The Long Gone Daddy Is Moving to Wordpress

Migrating to Wordpress.com, because it's a way more awesomer format. Or so I'm told. Please add http://longgonedaddy.wordpress.com/ to your RSS feed, bookmarks, or whatever. I will be posting there from now on, at the risk of losing my four readers.

Live-blogging the debate at Columbia

In case you missed it: http://www.themorningsidepost.com/2008/10/live-blogging-t.html.

Bill Maher Is Annoying

You've probably seen the coverage of Bill Maher's controversial new movie, Religulous. Looks like a pretty funny, broad-based criticism of religion along the lines of Christopher Hitchens.

From the trailer, it looks like Maher's movie makes fun of believers of all stripes, makes them look like imbeciles, and generally interviews the least articulate of them.

But a film like this does nothing to advance the dialogue on religion. To change people's minds and not just appear like an arrogant jerk, you need to have at least a modicum of respect for the people you talk to. Especially if they represent massively popular phenomena.

It also misses the real story. The tragedy is not religion but a certain kind of religious practice. Intellectual traditions in all religions are under attack. Perhaps there was never much room for being a doubter or a mystic in mainstream religions -- and of course, in Europe in the past you could have gotten into a lot of trouble for expressing such things. But more and more, they don't seem like an option (even though they would easily stand up to Maher-style logical debunking, because they claim very little in the way of specifics).

Religiosity, literalism and fanaticism are on the rise all over the world, and the diversity of interpretations is decreasing. I'm thinking specifically of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. You're either with us or against us, the literalists say. Stuff like Maher's film only amplifies the restrictions that only give us two choices.

So Mr. Maher, if spiritual life has been an aspect of all human societies since the dawn of time, then we cannot just misanthropically dismiss all the inclinations people have to "oceanic feelings". (I'm with Jung, not Freud, on this one.) We really need a good criticism of religious fanaticism at this time -- it is corrupting our most beautiful instincts -- but this film looks like it's only going to further polarize the debate.

And I wish you could have waited until after the elections to release this! Sarah Palin can have a field day.

This Is How You Get Got

So apparently pirates now have spokespeople, and it turns out they're pretty damn articulate.

This Times article made me think of the Mos Def song "Got". I.e., this is what happens when you sail an "estimated $30 million worth of heavy weaponry" down the coast of one of the most beleaguered, ungoverned countries in the world. It gets gaffled.

Was the arms deal really part of a secret shipment to southern Sudan? Hopefully, we'll find out.

Syria Bombing

A car bombing killed 17 in Damascus this morning. Before we all start wild speculations as to who did this, based entirely on our prejudices and political convictions and no facts, let’s first express some sorrow for the dead. This is a heinous act. I am thinking of all Syrians today. Keep your head up, Syria… peace will come.

Learning to Live New York

I was walking home about 11pm on 123rd Street near St. Nicholas. I passed the little jazz bar on the corner. It was about half full, and a live band's melodies murmured out. People were having drinks and talking; the night was cool.

A spontaneous smile grew on my face, even though I wasn't a part of the scene, and couldn't be, because I had to hurry home and read for class.

For me, that's learning to live New York City: appreciating and being aware of everything that is going on around you, without feeling you are missing out.

It's impossible to partake in everything this city has to offer. So I try to savor the aroma of its little blossoms even if I can't possibly pick them all.

Multimedia Activism in Palestine

My friend Willow made this clip during a summer in the West Bank. I'm really impressed. Makes me want to be a new media booster -- with just a little bit of training and relatively inexpensive equipment, anyone can be an effective documentarian.

A Space Station Called Dubai

I have come to think of Dubai as a space station: a place-less city in the middle of nowhere whose semblances of community, culture and soul are imported at great expense from elsewhere. The malls, bars and restaurants are of high enough quality to give the illusion of location, but the heart feels far away from earth.

Michael Slackman put it perfectly in this excellent Times article from today: "Dubai has been built along roadways, 6, 12, 14 lanes wide. There was no central urban planning and the result is a city of oases, each divided from the other by lanes of traffic. The physical distance between people is matched by the distance between nationalities. Dubai has everything money can buy, but it does not have a unifying culture or identity. The only common thread is ambition."

