Cote d'Ivoire who was ensconced in that most comfortable chair. Despite being groomed for decades by Houphouët Boigny, he wasn't up to the task. His country is still paying the price for his small-mindedness.

Frederick Chiluba of Zambia (arms crossed and self-confident) was quickly losing his democratic lustre - he would be voted out of office a few years later and continues to face corruption charges.

Abdou Diouf of Senegal is an odd one. Ostensibly a democrat, he eventually handed over but he was increasingly autocratic the longer he was in power.

The Ethiopians (Zenawi) and Eritreans (Afewerki) decided they needed to engage in pointless border wars and old-fashioned trench warfare ensued. Tens of thousands perished.

Museveni was sowing his mustard seed in Uganda - democracy was for chumps in his considered opinion. One party state, baby.

Kerekou of Benin still can't point to any thing that he's done for his country; in 1999, the priorities were clear, it was all about the money.

The Mistakes

These posters are of the cut and paste variety and were put together in a hurry; sometimes one forgets to update things or misattributes. Thus Habayarima Juvenal of Rwanda, who had been killed to kick off the 1994 genocide, is still listed. Paul Kagame should be annoyed.

For Burkina Faso there is also the image of supposedly saintly Thomas Sankara, killed a decade earlier. File under misplaced nostalgia.

The Swazi king and the Lesotho prime ministers aren't listed for whatever reason.

Complications

Sierra Leone in 1999 was all complexity. President Tejan Kabba clearly had a precarious grip on power, the evidence being the enigmatic "Sierra Leonean rebel leader" in green beret and army fatigues on the left hand side who appears ominously on the same poster. And indeed Sierra Leone was in the midst of its long civil war.

Sidenote: the only unambiguous good deed in foreign policy of Tony Blair's tenure would come a few years later when he sent a detachment of British troops to save the day in Sierra Leone. For that alone, one might arguably cut him some amount of slack for the later hubris on Iraq. Arguably... But you won't get that argument from me, my litmus test was his eloquent silence as Israel was bombarding Lebanon last summer until the atrocities crossed his very flexible threshold of manufactured disgust. He did do the right thing on Sierra Leone, Africans will give him that...

In the other Congo, the situation was confused and confusing. Patrick Lissouba is depicted in the poster although he had been overthrown by that other gun runner Sassou-Nguesso; his militia did came close to overrunning Brazzaville that year. Years later, one assumes he is still itching for a return from exile.

Somalia, after a decade as a failed state, gets any number of warlords on the poster: Aideed, Ali Mahdi are the convenient stooges.

Not depicted is Monsieur Bin Laden who brought his brand of collateral damage to the continent in the 1998 Al Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The grass always suffers... Back in 1998/99, he didn't care much for the limelight.

Passing grades

I wouldn't want my jaundiced commentary to give the impression that there were no good leaders on the poster or in Africa in 1999. Indeed there were many good things happening on the continent and often inspite of the leaders. Also, and this is the great virtue of Africa at that moment, much of the action on the continent was in civil society, in entrepreneurs, in schools and in business. Governments mattered less.

Ange Felix Patasse of the Central African Republic and Miguel Trovada of Sao Tome and Principe could argue for a passing grade in 1999 (later is a different question). Similarly Konaré of Mali - a country that probably has the strongest democracy on the continent, did good. The leaders of Malawi (Muluzi), Tanzania (Mkapa) and Botswana (Masire) were all sense and sensibility. Heck even Chisano of Mozambique was proving reasonable in reconciling his countrymen after their long civil war. For what it's worth also, Sam Nujoma of Namibia did no harm in 1999.

Waiting for an Angel: Reading Africa in 1999

Between a Dream and a Nightmare was how Human Rights Watch described Africa in their 1999 world report. There's a touch of hyperbole perhaps, but there is much to commend in their lyrical commentary. Africa in 1999 was a case of baby steps.

Sidenote: Boston University had the idea to find sinecures for African leaders so that they would have something to do when they retired - basically give lectures about their embezzlement, grand visions and such. When I lived in the Boston area, I never attended the various symposiums that were organized - it irked me no end that these rogues would be feted instead of jailed. Perhaps I've mellowed somewhat, but I now think such efforts are a step in the right direction. Baby steps...

Back to reading 1999... There was the matter of angels and demons, and I've previously pointed to contemporaneous posters showing the way in which religion had gotten a big boost in much of Africa. We were in need of much faith healing and the reason was leadership. Popular culture and the literature reflected as much.

Nigeria, by virtue of heft, sets the tone for much of Africa hence, for the best reading material on Africa circa 1999, I'll turn to Helon Habila's Waiting For An Angel. This was actually a far more assured debut than that of The Anointed One in that is a novel that really sought to capture the totality of a society's experience of that moment.

Habila is an ambitious writer and he presents a series of shifting but interlocking stories - the glue is a doomed journalist and a few students, but he covers considerable territory in his lyrical pages. In a sense it is the moral dilemma of Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, updated for the fin de siecle: will no one do the right thing?

His laconic tone and journalistic eye really captures the mood: the sense of dread and inevitability of life under Abacha. Simply put it was a time of suffocation, of repression and of corruption. To call what Abacha wrought in Nigerian society bad behaviour is to give bad behaviour a bad name. What took place in Nigeria was greed beyond belief and utter wickedness, leavened periodically with tawdry murders. Murder was most foul, theft was most blatant, and all relationships were corrupted.

I can also point to some maternal toli with observations about this period; in 1999, it was a matter of confidence in Nigeria. Nigerians are still picking up the pieces years later.

I haven't dwelled much on the francophone aspects but perhaps a few words are in order. France these days is having a touch of buyer's remorse at its back-scratching enablement of African rogues. One then should also add to the reading list Ahmadou Kourouma's En Attendant Le Vote Des Betes Sauvages completed in 1998. That too takes on the Eyadema figures (and many of those other knaves I've listed). Magic realism was our lot and the great wordsmith doesn't disappoint in his cultural observations.

Where Habila is waiting for an angel, Kourouma is waiting for the wild beasts to vote. A clear eyed look at the poster and at those leaders should explain why these two great stylists of African prose would write as they did about waiting for the next shoe to drop. If the one hoped for change for the better, the other was more cynical about the prospects - and perhaps given the slow pace of change in Africa, Kourouma had the clearer eyes. But as a matter of policy, I'll side with Habila; demons may have more fun but angels are more likely to inherit the earth.

Between a dream and a nightmare is a twilight zone of opportunity; that is the terrain of the great game and the temptions of the rough beast. As we have seen, leaders do matter, but I'd hazard that people matter more. It wasn't so in 1999 but with baby steps, perhaps it is more so today. Would it always be so.

Soundtrack for this note

Eric B. & Rakim - Follow the Leader
Braggadocio and inner turmoil never sounded so good. Certainly Rakim never sounded so good, a microphone fiend he handed allcomers a musical massacre with his lyrics of fury. Follow the money, follow the leader.
Prince - 1999
A double album opus with Linn drum programming mastery, the obvious line to contribute to the playlist is from the title track: "Party over, oops, out of time". I quite like some of the other, lesser-played songs on 1999: Delirious and the very apt Something In The Water (Does Not Compute). What say you Dear Reader?
Femi Kuti - Plenty Nonsense
I was going to pick a Fela track to round of this playlist, perhaps Unknown Soldier - the line about Government Magic always gets me, but I think Femi had already proven himself by then and a more contemporaneous song was warranted. The title should speak loudly to my point: we're doing better these days but we all need to be vigilant about the plenty nonsense that goes on in our lands.

Baby steps.

P.S. It's been suggested that I should get some technology toli out the door, we'll see what we can come up with. Stay tuned...

File under: Africa, politics, poster, leaders, observation, history, culture, rogues, Fallen Angels, Things Fall Apart, toli

Anatomy Lessons

2007-07-27T13:00:00.001-05:00

As part of an occasional series, a few items briefly noted, this time an anatomy lesson of sorts.

I. The Emperor's Teeth

Last year I pointed to an article that had brought me much comfort, the account of a wonderful taxicab conversation with the cab driver who — well, you should read all of it in his voice (it's a few paragraphs down the linked page).

"Funniest trip I ever had to make," said the taxi driver. "Now, you'll like this one..."

"So I gets a call on me wireless," he continued, "an' 'e says; 'Ere, I've got one for you.'

"I says, 'Oh, yeah,' and 'e says, 'Yeah, you're gonna like this one, I want you to go to this address, in Kensington, pick up Napoleon's tooth and take it to Swindon for auction.'

"I says, 'You what ?' 'E says, 'You 'eard. Napoleon's tooth. An' I 'ope you're insured 'cos it's worth 8,000 nicker.' ...

The humour gave me much comfort and I filed away the idea of eventually writing something of substance on said tooth, said transporter or whoever it was that had collected or bid for it.

Serendipity struck when I noted a related story last week; the headline: Napoleon's Toothbrush Finally Has a Home

The Wellcome Collection, as the new museum is called, includes early anatomical models, surgical instruments, prosthetic limbs and other examples of medical progress, as well as eye-catching objects ranging from Peruvian mummies and Chinese torture chairs to Greco-Roman phallic amulets to Japanese sex aids.

It also presents what can only be called celebrity curiosities, like Napoleon's toothbrush, Charles Darwin's walking stick, Benjamin Disraeli's death mask, Horatio Nelson's razor, Florence Nightingale's moccasins (worn during the Crimean War) and some locks of George III's hair.

I immediately wondered whether Henry Wellcome was the collector who had been the successful bidder for Napoleon's tooth and whether it was also part of his collection. And if not, the obvious question needed to be raised: was someone somewhere considering reuniting Napoleon's tooth with Napoleon's toothbrush? Inquiring minds want to know.

These are strange days and perhaps the cabdriver's eventual punchline bears repeating

"Well yeah, still, I'll tell you somefin'. You gotta 'and it to his dentist, 'aven't you? 'E shoves that tooth to one side, an' e says, 'I'll 'ave that and I'll keep 'old of it till someone invents eBay.'"

I wonder when Napoleon's tooth was excised. Was it before or after he crowned himself emperor? Would the course of world history have been different if he used a chewing stick instead of a toothbrush?

Some poetry is in order:

The Emperor's Teeth

The Emperor has no teeth
His toothbrush plain disappeared
But after much blood, sweat and tears,
teeth and toothbrush were reunited after two hundred years.

II. The Bible and the Ganglion

I once had a recalcitrant ganglion — don't you love that word ganglion? It just sounds gangly, like an uncoordinated teenager in the throes of a growth spurt. Perusing dictionaries you'll read this definition: "rich fluid enclosed within fibrous tissue and usually attached to a tendon sheath in the hand, wrist, or foot". Well talking of growth spurts, one of the hundreds of ganglions in my body suddenly started swelling one day on my wrist. It was mostly benign, a little bump that I paid no attention to for a month or so, after which time, however, the enlarged fluid sack began to pinch a nerve on my wrist. That drew my attention because the pain was as most pain associated with the nervous system is, sharp and debilitating. The ganglion turned from recalcitrant to excruciating.

The American health care system may be a little sick these days but the university doctors that I consulted back then did their best to provide relief - a little syringe plunge to drain the fluid. I was a little curiosity for the trainee doctors. After a few months of weekly treatment "It will go away soon, just let us know if it gets too painful", and with their patient increasingly bewildered by the seeming randomness of the sharp pangs of pain, the surgeons were called in, and well, they did what surgeons do, they exercised their scalpels, dove in and snipped. They called the procedure a ganglionectomy - that word also sounds delicious and loopy and rolls off the tongue quite felicitously; I like the "nectomy" part especially, like the verb to dissect, it is onomatopoeic perfection. Incidentally the pill-swallowing post surgery was, how to put it, interesting, but that was another story.

In any case, my doctor uncle later on told me how he would have treated my case had he been consulted. What he had been taught at medical schools in England, Ghana and Nigeria was that the time-tested treatment for recalcitrant ganglions is the forceful impact of a heavy object.

"Sometimes a good whack cures this kind of thing."

Indeed his English resident had suggested holding the patient's wrist on the table and using a heavy book like the Bible to hit the bump. He was surprised that my American doctors hadn't done the deed, perhaps they were being too careful — afraid of the insurance companies and all that...

Every so often, as my eyes pass over the little scar tissue, my memento of that episode, I think to that incongruous image of a heavy bible dropping with vicious, but medical, intent onto my supine wrist.

I still wonder, did I really need to subject the Harvard endowment to $9,000 dollars worth of surgery when a twack with a King James bible would have done the efficacious deed? For that matter, did it matter what version of the Bible was used? Would a Revised Standard Edition have worked? Indeed did it have to be a bible? Would a telephone book have worked its numeric charm? Was there clinical significance in the choice of a holy book or was the religious designation simply a placebo effect of sorts? Was it a mere article of faith? Would a Koran, Torah or some other Holy Book have done the deed? I have visions of a rural hospital somewhere, say Libya, with a villager complaining of ganglionic discomfort. What would the Bulgarian nurse practitioner prescribe? What cultural sensitivity does the Hippocratic oath entail?

I have a quite hefty New Oxford Annotated Bible (with the Apocrypha) on the bookshelf and it always give me pause when I read it because of the literal connection I've outlined between body and soul — sidenote: do the Apocrypha have relevance here? I'll note without comment that, serendipitously, said bible is nestled between Kwame Gyekye's Tradition and Modernity and Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, a delightfully-illustrated version. Would any of those tomes have provided faster relief?

Would The Riverside Shakespeare fit the bill, the Bard's comedies and tragedies have been known to work wonders elsewhere? Or does the weighty object need to be a softcover book? How did doctors come to learn about this remedy? Is it an old wives' tale that doctors spin to impressionable young trainees? What about Karl Marx's Capital Volume III - surely a Penguin classic, let alone a critique of political economy, might do, or would I need the later and slightly heftier volumes on the theory of utility and surplus value? Or, since I'm discoursing on matters dyspeptic and poetic, would Anthony Burgess's The Complete Enderby have worked? Or would a lighweight tome like Anthony Winkler's The Lunatic do the deed (a new edition came out last month)? There I was reading it last year.

Sidenote: I have a Nigerian friend who used to tell of how he and his siblings would be punished as children. They would be forced to walk up to their father holding up a bible to receive a few well-chosen whacks of the cane - at such times, dropping the bible was a definite no-no and it heightened the dread. I couldn't help but be reminded of that curious ritual (was the punishment corporal or psychic I wonder?) when I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus a few years back - the mystery of the African father and Serious Religion.

And to digress further on matters of the soul, I've heard that one of the reasons people in Northern Ghana vote the way they do is that the political bosses go around before election day accompanied by clerics, and make recalcitrant villagers pledge to vote the right way on the handy Koran. I've always thought that this was a stereotype of pork-barrel politics (or perhaps beef in this case) adapted for the supposedly religious, backward and illiterate northerners - even as said northerners are often far more worldly and cosmopolitan than the rest of Ghana. And surely our electorates were more sophisticated these days? But political scientists don't really know why voters do the things they do in the comfort of a voting booth. What has been happening in the USA recently after all? Perhaps the choice of book does matter.

But to return to matters ganglionic, this being the web, perhaps someone somewhere could eventually resolve these open issues, namely:

Has a doctor ever whacked your ganglion?
And if so, what book or implement did he or she use?

And Dear Toli Readers, what books would you suggest for a homebrewed ganglionectomy?

III. Faux Boils

Apropos ganglions:

"I'm tired of hearing about your faux boils"

That was what someone very dear to me exclaimed a couple of weeks ago in mock exasperation at one of my discursive tales. I believe she meant "foibles" although the notion of fake boils, beside being hilarious, also seemed to work. A sociolinguistic friend branded the malapropism as folk etymology rather than eggcorn. Still, I like the coinage and it seems relevant since I've been dealing with a plagiarized something-or-other these past few weeks. Ghana must go as they say.

IV. The President's Polyps

The novelist and gothic satirist Will Self is no stranger to anatomy and on it he tends to veer towards the grotesque. Last year he riffed on Haydn's Nasal Polyp:

I've been toying with a short story of this title for years, ever since hearing – or thinking I heard – a Radio 3 announcer say, with predictably risible stuffiness: 'During the winter of 1772, Haydn, then resident in London, found himself unable to compose, so troubled was he by a nasal polyp..'. There was something about the notion of Haydn's nasal polyp – rather like Flaubert's parrot, or Lenin's brain, or Churchill's black dog – that seemed almost purpose-built for a story title. Not that I really wanted to write anything serious about Haydn: this was going to be more a piss-take of that particular strain in contemporary letters, perhaps exemplified by the titles above, that seeks out profundity by yoking a mundane, or curious, thing – parrot, brain, polyp – to a great name.

He then went on to note a case of literary serendipity shared with Ian Rankin apropos the conductor's nasal nostrum.

Now you can probably guess why I was drawn to that piece and its confluence of small things and cultural observations let alone the fact I'm a big fan of Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes' novel that is.

Well yes, it was the polyp. What the hell was a polyp, I wondered? The word sounds polymorphous, polyandrous, poly-something-or-other. When you pronounce polyp, you feel as if you're missing something, it seems curt, abbreviated even. It stands to reason that it designates a tuft of tissue, a small growth or tumor.

This came to mind when it was announced that George W. Bush had five polyps removed in a routine colonoscopy last Saturday. There was a pleasing symmetry of the image of the keys to nuclear missiles being handed over to Mr Cheney just before the surgeon's scapels was applied to that area.

Now presumably nasal polyps have a different impact than polyps from you-know-where but it seemed that some dots needed to be connected. The President's polyps have now displaced the conductor's polyps in the panopticon, or rather the pantheon, of polyps. Hadyn must surely be turning in his grave. I wondered whether Haydn's music was the kind of thing Mr Bush listened to on the iPod his daughters gave him for his birthday.