One of the reason's Slackman's article is great is that it shows the positive side of Dubai from an Arab perspective: finally, there is a place where young Arab men can get paid, and their ability to work is respected. That's a good thing. The dynamics Slackman describes are exactly those I observed talking to Palestinians who are now working in Dubai, having left the various countries of their diaspora. I was happy to see some of my friends finally getting paid like they deserve to be.

On the other hand, Dubai is a major destination for human traffickers, and the situation of the indentured South Asians of the labor camps is none too encouraging. Neither are the relationships between Western or richer foreigners, Arabs and South Asians. From what I observed in a brief four days, these groups didn't mix a whole lot, and the comments tossed around by some Arabs about South Asians are hard to swallow. The men-to-women ratio is out of control. (An omission of Slackman's article is an explanation of why he only interviewed men.) There's a lot lurking below the surface.

That's why I see the positive sides of Dubai not so much as a triumph of that bizarre, binging city, but more as a reflection of just how bad things are in the rest of the Arab world. There are no good reasons why the same opportunities cannot exist, in their appopriate contexts, in places less artificial than Dubai. What's more, Dubai cannot sustain the whole region indefinitely.

Anyway, the story of Dubai is still unfolding, and I don't think anyone knows what the phenomenon really means yet. Glad to see good reporting on it.

Financial Crisis: Quotes from a Columbia classroom

The last couple days have shown that there are fundamental problems with the way we finance everything in this country. David Leonhardt's column in the Times is a thoughtful summary of the long-term changes that need to take place to make sure this doesn't happen again. No bailout, he writes, can solve the problems of regulators thinking Wall Street can police itself, or households taking out "wishful-thinking loans" they can't afford.

While no one official has put forward a new long-term financial strategy, people seem to be agreeing about some fundamental issues in this crisis. (And some of them were saying these things years ago. Why didn't more people listen?)

Here are some comments from a lecture by a professor teaching a class in international finance at Columbia University. I'm not naming the prof, since the classroom -- even though it is effectively open to the public and had about 150 students -- is only a semi-public place and not a press conference, but I'm sure plenty of folks will find these comments interesting. This prof has years of experience in the finance world.

• "The last time I felt like the bottom was falling out [like this] was October 19, 1987."
  
  
• The roots of this crisis were ten years ago. Despite all the complex balance sheets that seemed to cover risky debt, something was ignored: "There is a fundamental concern that if you want to sell something [debt], it means you don't want it anymore."
  
  
• What people thought about Bear Stearns: "These balance sheets look suspicious, but you know, they [Bear Stearns analysts] are just so smart! But then they play 20 straight days of golf and smoke marijuana in public .... Hmm, maybe they're not so smart."
  
  
• "These guys [i-banking leaders] are not that smart, they're not in touch and they don't know what they're doing."
  
  
• Bear Stearns has been hyped as a bailout more than it actually was. "The press calls it a $29 billion bailout. But ... it's not obvious that the Fed is going to lose money on this."
  
  
• "A world without i-banks: is it one we want to live in? I have personally thought for a long time that the existence of these banks is fraught. Individuals can trade stocks without Lehman. Investment management -- you can get that without Lehman.... Sales and trading -- that's why God created hedge funds. They have built-in incentives, they are unregulated and the investors can afford to lose." [LGD aside: Not sure I agree with this last one, but I don't know enough yet to argue with someone who has decades of experience.]
  
  
• "These behemoth i-banks combined all these things under one roof. Not only did they breed conflicts of interest, they are hard to manage -- look at the changeover of leadership."
  
  
• "I don't know why AIG insured so many subprime loans. My guess is that when they first did it, it made a profit, and they continued. It was a titanic error of judgement."
  
  
• "I predict that Goldman will be bought by the end of the year.... But maybe they're so special that they're really unique."
  
  
• "I kind of think it's a good idea to have fewer stand-alone i-banks, but I don't think they should all go down at once like this."
  

REGULATORS.... Mount up!

We need a fiscal Nate Dogg and Warren G to take control of these wild days on the Street.* But this time they need to be on Wall Street, not 21 and Lewis.

I have to admit to feeling a kind of sick glee watching the coverage of Lehman's demise this week, and I'm not alone. Wall Street observers are saying this is a necessary step in realizing the full depth of the financial crisis.

Of course, the glee is unfounded, right? Isn't it terribly naive to feel this way, since this crisis is going to rattle the economy thoroughly, and eventually directly affect me, along with everyone else?

The thing is, the Lehman disintegration is just a symptom of a crisis that has been brewing for much longer, so the glee is more about the depth of the crisis coming to light, and not about all the lost money.

Also, while I feel sorry for anyone who lost jobs or big money in the last few days, this is something of a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Long before summer 2007, I heard stories of people piling into houses in poor neighborhoods to try to pay their way out of subprime mortgages and keep their homes. Meanwhile, the hot housing profits in the credit markets were built on the use of these mortgages and the derivative schemes that made them seem viable. The geniuses in private equity who came up with these ideas operated outside the constraints and oversight of regulation -- I guess because the government trusted them, as rich people (rich=competent and good, right?) and because no one fully understood the mechanisms they were using. Now, the house of cards has collapsed.

It goes without saying, at this point: These capital markets need regulation, just like any market where greed can trump prudence. Which is probably any market under the sun.

So as soon as the bailouts and bankruptcies blow over, we need action from lawmakers, preferably under the guidance of a president who is not an idiot.

Regulators, mount up.

*In case you lived in a cave in the early 90s, Warren G and Nate Dogg sang the hugely popular 1994 hit, "Regulate", in which Nate Dogg describes saving his friend from muggers -- "regulating" -- on the streets of Long Beach.

Ramadan in My Neck of the Woods

The muezzin's call rises above the tenements in the deepening dusk. The crowds of faithful hurry to wash, pray and then, finally, to break their fast. The days have been long and warm this Ramadan, but work must continue as usual in this city where a day's rest from the hustle can mean no food at all.

Nope, this is not a nostalgic Beirut or Damascus flashback. I'm talking about my new place near 117th and Adam Clayton Powell in the heart of Harlem. Around the corner is what must be one of the most vibrant Senegalese neighborhoods in the United States. It's so dominated by Senegalese culture that Bambara and French are the languages that murmur from the stoops in the night, and men and women often wear their African clothes to hang out in.

My grandfather grew up around here, and used to camp out in Morningside Park with his copy of Peter Pan. I try to imagine that, and think it's strange and wonderful that the neighborhood has changed so much since then, and I want to find out how it all went down.

Until then, I'll enjoy the call to prayer. And the immense, $12 plates of lamb and couscous on 116th Street.

NYC: It's a Family Affair

Dear New Yorkers: You're lookin' good.

Since I came back to NYC, it's been about 75 degrees every day with light humidity and clear skies. Everyone looks in particularly good health. The trees are riotously green, though starting to look a little on the wilted side, it being the end of the summer and all. Compared to Beirut, things feel quiet, and smooth-running.

I went down to a park on a pier near Chelsea piers today, sunbathed and people-watched. (That's the view above, thanks to Llima, who licensed her work on Creativecommons.org; I neglected to take a picture.) I put on my headphones and listened to Sly and the Family Stone sing "It's a Family Affair" as three New York kids to my left argued over whether the very real grass was fake or not.

And I have to say, with me and NYC, it is now a family affair. Thanks for having me back, city.

The Last Cedars of Lebanon

I'm already back stateside, but I wanted to write a few lines about my visit to Lebanon's cedars in early August.

When you hear Lebanon, you think cedars. The tree is featured on the Lebanese flag, the cedar forests of Lebanon are mentioned in Gilgamesh -- which is the oldest known written story -- and any two-bit Beirut tourist shop will have trinkets supposedly carved from cedars. Which is why it is astonishing to see just how few are left. (At least in the main preserve, which is the one I visited. Apparently there is a secondary one in the Chouf that is quite a bit more extensive.)