I do hope that Will Self writes his piece and, further, that he manages to tie in the five presidential polyps to give the requisite historical sweep that this story deserves. If not I'll file that tidbit around and perhaps get around to writing something of substance with it, perhaps linking things to Napoleon's tooth — Emperor to conductor to Decider. In parting one has further questions:

Where will the five polyps live once the doctors are done with them?
Will they be preserved as a whole or separately to be studied by future generations?
Will the 43rd President of the United States change his stripes now that they have been excised?
Will the course of the American Empire later be judged to have turned on said polyps?
Furthermore, will future curators of the Wellcome musueum seek to gain access to them rather than the undoubted presidential museum that is being planned somewhere in Texas?

Needless to say: observers are worried.

V. Body: A Playlist

I was recently reading Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar and in the spirit of that chance discovery I've been thinking that if I ever decided to be the svengali of a boy band that I might well call them The Five Polyps. Their demo for their first album, Napoleon's Tooth, might be the breakout ballad, The Recalcitrant Ganglion. The b-side would be the funk track Faux Boils.

As usual, a short playlist founded in reality seems appropriate.

Raphael Saadiq - Body Parts
An instant vintage affair from one of Oakland's sons of soul
The Jacksons - Body
The Victory album doesn't get as much love as it should. I believe Jermaine and Tito orchestrated this dance track reminiscent of the earlier Shake Your Body Down To The Ground from the Destiny album
Sonny Rollins - The Serpent's Tooth
On an album with Miles Davis, a young Sonny stretched out.
Ohio Players - Body Vibes
The funk was on fire with these brothers
Bootsy Collins - Body Slam
It's about the Pinochio Theory as Bootsy would sing as he competed in those funky seventies. Did he deal with Haydn's nasal polyp one wonders? Wasn't he Parliament/Funkadelic's Sir Nose or is my attribution sloppy?
James Brown - Bodyheat
The godfather of soul brought the motherlode of funk. He is sorely missed.
Nas - Don't Body Ya'self
The dark prince of hip-hop goes pidgin on everyone and body parts start flying at the lyrical onslaught. 50 Cent got downgraded by a quarter.
Johnny Gill - Wrap My Body Tight
Johnny Gill provides the counter and seeks comfort
R Kelly - Your Body's Callin'
Hmmm. He is obsessed with bodily functions isn't he? No comment.
Me'Shell Ndegéocello - Body
Me'Shell was seeking a comfort woman a few years ago. One hopes her search was conclusive.
Coleman Hawkins - Body And Soul
Perhaps the greatest solo in jazz history, this 1939 excursion still delights with its emotion.
Dwele - Flapjacks
I'll end with Dwele who was so great, exuberant and soulful in last night's concert in Oakland. There were many moments of musical genius but the most sublime was when he orchestrated an expedient audience choir on top of the laidback groove. The ladies in the audience would hum "la la la la la / da da da da da / paaaa daa daaaa" And the men would punctuate in harmony:
"I'm digging your flapjacks"
As The Wife and I sang and shook our behinds in soulful harmony we were sated by the celebratory vibe. We had paid our soul insurance and our bodies and soul could receive treatment from Doctor Soul himself. Amen. Hallelujah.

Note: since this is a family blog I'll add the obligatory disclaimer. There is no need to elaborate on what body parts flapjacks refers to. It's a metaphor for the soul, not the body.

File under: body, soul, language, anatomy, teeth, Napoleon, medicine, health, science, bible, humour, ganglion, polyp, Bush, life, literature, Will Self, serendipity, apophenia, perception, observation, ephemera, Small Things, culture, toli

Of No Fixed Abode

2007-07-11T09:04:00.000-05:00

My initial response to the 2005 London bombings was in the vein of whimsy: London's got soul, a trilogy celebrating the place, my favourite town. I then considered a case of identity theft last year to kick off the present Things Fall Apart series. After the news of the past few days, I can now give you the second part of a trilogy focused on the people. This time a look at my "fourth man": the fifth bomber, a man of no fixed abode. Some notes ripped from the headlines, a few musings and some poetry...

"Thought to be Bukhari": A Paper Trail

You lived with him
You stole his name...

They trained you well
Your name is cursed...

No one knows the identity of this man who performed the identity theft.

— Identity Theft

Identity:

[Redacted] 32, from West London. A Ghanaian, his real name is thought to be Bukhari. Said to have abandoned his bomb at Little Wormwood Scrubs after losing his nerve. Represented by Stephen Kamlish, QC.

— 21/7: the trial, January 16, 2007

Motivation:

Mr Kamlish, representing [redacted], said to Mr Ibrahim: "You wanted to do a copycat of 7/7 - four bombs on 7/7, four bombs two weeks later on 21/7. That was your plan.

"We say your 21/7 bombs were to be bigger and better in your twisted thinking than that of 7/7.

"Four real bombs on the Tube and one block of flats, a tower, destroyed, going up in a ball of flames. That was your plan, wasn't it?"

— Man 'planned tower block blast', March 22 2007

During the trial the man I called cursed continued to be referred to by his alias and that inevitable suffix, "of no fixed abode".

Tricksters, gremlins and parasites; who is which?

Mr Kamlish said his client - who the jury was told was really called Sumailia Abubakhari - was "used and abused" by Mr Ibrahim who was a "cowardly, manipulative schemer".

21/7 suspect 'saved tower block', April 17 2007

On Tuesday, he took to the witness box for the first time and told the court his real name was in fact Sumaila Abubakhari and that he is 28 - not 34. Wearing a crisp white shirt, dark blue tie and grey suit, [redacted] said he came to the UK in December 2003 using a passport in someone else's name and applied for the Army. He said he did not consider what countries he might be sent to on active service.

— Ghanaian suicide bomber 'wanted to join Army', April 17 2007

Muddied waters:

A terror suspect dismantled a bomb and saved the lives of people living in a tower block, his lawyers have claimed...

Prosecuters say he was the fifth bomber who allegedly lost his nerve at the last minute.

But Stephen Kamlish QC, defending, said his client had ditched his bomb - made of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour - at Little Wormwood Scrubs after "making it safe".

Woolwich Crown Court heard claims he also dismantled a booby-trapped sideboard at a "bomb factory" allegedly set up by a co-defendant in Curtis House, New Southgate, north London.

Mr Kamlish said: "He's not asking for any applause, but if he hadn't have done it and it was a bomb that actually worked ... he was in fact responsible - potentially - for saving the block and all the people in it."

Mr Kamlish said his client - who the jury heard was really called Sumailia Abubakhari - was "used and abused" by Ibrahim, a "cowardly manipulative schemer".

The barrister told the jury that [redacted] had been under intense pressure, and was even threatened by another defendant, since deciding to "break ranks".

He described his client as a "decent" and "somewhat childlike, sometimes naive" man.

— 'Not Asking For Applause', Sky News, April 17 2007

A theatrical man, he makes good copy with his African emotions; consider the headlines generated in under an hour a few months ago:

21/7 suspect 'is a devious liar', BBC, April 17 2007
21/7 suspect 'encouraged to lie', BBC, April 17 2007
Accused breaks down in court, BBC, April 17 2007
21/7 suspect 'defused booby-trap', BBC, April 17 2007
21/7 suspect 'saved tower block', BBC, April 17 2007
21/7 suspect's claim 'is amazing', BBC, April 17 2007
'Bomber' admits lying to police, BBC, April 17 2007

A compromised man:

Anthony Jennings QC, defending Hussain Osman, accused Mr [redacted] of crying when he told police about his supposedly dead father.

Mr [Redacted] has since admitted that his father is still alive.

"You were doing exactly what you were trying to do to this jury, which is pull the wool over their eyes by starting to cry when you were lying," said Mr Jennings.

The barrister went on to accuse Mr [redacted] of being a "self-confessed liar", a "fraudster", and a "sly and devious liar".

Mr [Redacted] denied lying, saying: "I was remembering the time as I'm staring death in my face and you're telling me not to cry?"

— 21/7 suspect 'is a devious liar', BBC, April 17 2007

Bukhari or Abubakari?

The prosecution says his real name might be Sumaila Abubakari but his nationality is unclear.

'Bomb plot' trial, BBC, April 17 2007

Bukhari or the other moniker Abubakari are Muslim names typically found in West Africa (from Northern Ghana, Nigeria to Sierra Leone). In Ghana at least, the north is much poorer and less developed than the rest of the country. Northern muslims tend to settle in the zongos (slums). Regardless of nationality, the experience of these dwellers is much like that in the slums of Nima, rough and hardscrabble lives. As an often itinerant people, they are deliberately opaque and insular. This served them well in their dealings with the colonials and beyond but this opacity gives rise to much uncertainty as in the present case. We simply don't know what the nationality is.

Emotional:

Mr [Redacted], who is said by the prosecution to have lost his nerve and dumped his device, has said he was not a "fanatic".

He told the court he left the device he was given in a west London park as he "just wanted to get rid of it".

He said Mr Ibrahim had told him the devices would "not hurt anyone".

He told the jury: "It didn't make sense to me. I didn't know whether this was hoax or real or anything to do with terrorists.

"But I didn't want anything where the police got involved in it.

"I thought: 'I don't want to listen no more. I have heard enough. I just don't want to have anything to do with it." ...

At one point, Mr [redacted] needed several minutes to compose himself in the witness box.

He broke down after telling the court of how Mr Ibrahim demonstrated the rucksack device on the morning of 21 July 2005 - two weeks after suicide bombers struck in London on 7 July 2005.

"He started to explain for the first time as if he has been talking to me before," Mr [redacted] told the court.

"I was waiting for him to tell me if this was a suicide bombing or not.

"This was my belief, that this was going to be a suicide bombing because it just happened two weeks ago."

He told the court: "I wanted to live. I wanted to have a good life. I wanted to support my family. It is just something that I have never thought of in my life."

— 21/7 accused breaks down in court

Lies and Truths:

But he agreed with Mr Sweeney's description that he had lied to police on an "epic" scale, including not telling them his real name, religion or background, about buying the peroxide or what he did after the "attacks" had failed.

He said: "It is unbelievable when I look back at these lies...I lied about the whole day of July 21."

Mr Sweeney said: "You lied through your teeth as to who the bombers were."

[Redacted] replied: "Yes I did. I did not want to associate myself with them after realising what they had put me through."

[Redacted] denied lying to cover up his own guilt, maintaining that he was initially manipulated by co-defendant Muktar Said Ibrahim to follow the story that the attacks were meant only to be a hoax but realised once the trial had started that he had to tell the truth.

— 21/7 suspect 'lied on epic scale' April 27, 2007

Assessment

The jury deliberating the cases of the alleged July 21 bomb plotters was today discharged after failing to reach a verdict on the final two defendants.

The decision by the trial judge, Mr Justice Fulford QC, came during the eighth day of deliberations by the jury at Woolwich crown court in south-east London.

He asked prosecutors to decide by tomorrow whether they want to seek a retrial for [redacted].

— Jurors fail to reach verdicts on two 21/7 defendants, Guardian, July 10, 2007

Jury deadlocked in UK transit bomb case, AP, July 10, 2007

The jury was discharged yesterday after failing to reach a decision on two other defendants, [redacted], both of whom deny conspiracy to murder.

[Redacted], 34, of no fixed address, ... will face a retrial, prosecutors said today.

— Four July 21 plotters jailed for life, The Guardian, July 11, 2007

A Redacted Note

It has been known since September 2005 that the man I called cursed, a man of "no fixed abode" and now "thought to be Bukhari" was not the man his identity papers claimed, yet in the proceedings of the trial and the journalistic coverage, he is continually referred to with his stolen name. Perhaps this is as it should be, the slow workings of the law and the wheels of justice, an administrative decision. Yet each mention of the name is an open wound for a family in Ghana and London, a reminder about the continuing trauma in their lives. We are all collateral damage, the walking wounded of these interesting times.

I'll note in passing that the western journalistic tic of attaching an age and provenance to every name leads to the stilted formulations of the copy we have seen. Indeed these details detract from the heart of the matter and obscure rather than enlighten the complexities of this very human story. As we have seen, the name, age and nationality are still undetermined and the reporting has been wrong throughout. The only certainty is that he is "of no fixed abode". If we do have to name, place and date in tangible words, I suggest in this case that we stick to the following:

"[redacted], undetermined age, unclear nationality, of no fixed abode"

Reflection

A few more leading indicators to round off our notes:

Al-Qaeda has responded to the U.S. intelligence focus on young Arab men as potential risks, he says, by recruiting "jihadists with different backgrounds. I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to."

— George Tenet: Tenet Details Efforts to Justify Invading Iraq, April 28, 2007

No country is immune from these things, consider this clipping from last summer:

Two Nigerians, whose identities were not disclosed at press time, have become victims of the exchange of artillery fire between Israeli authorities and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

Two Nigerians Confirmed Killed in Lebanon bombings, July 24, 2006

The footsoldiers of The Great Game know no boundaries, indeed their variety is a historical commonplace.

So when I watched the recent protests in Kyrgyzstan, I thought not to the recent people-power outings in Ukraine and Georgia or even to the collective courage that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall (not pope-inspired by the way). Rather I thought back to Christmas 1990 sitting in Nancy, France, watching images from Bucharest alongside a true-believer socialist as his worldview finally succumbed to that ineffable and unrelenting pull of gravity.

It is no comfort to have learnt, as I did a few years later, that there were Ghanaians who died fighting for that reptilian man, Nicolae Ceausescu, alongside his Securitate during the Romanian overthrow of that macabre communist regime. I thought about the kind of world in which someone would send young Ghanaian men to train in interrogation techniques in far-flung places like Cuba, East Germany and Romania to come back and oppress their people.

I thought about what it meant for a young man to find himself in that position, in a foreign land, dodging bullets and shooting at people, in their own country mind you, trying to overthrow a rotten regime. I thought about how miserable and brutish their lives must have been to have undergone that kind of journey. And what about their peers who did come back from their various schools of grist to wreck havoc on their compatriots? I'm sure that some of these trained killers are among those who carry out weekly armed robberies in our towns.

— Strange Bedfellows and the Journalistic Impulse

Perusing these notes, the obvious questions remain unanswered. Depending on where you stand, the actors range from convenient scapegoats like John Walker Lindh, to the convinced and morally convicted ciphers such as Richard Reid, to the more ambiguous cases like that of the man I call cursed. There is perhaps a full spectrum of responses: from moral courage, through the mistaken and misguided indiscretions of youth, to moral midgetry. That is the terrain of fallen angels.

As with all things about the human factor and the theatre of our existence, our fall from grace perhaps renders this melancholy mystery unknowable. One cannot but stare at the trainwreck when it comes. But how does one equip oneself to face the abyss? Where does one buy soul insurance? In a dark time, perhaps social living is the best.

"Of No Fixed Abode"

Identity theft
Open wounds

Fallen angels
Damaged goods

Brutish living
Scarred consciences

Devious schemers
Lost nerves

Enemy combatants
Collateral damage

Modern travellers
Prison shelters

Stolen verdicts
Jury deadlocks

Bomb factories
Moral blinders

Hostile lives
Fractured dislocations

Cultural interplay
Social living

The aliases of exiled souls
Alienated, "of no fixed abode"

Soundtrack for this note

Antibalas - Indictment
An angry afro-beat meditation with dissonant horns that presents a bill of goods, if not some articles of impeachment, on our current situation. The song is also a humourous indictment of all those rogues in a musical court of law. One wished everyone expressed their grievances in music or words. The cover art is prescient about the flight of that man "thought to be Bukhari", the confusion and urgency are the same, as is the mistaken resort to violence. It is the mask of a man of no name, of indeterminate age, of unclear nationality and of no fixed abode. The only missing thing is the discarded, bomb-laden rucksack.
Prince - Reflection
A simple song: light drums and an acoustic guitar that sticks in your head and gets you singing along before you know it. The melody is wistful and, befits the title, reflective. We're reminiscing about innocence lost, the good old days when decisions were without consequence and life itself was carefree. Not everyone has that luxury but we can all empathize with that sentiment
Sometimes I just want to sit out on the stoop, play my guitar just watch all the cars go by
Angie Stone - Soul Insurance
Her warm voice endears as does the music; Angie assures you that she has got your back. Soul assurance. Soul insurance. Where do I sign up for mahogany soul?

Update August 29, 2007

The following passage should give much pause for those sympathetic to this man "thought to be Bukhari"

He said that Mr Omar had offered a bed to a mentally ill African refugee, took in a homeless Indian man and paid visits to people in hospital. He never heard Mr Omar speak out in support of any act of terrorism. Mr Dixon said: "He was against the Iraq war, but... he said nothing radical." Mr Dixon became an unwitting helper of the alleged conspirators when he accompanied Mr [Redacted] on a trip to buy dozens of litres of hydrogen peroxide, the chemical that formed the key ingredient of the rucksack bombs.

— Witness was unwitting helper with 21/7 purchase

So not only did [redacted] use people unwittingly to help buy bombmaking equipment but, if my reading is correct, he also stole the identity of that "mentally ill African refugee" who his accomplice had taken in. No one has connected these particular dots but I would lay even odds that said refugee was indeed the man who woke up to learn that the police were calling him a bomber. That would certainly round out the circle of infamy of tricksters using anyone who falls into their orbit. One wonders if there really are any more shades of gray to this story.

Next: Ode to Betty Brown

File under: London, Ghana, bombing, terrorism, loss, waste, crime, anomie, identity, theft, reflection, globalization, Africa, culture, immigrant, diaspora, observation, perception, poetry, Fallen Angels, Things Fall Apart, toli

A Plagiarism in Plaid

2007-06-03T18:51:00.002-05:00

To the Editors (Daily Telegraph)
Date: Jun 3, 2007 5:29 AM
Subject: A plagiarism in plaid?