In the reserve in Mount Lebanon, the cedars are confined to a few acres on a broad, denuded plateau at about 8000 feet. The winding road that takes you to them -- with the anticipation mounting all the while -- goes straight up from the sea through fantastic villages perched on the sides of chasms whose bottoms lie in shadow. You pass the village of Khalil Gibran -- the famous poet who wrote The Prophet, a popular feature at 70s weddings -- and churches built improbably on precipices. Bare mountain summits tug on shreds of mist. You're almost there as the car climbs up through a final ravine...

Suddenly, the car passes through a 30 meter stretch of crammed stalls selling cedar-related tourist goods, and a few stately cedars begin to pop up on your right. Man, you must really be getting close to the forest!

But then you pull out into a treeless plain and there's nothing in front of you except a bare mountainside with a lonely ski lift floppily hanging to it. Those few stately cedars were the forest. And barring a somewhat spotty attempt at replanting on the road to the entrance of the preserve, all the old trees have been cut down, literally to the edge of the stone wall surrounding the preserve. Inside, there are just enough trees -- and some of them truly are sacred, thousand-year-old grandfathers that instill a lot of awe -- that you can briefly be tricked into thinking you are inside a forest.


From a vantage point high on the mountain ridge above, however -- where I drove afterward -- the magnitude of the deforestation is clear. The cedars look like someone's garden, perched on the lip of a high basin that must have once cradled a mighty forest that seemed inexhaustible to its early harvesters. The deforestation is probably a problem that dates back to ancient times, because there is very little evidence of stumps or the former forest. But based on the topography and climate, and my experience with clear-cuts in North America, it seems pretty clear that the forest was as large as I imagine (though I'd like to get a scientific confirmation).

It is a pitiful sight and one representative of Lebanon in general -- so much has been taken from this country's glory. Only a tiny glimmer remains, just like these cedars. Perhaps it is just barely enough to produce seeds, which if carefully protected could produce another forest of beautiful Lebanese cedars one day. Then again, the grove is also so small that a single catastrophe could easily wipe it out.

The sight of this grove also made me thankful for the systems of public land protection we have in the United States, something we need to continue to protect. We are extremely lucky to have as many national forests, parks, monuments and wilderness areas as we do. Let's not take it for granted.

The South Wind of Summer Caresses the Hills...

I got a call around noon on Sunday -- my last Sunday in Lebanon -- from my capoeira friends asking if I wanted to come to the Bekaa to do a workshop for a youth camp.

Duh. Of course I want to go on a road trip with a bunch of capoeiristas to northern Lebanon!

An hour later, I was cruising up the Damascus Road in the back seat of a capoeirista's jeep with a berimbau lying across the middle of the car. We came to the crest of the mountains and beheld the mighty Bekaa Valley. It was supposedly the breadbasket of the Roman empire, full of grains and fruits for nearly the length of Lebanon. Now, it still produces some of the best fruits, vegetables and wines, but it has been left out of the international trade loop, people say. It is relatively impoverished and development has bypassed it. Parts of it are home turf for Hezbollah. On the far side of this deep, broad valley rise the slightly more arid ante-Lebanon ranges. On their far side -- in their rain shadow -- lies Damascus.

The view has the same effect as the one that greets you coming over the Grapevine from Los Angeles into the Central Valley of California. You know, the view that Tom Joad sees in The Grapes of Wrath when his Okie convoy finally comes through the Mojave.

A little while later we were heading up the Bekaa listening to Salif Keita. We went through some small farming towns, where the people had a hard-bitten look to them, and there were Hezbollah and Amal flags everywhere. They run the show, and the Amal guys we asked for directions were completely helpful, despite the foreign appearance of even the Lebanese in our six-person group. (Amal is the purely political wing of Hezbollah.)