I noted with interest that Liz Hunt's recent opinion piece — Immigrants have bags of ambition (June 2, 2007) — was a nice reworking of my April 13, 2007 essay, Bags and Stamps, published on my blog, Koranteng's Toli.

While I appreciate that this means that I have readers in high places, the norm when remixing on the web is to include a link to the originating source of the material.

I'll assume that this was a minor oversight on her part and, for what it's worth, she adds a little colour, her personal perspective and indeed some original reporting - not a bad remix - she certainly channeled my words and ideas quite effectively.

Still one wonders about these things... A cursory examination reveals wholesale, shall we say, lifting of said words and ideas.

It is also ironic since the essay was ostensibly about the ecstasy of influence, as Jonathan Lethem would have it, and concerned itself with a high profile appropriation, if not plagiarism, by Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton fame of the notion of "Ghana must go bags" as used in the work of Ghanaian artist Senam Okudzeto. That the Ghanaian writer who connected these dots together is himself (inadvertently we'll assume) written out of the conversation is quite something to behold.

"Out of Africa always something new", wrote Pliny The Elder. There must have been a second part to his observation: "Things to be used but not acknowledged".

A further twist, this essay is part of my ongoing Things Fall Apart series which I am hoping to publish as a book - I am quaint that way. It had been suggested to me to send it to the New Yorker or similar. It now appears that I have a nice postscript for the essay, if not a further essay topic, one addressing the lines between journalism and blogging and the influences and overlap thereof.

I am unclear whether Liz's piece was published in the newspaper or only online. If the former, presumably there are well known procedures for corrections of editing errors, errors of omission or indeed (and God forbid) errors of commission - that is the domain of so-called intellectual property, copyrights and such.

If the latter, I'd appreciate a link.

The internet being what it is, I am glad to have the option of commenting directly on the piece in question through The Telegraph's website and 'having my say' in that forum. I'll demur for the moment and intend to publish my query on my website. Perhaps your response or indeed that of your reporter can occur on my grounds.

Still, the currency of the web is the link, I don't think it is too much to ask for a link. It simply adds to the conversation.

Best regards.

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah

P.S. For further fodder, I took a few minutes to provide a little juxtaposition of the two articles, nothing exhaustive but illustrative I hope - a link in other words - and here I hesitate to reuse a title I had suggested in my original essay:

Click here — Bags and Stamps: a plagiarism in plaid

As a study in contrast, consider this sampling and judge for yourself:

Koranteng

Liz Hunt

In Ghana and most of West Africa we call it the "Ghana must go" bag. Last year Sokari Ekine revealed her own bag woman tendancies and opened the discussion - she's a connaisseur. In response, Georgia Popplewell noted that "in Trinidad I've heard those bags called Guyanese Samsonite". We learnt that in Germany, per contra, they are known as "Tuekenkoffer" or Turkish suitcase. In Boston I've heard them referenced as Chinatown totes, and called Bangladeshi bags in England, presumably after the 1970s influx of Bangladeshi immigrants.

In Ghana, it is known as the "Ghana must go" bag; in Germany it is "Tuekenkoffer" or the Turkish suitcase; in America, the "Chinatown tote"; in Guyana as "Guyanese Samsonite" and elsewhere as the "Bangladeshi Bag"

Do note that the author completely misses Georgia's nuance by transposing Trinidad to Guyana. The point is that the naming is done by the natives - looking down onto the teeming masses of refugee or downtrodden immigrant Others. Thus Nigerians named the bags Ghana must go, Germans named it Türkenkoffer, and so forth. Thus this is not a simple copying and pasting, there was reordering and some conscious editing done in the article, and perhaps the immigrants coalesced into one indistinguishable mass. This is of a piece with the general disdain for said immigrants that the rest of the author's commentary indicates. We can also skip over how Boston becomes America in the coining of "Chinatown tote". The rest of the article I'll suggest is equally enlightening.

Soundtrack for this note

I normally offer playlists to accompany my writing, in this case we'll go with Abbey Lincoln, she has been on my mind lately.

Abbey Lincoln - Throw it Away

From her extraordinary 1995 album A Turtle's Dream, the lyrics are inspirational and I hope she'll forgive me for reproducing them here with attribution.

One day I found these magic words
in a magic book:

Throw it away. Throw it away
Give your love, live your life
each and every day,
and keep your hand wide open.
Let the sun shine through,
'cause you can never lose a thing
if it belongs to you

[Update June 5, 2007 3:31PM PST]

My inbox, the comments and clickstream on my website all tell an interesting tale. The global audience of modern travellers and sedate web surfers who frequent this joint have sprung into action, mice and keyboards at the ready. Even some who normally remain dark matter have sent head nods of recognition if not sympathy or empathy (and links of course - this is the web). It's comforting to know that I'm part of such a community.

Sokari who started this global conversation is suitably outraged, as is Georgia, and presumably that prolific fellow named Anonymous. Sattva helpfully pointed out that even the typos were faithfully reproduced in the Daily Telegraph - the Türkenkoffer Tragedy as it were. The Telegraph columnist has no idea about the depth of fortitude of the interlocutors she dismissed - bags of ambition is the least of it.

It's been a day or so since a Telegraph editor read my query and I, like many, have been slightly expectant as to their response. I know also of at least one outraged toli reader who deigned to comment on Sunday on the Telegraph's website - annoyed that I hadn't immediately published this note on my blog on Saturday. That comment has not been published and indeed, as I write, the article's web page is unchanged since Saturday.

The initial silence from the Telegraph's offices, like all silences, can at once be seen as eloquent and troubling. Eloquent in suggesting that one's concern was deemed trivial or not worthy of a response and all that implies. Troubling because of what the cynical might proffer as the worst reading of the matter. If someone could be so reckless as to brazenly and casually pass off others' words as their own, one inevitably wonders just how long such things have been going on. We have seen recent high-profile examples of such effrontery in journalism.

Such actions would also show a certain contempt, for editors and audience alike. As an editor, I would worry about the compromise of a publication's reputation and want to proceed carefully. Allegations of sloppiness and/or misconduct are serious, and reflect on people's careers and livelihoods, not to mention the bottom line of the organizations that relate to them. This is the tangled web of The Reporter and The Editors. I place my faith in The Editors in this instance.

One theme I've been considering in this series is 'who is writing the script?' and I've even suggested a word to cover the behaviour I've observed: huhudious. I trust instead that Telegraph editors are simply not wanting to rush to judgement. Let's hope they will be thoughtful in their eventual and considered response.

I do appreciate that The Reporter advanced the story - indeed she adds one important and original nugget: the name and background of the putative Chinese manufacturer of our Ghana must go bags. Another potential addition is the model name and price of the Louis Vuitton plaid appropriation - although that last could be figured out by following the links I sourced in my original essay. These are the kinds of things I would undoubtedly have followed up on as a professional. With The Reporter's kind permission, I will include these points (after quite scrupulous fact-checking of course, and with attribution) when I do finally submit my article to editors for publication in a magazine or book.

Liz Hunt, at the prompting of The Editors, has kindly replied to my query and I've linked our email exchange below:

Click here — Liz Hunt - Plagiarism Exchange

It's a very creative defence, the most revealing phrase being "how our researcher came to your blog". Thus she cannot but acknowledge that I was a crucial source of her story - the damning spelling mistakes, let alone the juxtapositions that a few minutes revealed, don't offer a leg to stand on. A friend had posited an underling factor in this business, but who knows about these things; she can best inform us. Anyway you can judge her motivations and thought process for yourself. Her response is unedited as she requested.

I do wonder about her use of the word "refute" and whether she has since taken a peek at my blog, because most wouldn't dare brazen this out. But maybe it is that in my culture I have a different appreciation of shame. Still I'll acknowledge the protestations of "good faith" - although the evidence is lacking in my opinion. I do believe in the golden rule but I'll admit I have no words for her.

In the meantime, I wait patiently for the response of The Editors. They are the ones I addressed my note to, and they are well versed in honour and the calculus of damage limitation. There is enough going on in my life that I won't go out of my way to press the issue. I thought I'd enjoined in a beautiful conversation, but a gift bestowed with open heart seems besmirched by notoriety. I will say that this episode leaves a sour taste - quite tangible in real life, that not even Abbey Lincoln's sultry and bittersweet exhortation can cover. Blogging shall be fitful at best for the next few weeks. I will in parting add a couple of stanzas to my original poem

Bags and stamps

Modern travellers
Packing our bags
Seeking out stamps
The mementos of exiled souls

Ghana must go versus Louis Vuitton
Observing a hustler tradition
Enjoining a global conversation

The Reporter and The Editors
Immigrants and their ambition
Plaid bags and plagiarism

A Busy Person's Guide to the Curious Case of Liz Hunt, Plagiarism and The Daily Telegraph

A couple of links for the busy observer...

Some findings of fact.
We write, you decide.
How doth the little crocodile
Rachel, ever succintly, weighs in on the matter, her global voice and journalistic viewpoint further clarifies the conversation. Fair and balanced.

[Update June 15 2007]

So. Twelve days later... As we continue to wait for The Daily Telegraph editors to weigh in on matters of plagiarism, I thought I'd lighten the mood a little and follow up with some of the visual responses I've received to the Bags and Stamps essay and to this note.

The first came from Elia, whose visual sense is more acute than mine and came up with this great collage which makes the point more effectively than I had. My spanish is non-existent, but a Babelfish translation indicates that a very kind label had been launched towards this joint; a head nod back in your direction, Elia.

Guyanese Samsonite Musings

Georgia, our Trinidadian informant on the "Guyanese Samsonite" business, took the following photo in a market in Scarborough, Tobago. She was also threatening to follow a lead and head out in the pouring rain to photograph a woman she had passed a day earlier, sans camera, who sported one of these bags that featured a flowery addition to our plaid stylings. Please don't risk your health on my account, it's just a bag!

While on the Guyanese Samsonite angle, one wonders when that name was bestowed on the bags. I wonder if these are the same bags that not just the Guyanese, but also the Trinidadians and the Jamaicans, were carrying in the 1940s and 1950s when that immigration wave happened, and Britain was welcoming them for their cheap labour. Their struggles were what the famed Trinidadian writer, Samuel Selvon, lovingly chronicled in The Lonely Londoners which also has piercing insights on African immigrants at that time.

The cover art indicates slightly different luggage:

The literary evidence points to similar bags of exigency as when a family suddenly appears and handbags an Trinadadian immigrant at Waterloo station. Described in Selvon's pitch perfect voicing of Caribbean patois:

A old woman who look like she would dead any minute come out of a carriage, carrying a cardboard box and a paperbag. When she get out the train she stand up there on the platform as if she confuse. Then after she a young girl come, carrying a flourbag filled up with things. Then a young man wearing a widebrim hat and a jacket falling below the knees. Then a little boy and a little girl, then another old woman, tottering so much a guard had was to help she get out of the train.

"Oh Jesus Christ," Tolroy say, "what is this at all?"
"Tolroy," the first woman say, "you don't know your own mother?"

Tolroy hug his mother like a man in a daze, then he say:

"But what Tanty Bessy doing here, Ma? and Agnes and Lewis and the two children?"
"All of we come, Tolroy," Ma say.

The goodwill for those Caribbean immigrants was beginning to run out by the time he published his novel and he catches the flavour of that historical moment in the paperbags, flourbags and indeed in that stylized prose.

Staying on the Caribbean theme, and with another stylist, one wonders whether our plaid bags were similarly depicted by Patrick Chamoiseau in the mythical slums of Martinique or whether his urban griot, Solibo Magnifique, would have spontaneously declaimed any odes to them as he walked through those grand markets. The cover art you'll see is again ambiguous.

Appropriation a l'Africaine

Sokari mentioned that the trend in South Africa was to rebrand the plaid bags "with shiny maps of Africa, elephants, soap powder and all sorts". The idea is to badge them with Made in South Africa labels. I quite agree, why should the Chinese have all the fun, and profit, even on these cheap goods? The Wife called this the Fubu effect, reinvention and appropriation. Sokari kindly sent along these photos that make the point quite effectively.

Forget your garden-variety shoppers with heavy loads to pick up, I trust even the tourists will be picking them up, I certainly would. She adds: "photos were taken in April in the Jeppe Street / Bree street areas of downtown Joburg. I have a blue version of the red one which cost me 10 rands". They come in "blue, red and green and large, medium and small". A great knockoff with a little profit to boot.

Still, as with book covers and types and faces, these too present a certain image of Africa: zebras, elephants, safaris etc. While certainly more colourful, fun and perhaps "authentically African", the more arresting images to my mind are those of the marketplaces in which they are found, and the context in which they are used. The streets of downtown Johannesburg and the activity therein draw me in, as do the marginalia of the Tobago concoction. Those marketplaces are as much a part of Brand Africa or Brand Caribbean as the fashionable and camera-ready versions.

I'm reminded of what Hilaire Belloc wrote in The Modern Traveller

Oh! Africa, mysterious Land
Surrounded by a lot of sand
And full of grass and trees,
And elephants and Afrikanders,
And politics and Salamanders

As long promised, that 1898 tome will be addressed in a coming installment of our meandering series, it is indeed an invigorating antidote to the later Heart of Darkness...

Finally, and in a different direction, I ran across the work of Bay Area artist, Jenny Hurth, this past weekend at an art fair in Berkeley.

Another bag lady, she makes her bags from recycled banners from trade shows and conferences - essentially the garbage that these marketing events and ceremonies engender.

I think the notion of recycling is quite apt, and works well in terms of encapsulating historical memory and rescuing it in a tangible, utilitarian, and, in some instances, fashionable repository. I'll try to connect her with Senam, they should have much to talk about.

[Update June 21, 2007]

My good friend Nate, riffs on our "South African Street Merchant Bags" and considers containers in one big boxy multicoloured metaphor. He also sends along a bag "bought in Vilankulos, Mozambique. It's a re-sewn flour sack." Dig the back lighting.

He adds as an aside:

Reminds me of how flour companies in the US used to use sacks that had floral patterns printed on, once they realized farm wives were using the soft cotton material to sew dresses out of. I think Williams-Sonoma now sells "flour-sack" kitchen towels, designed to mimic the better properties of towels made from actual flour sacks.

I too have batakaris from the north of Ghana made from flour sacks. They feel more comfortable than the ones made with more conventional materials and lining. As we have seen, their utility too goes beyond flour and general market duty, and spans the world, from Mozambique to Trinidad, to Ghana, England and Middle America. This reinvention is only fitting: Humanity knows no boudaries.

Connecting dots further, I'll simply point to this image from a slideshow in Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozi's wonderful documentary Secondhand (Pepe) about the history of used clothing and immigration - and more on said documentary later. Simply note the presence of our Ghana must go bags in the midst of the bend down markets in Haiti where the cast-offs of the First World are bartered and reinvented in the comfort of the Haitian landscape.

Credit: Vanessa Bertozi (licence)

Perhaps others can provide their plagiarisms in plaid, I'll be your bag man, collecting your visions. I'm quite easy to contact and will happily link if need be — that business about attribution on the web... Links do cost so little.

[Update July 1, 2007]

The Wife, while conducting research in an unseasonably chilly South Africa, points out a piece she came across in this week's Sunday Times at Johannesburg airport, Get a handle on original fakes. It's a bit of a late pass on Marc Jacob's expensive appropriation, or rather his plagiarism in plaid but it is a good example of how one would expect journalists to cover the story,

Nechama Brodie has written a sharp and insightful piece with a reflective perspective and original reporting. Further, she contributes a few more terms to our bag vocabulary. Apparently in South Africa, they are known as "raffia" bags or as the "Street GM" which meshes well with Nate's "South African Street Merchant Bags" characterization. Interestingly there is no trauma involved in the naming, these are generic names. One wonders whether the large influx of Zimbabwean immigrants fleeing the bleak desperation of that rogue called Mugabe in recent times will change that perception. From what I understand, South Africans are beginning to resent the refugees in their lands and, curiously enough, brand them generically as "Nigerians". Will be soon be hearing cries of "Nigeria must go" as the natives start resenting the immigrant upstarts? Or is it rather the case that Zimbabwean's, with their rich tradition of Ndebele textiles, have not had to resort to our bags of exigency as they flee into political and economic exile? Perhaps they use baskets as they take flight? Inquiring minds want to know.

Grandiose Parlor points us to some videographic evidence, an AFP news report on Zimbabweans fleeing the brutality and economic deprivation that is the lot of those living under the thumb of that rogue.

It is difficult to watch these kind of images and see proud people sleeping rough in churches in the cold South African winter. How does one handle the rogues that cause these things? It is no comfort to notice the presence of our Ghana must go bags by acting as literal comforters for a few that choose a blanket of soul made of our plaid polypropylene bags. I'll wager we'll soon be hearing "Zimbabweans must go" (Zim must go?) before too long.

Returning to lighter thoughts and perhaps to rogues previously discussed, I do like Brodie's poetic title. "Get a handle on original fakes" could very well be the best strategy to apply to our smug and admitted plagiarist at the Daily Telegraph.

Our dear Liz Hunt isn't even saying "I smoked but I didn't inhale", like Mr Clinton famously did about his youthful indiscretions with marijuana. No, that would be too easy. Rather it's a case of

"I smoked, but it was for a good cause. And incidentally I resent you accusing me of smoking as much weed as I did smoke."

Oh well hubris springs eternal, the celebrity got to her head; a diluted sense of noblesse oblige... We shall take our time formulating the appropriate response.

Bags and Stamps - the photo set

File under: influence, ideas, fame, plagiarism, Daily Telegraph, Telegraph, journalism, media, blogging, theft, hubris, plaid, culture, observation, attribution, immigration, memory, Ghana Must Go, Guyana, Trinidad, Mozambique, Caribbean, South Africa, Zimbabwe, literature, ethics, morality, values, life, photography, Fallen Angels, Things Fall Apart, toli

On George W. Bush

2007-05-18T01:59:00.000-05:00

I. On Knowledge

His had been an intellectual decision founded on his conviction that if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.