Ahead of us was a thunderstorm: a good, old-fashioned, high-desert, afternoon-sky-blackening thunderstorm. My instructor -- who lived in Albuquerque for years -- and I immediately knew it was going to be a nice rain. We had a fun time arguing with the Beirutis in the car, whose conviction that rain does not fall in Lebanon in August under any circumstances was stronger than the evidence before them. Finally the blessed drops began to fall, and we stopped the car and greeted the moisture with out-stretched arms. Such refreshment is hard to come by down in Beirut.

We turned up into the hills to the west, and began a slow ascent through mountains that looked exactly like the semi-arid country of southern Colorado. The difference was that here, the soil was limestone, and the trees were not pinions and junipers but olives and other deciduous trees. They grew in the same evenly spaced patterns of a pinion forest. A breeze was blowing and I could smell the rain. I felt right at home.

In a small dale where the road was glistening from the recent rains, we stopped by a cabin where some apple trees were growing. A man in camouflage pants with a pony tail came out of the cabin. Some children and women were in the background.

"Hey, don't I know you?" he said in clear English, with a decaying smile. He then proceeded to offer us "cocaine, ecstasy, hash -- whatever you want."

"Uh, no, we just wanted some apples," I said in Arabic.

"Oh, OK, please have some. In the summer, we have apples. But in the winter we have cocaine, ecstasy, hash, only."

It was a puzzling and light-hearted conversation. We had no interest in his more exotic goods, but we left with our delicious, fresh apples and drove above dark green fields of crops (you read correctly, Cypress Hill fans) to the camp where we were doing the workshop. The picture above was taken on the last leg of the trip, above the little valley where the hamlet is.

At the summer camp, we did drills with everyone in the late aternoon on a large stage. People liked it -- the children were most enthusiastic -- but their attention was mixed until we played in a huge roda and they got to see the acrobatics and contortion of the game. Then, with great enthusiasm, everyone taught us same dabkeh steps and played darbakeh beats on the African drums we had brought along.

We drank fresh cold water from a stream (hope that was OK, everyone was doing it) and ate a meal of fresh fish, fattoush and french fries. The full moon came up over the beautiful valley and the air was very cool (elevation about 1,500 meters). It felt just like a New Mexican village. We left despite the entreaties of several young men who begged us to stay and talked about American music with us. Most of the people in the camp were visitng from the middle of the Bekaa and thought of the locals as a bit backward. (Which was a little funny since that is how Beirutis probably view them.) The town looked like Hezbollah ran most major operations, despite the presence of a cursory Lebanese army post.

We cruised back out over the hills in the moonlgiht and told each other scary stories. I freaked everyone out with La Llorona, which seemed appropriate to the landscape.

Finally, we were back in the flats of the Bekaa, and drove by the awesome (not in the surfer sense -- rather, the original sense of the word) Roman ruins of Baalbek. To make everything unbelievably perfect, we had the windows open bumpin' Marvin Gaye as we drove past the towering columns and still-intact temples of the ancient city. So the denizens of the surrounding town got a nice taste of Sexual Healin' before we left down. Which is really very appropriate for Lebanon, whether or not you are in a Hezbollah-dominated area. People like to live, and they are used to the outside world.

Anyway, that's the story of my last Sunday. I gotta say it was a good day.

(PS The title of this blog is from a song by the band The Flatlanders. Listen for an auditory equivalent of the breezes I felt that day.)

Tripoli Tragedy

When I woke up this morning to the news of a horrific bombing in Tripoli (northern Lebanon) that killed at least 11 people, I swore I would not join the throngs of amateur (or often amateurish professional) pundits who leap to blame someone or other for this kind of strife.

But I have to point out how quickly people are doing just that. Check out this unfounded-in-fact editorial from NOW Lebanon, which blames Syria for the attack.

It’s gotten to the point where, any time any violence happens, folks just pull out their own agenda and slap it onto the vague facts of the case. There’s no sense of justice or accuracy in such games. Quite the opposite, they stoke hatred and suspicions. (Blaming Syria, in this case, implies certain sectarian and political abettors in Lebanon, which I won’t get into here.)