— Tom Sharpe - Porterhouse Blue

I turned to Tom Sharpe expounding on knowledge a quarter century ago for insight on the 43rd President of the United States. At first glance, I thought his bons mots were a succinct and definitive summary of what we have seen of said President's attitude towards knowledge. Some have speculated about oedipal reasons or ice queen mothering for his essential incuriousity. I demur; one should give him the benefit of the doubt and ascribe his outlook to conscious decision. He has asserted after all that he is "the decider". Also as Sharpe explained, incuriousity can be a deliberate policy, indeed one founded on conviction, if not an instinct towards self-preservation. This is only human and it is clear that there is a lot of conviction in the President. Upon reflection then, Sharpe's formulation can only be a partial rendering.

Knowledge is all the rage these days. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld even proposed a taxonomy of knowledge, iconic in recent memory, in one his jawboning press conference performances — said taxonomy was incomplete as it turned out, he forgot the unknown knowns, and in the war policy he implemented, he discounted even the known knowns. Robert Waldmann recently added a few prescriptions on the matter. Political discourse in the United States of America has thus been all about knowledge: who knew what, when did they know it, should they have known it and so forth. There have even been acrobatics: "If I knew then what I know now, I would etc."

Well, who knew?

II. On Ignorance

It seems to me that one should turn to the other side of the coin in search of insight on the 43rd President of the United States. Thus we'll consider ignorance. For this we'll go back to 1907 and to Hilaire Belloc's delightful essay On Ignorance. As an avid proponent of the collage and remix, let's see how well a sampling of his toli can flesh out our portrait...

On Ignorance by Hilaire Belloc

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known. Is it not wonderful then, that we should be so sensitive upon the discovery of a fault which must of necessity be common to all, and that in its highest degree? The conviction of ignorance would not shame us thus if it were not for the public appreciation of our failure.

... the biting shame of ignorance suddenly displayed conquers and bewilders us. We have no defence left. We are at the mercy of the discoverer, we own and confess, and become insignificant: we slink away.

... Note that all this depends upon what the audience conceive ignorance to be... Among very young men to seem ignorant of vice is the ruin of you, and you had better not have been born than appear doubtful of the effects of strong drink when you are in the company of Patriots...

Ignorance is an everyday occurence, something that affects every man. It isn't surprising that those who affect to be Everyman would not be immune from its effects.

One wonders about the moods of crowds. Why do people turn when they do? What is it that causes reassessments and shifts in the cultural zeitgeist? Tipping points are only part of the picture. I continue to ponder the essential difference between those two fables: the boy who cried wolf and the emperor's new clothes. This is not to suggest that the 43rd President of the United States is a wolf or indeed an emperor, although there may be latent aspirations to both characterizations. Rather I wonder about the reception to the messages of those boys in the fables. The one was ignored (he cried wolf too often) while the other was celebrated (everyone laughed at the emperor). When does danger or hubris become plainly evident to all? Perhaps everything is local and our evolutionary make-up conditions us accordingly.

But I digress. Back to ignorance...

Nevertheless... we should rather study the means to be employed for warding off those sudden and public convictions of Ignorance which are the ruin of so many.

These methods of defence are very numerous and are for the most part easy of acquirement. The most powerful of them by far (but the most dangerous) is to fly into a passion and marvel how anyone can be such a fool as to pay attention to wretched trifles...

No one can fault the 43rd President of the United States for lack of passion. He is focused. He is a compassionate conservative. He is a war president. Passion and focus on big, serious and era-defining issues are his concern. War by definition is as big an issue as humankind faces. Would it that small things were considered; that however would reek of Clintonian microsteps, trivialities in essence.

No. Crusades. Mushroom clouds. War. Terror. Big picture. Serious.

There are other and better defences. One of these is to turn the attack by showing great knowledge on a cognate point, or by remembering that the knowledge your opponent boasts has been somewhere contradicted by an authority...

The 2004 US presidential election campaign is perhaps a great illustration of this technique, and in this Karl Rove, sometimes labeled Bush's brain, was in full concurrence. John Kerry knows this all too well.

Yet another way is to cover your retreat with buffonery, pretending to be ignorant of the most ordinary things, so as to seem to have been playing the fool only when you made your first error. There is a special form of this method which has always seemed to me the most excellent by far of all known ways of escape. It is to show a steady and crass ignorance of very nearly everything that can be mentioned, and with all this to keep a steady mouth, a determined eye, and (this is essential) to show by a hundred allusions that you have on your own ground an excellent store of knowledge.

This is the true offensive-defensive in this kind of assault, and therefore the perfection of tactics...

The steady mouth, the determined eye, the repeated calls for resolve, the swagger, the obsession with fitness, the cowboy photo opportunities, the outdoors pose of a "Texan" stand in stark contrast to the Connecticut patrician upbringing. This is deliberate it would seem.

The notion of buffoonery is trickier however. The public gaffes during the Queen's recent visit are a case in point. One should ask: is the steady flow of homespun awkwardness calculated or genuine? Dwelling on bushisms as many do, only serves to lower everyone's guard and cause misunderestimation as the 43rd President of the United States so candidly and memorably put it.

This is a theme Belloc covered a decade earlier in The Modern Traveller, a book whose toli I'm a year behind in addressing (real soon now).

Note the name, Blood, and the reaction to his shrewd manoeuvers:

It saved the situation.
"If such a man as that" (said they)
"Is Leader, they can go their way."

That is an efficient take on ignorance, who has the time to scrutinize closely in this fast-paced world? By and large, our decision-making is done on gut feel and liminal signals, with only lip service paid to due diligence. Most of the time things work out, right?

Lastly, or rather Penultimately, there is the method of upsetting the plates and dishes, breaking your chair, setting fire to the house, shooting yourself, or otherwise swallowing all the memory of your shame in a great catastrophe.

I fear that this is the terrain of the current moment; the aircraft carriers ominously deployed in the Gulf, the saber-rattling on Iran, Syria and such bode ill for all of us. Setting fire to the house, whether to its finances or its foundations is a real temptation. One school of thought on the Middle East misadventures is that if you break eggs over there, the natives will be scrambling amongst themselves. "We fight them over there so that etc". This Scrambled Egg Theory of Mesopotamia is a rather dubious historical legacy I must say. I rather thought that blood was precious for most human beings but it seems that a powerful cohort, and the 43rd President of the United States is among equals in these elite ranks, are determined to provide existence proofs of the quantity theory of insanity. This young century is on course to equal the butchery of its predecessor.

But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company: I shall therefore beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."

This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.

The closest we have come to this last method was when newly elected Congressman James Webb refused to shake the hands of the 43rd President of the United States. Decorum sadly did not allow the two to come to blows and thus provide catharsis one way or the other. Thus one must hold one's breadth until January 2009 keeping in mind, as his putative replacement has noted, that "the last throes can still be a violent period, the throes of a revolution".

The great contribution of American capitalism to the world is the notion that the customer is always right. In a London shop over the weekend, I was reminded that such a sentiment is not a cultural universal (don't ask). Indeed rhetoric can often be alienated from practice, witness no child left behind, heckuva job and so forth. In this vein, the popular majority that the 43rd President of the United States received in the 2004 elections causes me to discount the buyer's remorse that is the current, apparent collective hand-wringing. I actually agree with his notion that we've had an "accountability moment". Moreover, he was indeed clear about his intention of spending that capital. So yes, capital is being spent — in all forms. As to the rest, others can add their assessment. I omitted the dialog that Belloc provided out of a sense of dismay, it predicted too closely the discourse we have been treated to.

So, the 43rd President of the United States leads with his notions on knowledge and seems to be assiduously applying all of Belloc's playbook on ignorance. In this respect, he seems to be crossing the line from genial, if miscreant, rogue to fallen angel in the eyes of the American public. I suspect that this judgement, a fallen angel, is one he would be comfortable with. For my part, I only see Blood, but I have a jaundiced outlook on these things. All power to him I suppose, and history will tell the sorry tale. And that is all I have to say on George W. Bush.

Soundtrack for this note

Gil Scott-Heron - A Legend in his own Mind

No comment.
Manu Dibango - Bush

A little Afrobeat and jazz-funk excursion taken from the maestro of Makossa's 1975 original soundtrack to Countdown at Kusini. It's nothing too light nor indeed too deep. The bassline and driving horns are augmented by some demented guitar as the band steadily ratchets up the tension building towards the inevitable crash at the end.

File under: observation, profile, knowledge, ignorance, Bush, USA, America, neocons, literature, psychology, culture, Tom Sharpe, Hilaire Belloc, essay, zingers, hatchet job, blood, rogues, Fallen Angels, Things Fall Apart, toli

Public Nuisances 63 and 64

2007-05-16T23:36:00.000-05:00

Travel this past couple of weeks and considerable jet lag prompt a few entries in an occasional series...