In a place where so many such crimes remain unsolved, I don’t blame people for speculating. But it would be nice to let people mourn and take stock of the situation before making wild accusations, especially if you have a voice that carries some authority. Using the event for a political agenda is terribly callous.

Anyway, I refuse to join the crowd of would-be experts and speculate about who is responsible. All the voices of such pundits gain steam until they are reported as near-fact on respectable websites. I just want to say that this attack -- because of its timing and the fact that it apparently did not target any particular individual -- especially requires some calmness and careful thought before allegations are made.

We’re not dealing with the latest rumor about an American presidential candidate’s extracurricular activities. We’re dealing with events that threaten to destabilize a country that is still very vulnerable to civil war. So if you’re in the media, be responsible and show some restraint before you start calling out names.

Isaac Hayes and Mahmoud Darwish

It's a cruel year when we have to mourn Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes and Mahmoud Darwish, three personages that are so big it is hard for me to think of them as dead. All these guys were revolutionaries in their own ways.

Isaac Hayes passed on Sunday, and I will not repeat the incredible details of his life here, since you can read them yourself in this very good Washington Post obit.

Hayes' 1974 song "Hung Up On My Baby" has probably my favorite guitar lick of all time (OK, with the possible exception of some Ali Farka Toure stuff, but I consider any comparisons with him unfair). It's the one sampled in the Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks On Me," and it's completely haunting and unforgettable.

The song also has the second best guitar lick ever, which 2nd II None sampled in their early 90s hit, "If You Want It," which was one of my favorite songs when I was about 12. Little did I know how much better the original was.

Mahmoud Darwish was, of course, a Palestinian poet -- the Palestinian poet, really. His death on Saturday is a big loss not just because of his artistic genius but also because he was a voice of compassion, reason and nuance in a conflict and region rife with extremes. I feel lucky I got to see him read in person in Damascus in 2005. Here's a decent LA Times obit (read it now because the link will probably only work for a while).

I'll fill for them the parting glass, and I hope you'll do the same.

Midnight Oud to Beirut

It is getting quite hot here – it’s been close to 100 for the last few days, and combined with the humidity it can be stifling.

When I arrived in Beirut, I had a fantasy of sleeping with the floor-to-ceiling glass doors open onto the balcony, with curtains billowing and the dawn pouring in above the rooftops, probably accompanied by Cesaria Evora singing “Soledad”. But I discovered on my second night here that if you leave the door open, a mosquito is liable to single-handedly ruin your life, biting your face and droning ever more lowly as its gut fills with your blood over the course of a long, sleepless night. So to sleep, I close the door of my fourth-floor room and turn on the AC. (And if I don’t use the AC, I wake up in about a half hour drenched in sweat.)

The other evening was a very warm one, and just as I was dozing off the power went out, and with it, the AC.

In the ensuing quiet, I heard a strange sound. It was a haunting melody played on strings, so faint I couldn’t tell if it was my imagination or not. I got up and opened the doors, walked out onto the balcony and peered into the night, listening.

It was there, coming from the street below, where it was very dark because the electricity was out: the tremulous, smooth notes of an oud. The music filled the street for a few minutes and then stopped, and I saw the oud float up on the hands of a group of men sitting in front of a sandwich shop. It flashed in the ambient light like a gem, luminous, perfect and lusciously full-bodied, as more hands received it to put it in a car.

In the streets of Beirut, you rarely hear anything but the screech of tires and of horns and Arabic pop music blasting from fancy cars that, in their luxury, are incongruous with the pot-holed, rules-free roads. You see half-finished construction projects and garish ads for beauty products, cigarettes, alcohol and soft drinks. Haze obscures the mountains.

So hearing this oud – that most authentic of Arabic instruments, whose sound is the cry of longing – lovingly played in the silence of the midnight was like listening to a secret whispered about the real soul of Lebanon.

Beneath all of the scar tissue, it seemed to say, beneath the plastic consumerism and the chaos and the violence, somewhere in the tired soil of this land the seeds of its essence lie quietly in wait for the chance to grow again. There are still fingers that play those ancient, gentle Lebanese chords, though you may need to have a power outage in the middle of the night just to hear a few bars.

It is a theme on which I will expand in my next post, about my visit to one of Lebanon’s last stands of cedars.

"And Life Goes On"

Every time I hear of a tragic, premature and unjust death, the Tupac Shakur song "Life Goes On" begins playing in my head. It's what I listened to when Columbine happened, and when the war in Iraq started.

It's what I'll be listening to tonight thinking about the death of the ten-year-old Palestinian boy pictured above, who was shot in the head and killed by Israeli forces on Tuesday in the village of Ni'lin.

Lots of innocents die everyday in the Middle East and around the world, but this death holds special significance for me because the child was known to my friend and colleague Willow Heske (she posted this picture on her blog), who is working in Palestine for the summer. It also resonates because this child was shot during demonstrations against the "security wall" (more appropriately called the "apartheid wall") being built through his village. The wall is a violation of human rights and international law, an attempt to ghettoize a people based on ethnicity and a harbinger of bad times. We should all be concerned about it, especially we Americans, because our tax dollars are indirectly financing it.

I don't like hyperbole for these kind of matters -- the tragedy speaks for itself. I just want to bring attention to this boy's unnecessary death.

Heart of Solitude, One Year Later

It's been a year since two friends and I crossed the Sierra Nevada through its most remote heart. For me, it was a spiritual experience, extremely difficult -- the most challenging climb/hike I've ever done -- and a reference point for all things afterwards.

I've been thinking about it a lot because I have been so out of touch with nature since then, and decided to post a few pics from that time. (My brief encounter with nature in Batroun, see previous post, made me realize that.)

I am too selfish to write the place names -- I don't want this to be searchable and then draw a bunch of people to these amazing places. Some spots are secret and sacred, and should only be available to people who study topo maps for hours and dream about the obscure swaths of peaks, canyons and lakes where no trails lead.

Your eyes follow the lines, and a landscape opens up in your head. The unnamed lakes with their high elevations printed on them, the creeks in canyons so narrow all the contours touch, the glaciers that cling to northeastern cliffs on the highest peaks are flat and dry on the unbeautiful paper, but your imagination runs wild. Then, when you finally see the places that inspired these maps, there is no way to exaggerate how beautiful this hidden land is. The feeling of crossing over mountains and valleys with only your food, maps and shelter -- and no guide or path -- is the closest thing I've felt to flying like a bird. Pure freedom.

I won't name the places, but I will give a few clues: Enchanted Gorge, 10 days of hiking and an east-west traverse of the Sierra Nevada, completely off trail. And I will say that we once went three days in California without seeing another person, which is an accomplishment. Enjoy.

Peering into the Gorge.
Everything was silent as we passed between two peaks named after mythic monsters.

Mouth of the Enchanted
(and we look like a party of 1860s surveyors)

On top of the world, somewhere on the western ridges.
We had nearly completed our crossing.

Dimmy's final resting place at 10,500 feet, where he lay down to sleep and turned into a stone (inside joke).

Summertime Vibes Batroun Beach Party

This was the scene from an all-night capoeira fundraiser Sobrevivientes threw this weekend. It was a success on many levels and a great introduction to the beauty of Lebanon's beaches. I will post a clip to give an idea of the vibe, but it takes too long in the net cafe... later.

Paintballin’, Blowjobs and Hizbullah

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Mama Syria: Some Anecdotes from Homs

Last Friday evening I leave late with my friend Ghaith for Homs, his home city, two hours north of Damascus. He is a little disappointed – he would have liked to leave earlier, because he wanted to show me the countryside and a village. But I had meetings with other friends all day, and couldn’t get away.

Ghaith is like all my Syrian friends in that he is desirous of my time and utterly generous at the same moment, demanding a lot from me and giving me even more. There is no reasonable request to which he would say no. He and others try to give me money, insist I eat from their refrigerators when they had little, use their cell phones, act as if they were personally insulted when I tell them how a cab driver overcharged me.