Public Nuisance Number 63

The single greatest improvement in the quality of life for the traveling masses of humanity will be the abolition of those public announcements about "cars left unattended (being) subject to towing". The seven and a half minute frequency of said announcements is a blight on society.

It must drive airport employees mad to hear this business. No wonder bags get misplaced and creative thefts occur. I'd rebel if I had to hear it 72 times a day, 360 times a week, 10,000 times a year. And that is at the laidback airports I've been patronizing where a few hours of flight delays prompted my timing investigations. What, I wonder, is the typical frequency of such announcements, say, at Logan airport in Boston where guilt about terrorists attacks past reigns. Good Lord.

Really, does one need to warn about towing? If you come out on any street and don't see your car, well yes, it's probably been towed, if illegally parked, or stolen, or borrowed if you're lucky. Regardless you're either stupid and/or unlucky. Such is life. Why do you need to be warned? Or is the message intended for a different audience? Is it simply a piece of security theatre deftly designed by security experts to heighten a sense of vigilance, in the best reading, or fear, in the more probable reading. Or is it one of those vestigial announcements that no one questions but that spread inexorably out of bureaucratic inertia. Somewhere a soul dies every time that recording plays. I know that my fortitude was tested...

I can understand the "be on the lookout for suspicious __" or the "don't accept packages" items but that business about towing cars needs to stop. It pollutes our ears. It pollutes our minds. It's that simple. Stop it. Erase that message from the system. Please. Pretty please.

Public Nuisance Number 64

Is there a more diseagreeable verb in the English language than deplane? I believe it is beyond objectionable, nay it is simply indecent in any good company.

Deplane indeed. What's wrong with disembark? The sole saving grace in this sad tale is that board or embark have fewer or the same amount of syllables than emplane which has consequently not seen the same adoption as its obverse (although a Delta employee used it on a recent flight).

But back to deplaning...

May catastrophic bankruptcy befall all airline companies that deploy that verb as part of their linguistic arsenal. Moreover, may the authors of the style guide of said airline companies, those syllabic bean counters who foisted those words on humanity be consigned to a sojurn of no less than six months and a day working at the most gruesome meat rendering factory — I can think of several if consultations are required. Further, may all airline personnel who utter said verb and follow the airline scripts be ignored by their progeny come Mother's or Father's Day.

Deplane! No wonder one hears about air rage even in this post 9/11 world, forget alcohol, I'll deplane you. United Airlines, consider yourself on probation. Continued toli patronage is hanging on a very frayed thread, indeed Jetblue beckons.

Sigh... It's been far too long since my last boycott day. What are you boycotting today?

File under: nuisance, rant, life, language, annoyance, irritation, boycott, indignation, bureaucracy, security, air, travel, theatre, Small Things, toli

Briefly Noted

2007-05-09T20:31:00.000-05:00

Deadlines are looming and it's also travel season, hence toli must be brief. Here then are some notes on the run...

I. Imperfect Analogies

Item: Before a certain column was published last Friday, a note I wrote used to be the top result for searches for IBM layoffs. I always worried that my musings might attract attention of The Authorities; thankfully, with Cringely taking the hyperbolical lead, they are now firmly (and hopefully permanently) under the radar...

It's been almost two years and perhaps I should revisit the France IBM Connection. Back then, I predicted that despite the malaise in France, the French would re-elect the right after Chirac stepped down.

Dig: Nicholas Sarkozy was elected president over the weekend in an election that saw record participation. French democracy is proving remarkably healthy. Although ostensibly elected on a mandate for reform, it is interesting that the old guard was the demographic group that voted for him en masse and put him over the top. In a similar vein I will not (cannot?) comment on rumours that IBM is about to decimate the ranks of its global services group and reform that business. One has to tread carefully in this lean corporate world, job (in)security and all that. I never answered the question later put to me: if IBM is France, who was it that was burning cars in the banlieues and would they survive? Implicit also was the issue of whether and how the French establishment would address the wider challenge, modernity and sundry taboos, or in the case of IBM, how it would deal with the web. My analogy was never perfect and I remain at a loss for answers on both fronts. Still, to mix a few sayings:

The stakes are high.
Observers are worried.
Closed due to computer problems.

II. Special Treatment

Delta Airways recently (December 2006) began direct flights to Accra from JFK and Baltimore. By all accounts this has been a very successful endeavour for them. Their three weekly flights are fully booked. Clearly they are servicing pent-up demand. Ever since Ghana Airways went out of business, KLM and British Airways had been reaping the wages of monopoly pricing. It's not simply that Ghanaians are homesick or that we are now able to flex our economic muscles. The Nigerians, and others seeking convenient access to West Africa, are also patronizing these flights.

There is a little twist that I observed over the weekend. Delta has done their research well and paid attention to their market. They know all too well that Africans love luggage, what with Ghana must go bags and such, and will seek to haggle over the amount of luggage that they can check in and carry on board. Further, our crowds in airports are often unruly as fellow travelers will attest. Our relationship to authority and order was perhaps poorly served by having rogues rule us for a few decades.

Thus I noted that there is a separate check-in area for travelers to Accra in the Delta terminal in New York. As I passed it on my way to San Francisco, I overheard a couple in the regular check-in area pointing and asking "What country is Accra in?" The reply: "I don't know, I don't envy them however". I looked over at the long line that was forming, the numerous bags spilling over, and heard the clamour arising from the check-in counters. The airline staff looked a little harried, and well, world-weary. Crowd control is a difficult thing especially when you are dealing with a culture that is all about conversation and the banter of marketplaces. Keep in mind that Kweku Ananse, the cunning and scheming spider, is Ghana's great cultural and literary gift to the world. They must have heard every story in the book, along with sundry inducements for bending of the rules on all forms of luggage, excess and otherwise. I was a little sad at first at our segregation, and embarrassed at being singled-out for cattle-herding. I thought it over for a while, rationalizing rather than wringing my hands, and then smiled: we have our own section, how many others can say that? Our people are being given the special treatment.

Accra check-in
Step right up
Baby steps, baby steps.

III. Triumph of the Penguin

A sidenote: a custom version of Redhat Linux is the operating system running the in-flight entertainment system on Delta flights. This was evident from the scrolling screen messages that we observed as the air hostesses had to repeatedly reboot the system so that the other side of the plane could get their 40 channels of satellite tv. It's heartening to see the spread of Linus' little penguin even if it is only visible when there are problems - the brief flashes of startup screens. The Pentium chip grew into the public's consciousness after its flaws with floating point calculations were exposed. Paradoxically Intel never looked back once it dealt with the initial fallout of that episode. Similarly, folks continue to photograph blue screens of death in machines running Windows say in ATM machines and the like. Again that is an ironic triumph, a display of the spread of Microsoft's software into areas that were formerly the lucrative province of others. As we observe the spread of Linux as core and ubiquitous infrastructure it is good that it is similarly an iconic brand. Infrastructure is normally invisible and only appreciated when things fall apart. In this respect, I should say:

I love infrastructure.
I love glitches.

IV. Dark Brown

When I wrote my piece on Cultural Sensitivity in Technology, I alluded to a number of incidents involving glitches with Microsoft Word's dictionary or thesaurus. I never managed to track down a good reference to add before it was published. A few weeks ago however the perfect example came up, it concerned the colour dark brown. The headline read:

Offensive couch label traced to China

Toronto. Doris Moore was shocked when her new couch was delivered to her home with a label that used a racial slur to describe the dark brown shade of the upholstery.

The situation was even more alarming for Moore because it was her 7-year-old daughter who pointed out "n----- brown" on the tag.

The rest of the story is a tangled web especially apt these days as we all mind our P's and Q's and hold mock funerals.

It's a wonderful and layered example of the ramifications of small things. The fingerpointing that results in this globalized world of ours is also very interesting. Who is to blame? Is it the manufacturer of the software that translated 'dark brown' in Chinese to the n-word in English? Or is it the supplier of the upholstry that used said software? Or is it rather the furniture store that sold the couch? Who is ultimately responsible for making sure that such things don't occur? Who, if anyone, should apologize? Or are such things what we should expect, the logical endpoint of globalization?

So what do we have here? A simple glitch in the continuum of cultural sensitivity resulted in innocence lost all around the world. The Chinese companies are embarrassed and worried that they will lose business - they are furiously updating all their software, the furniture store is worried about being sued, the mother learned that you can't protect your kids from that thing known as race, the 7 year old learned what a complex world we live in, a world of words that hurt and can even kill.

I was also tickled by the huhudious claim of the Indian store owner that "I've been here (Canada) since 1972 and I never knew the meaning of this word". That is indeed as brazen as it gets.

The remaining absurdity lies in the visiting "friends over from St. Lucia" who "wouldn't sit on the couch." I wish I could meet said friends, they push this toli into sublime territory.

A Brown Playlist

Some music celebrating the darker shade... Liner notes to follow.

File under: IBM, France, Ghana, USA, airport, luggage, culture, observation, life, globalization, language, software, technology, glitches, race, brown, toli