Ghaith complains about the condition of Christians in the Arab world. He also clearly loves Arab cultures. He is enthralled with old poetry and romantic songs. Arabic is his mother tongue, and the only language he speaks fluently.

We take turns testing each other’s translation skills by listening to songs on my iPod on the bus to Homs. I play him “Imagine,” by John Lennon, and he likes it a lot, though he seems not too sure about the line “imagine no religion.”

We get into Homs by 10:30, in time to eat dinner with Ghaith’s family. They are barbecuing on the tiny balcony of their small apartment in a nondescript block of housing somewhere in the sleepy city.

The breeze is blowing, a fact about which Homsis seem proud.

“Fi buroud bi Homs, ma?” Ghaith says with a smile. There’s coolness in Homs, no? (Something those big-city Damascenes can only dream about: Homs is on a high, cool plain.)

I sit on the couch and watch Turkish soaps dubbed into easy Arabic with his sister. Every so often Ghaith taps on the glass sliding doors and insists that I eat a succulent morsel from the kebabs.

We eat dinner with glasses of araq on the rocks. Ghaith’s father, a craggy man with a prominent pot belly, gnarled strong limbs and a bottlebrush mustache, tries to crack jokes with me in broken English, which makes the Arabic in between that much harder to understand.

Ghaith’s mother, a stout, dark-haired, doting woman, keeps emerging with more plates of skewered meat, onion and tomatoes. Slight beads of perspiration form on her brow.

Afterward, while the women do all the cleaning up (I try to insist on helping, an idea greeted as ridiculous for the double reason of me being a male and a guest), the father regales me with tales of his time in the United States, where he spent several multi-year periods.

His face is a grizzled, sun-burnt crimson above his A-shirt as he tells of the time robbers put a gun to his friend’s head in an L.A. convenience store where he was working and he had to get the “Mexican woman” next door to call the police. He has been to Las Vegas “many times.” One time the police pulled him over and he told them he was French, and they let him go. He switches to English to mimic, rather unconvincingly, the voice of the woman who “wanted to marry” him when he worked at “the store” in L.A. He calls black people “abeed,” which I hate. (It means “slaves” in Arabic and older people often use it.)

“You can’t say that, Dad,” Ghaith says, knowing I am offended.

The father says America is beautiful, wallahi al-azeem. He can’t go back now because he overstayed his last visa.

Ghaith’s father’s physique and presence would seem to be the result of a peculiar combination of habits. He smokes two packs a day and generally does not eat vegetables if they are not accompanied by meat. He also rides his bicycle 10 kilometers a day to and from work.

Then, in the dialect of the Bedouin, he can recite beautiful poems called Baghdadis. His family is from eastern Homs governorate, on the edge of the desert. When he was a child – and the family had already moved to the city of Homs – bards would sing these songs, and he would memorize them. The poems have several lines ending in a word that sounds the same but has a different meaning in each case. They deliver an emotional punch even when I have no idea what they are about.

I imagine the father as a small Christian boy at the feet of a roaming bard in a dimly lit village, hanging on every word, as his whole family and I are doing now. No one besides the mother understands the Bedouin dialect in which the father sings the poems, and he must explain them.

The foreign words bring to mind the vastness of a dark desert, a place where the stars are the brightest thing at night, and life’s longing is undisguised. The songs are about lost love.

Back in his room in Damascus, Ghaith plays for me Bedouin songs that he has saved on his mobile phone.

“You understand that one?” he grins. “That one’s impossible.

“He’s saying that he is in love with a girl and wanted to marry her. She agreed, with the condition that he break his relationship with his mother.”

The singer wails and repeats the line.

“He’s saying that when your mother sees your silhouette in the desert from afar, she cries from camp to greet you. She doesn’t care about how you look or what you have done.

“But when the girl sees your silhouette in the desert, she tries to reckon your appearance before she rises to greet you.

“The girl is beautiful, she has the choice of many men in the world; for your mother, there is only you.”

What does the suitor do in the end?

“Ha, he stays with his mother,” Ghaith says. He clicks off his phone and reaches for hot water, to fill our glasses of yerba mate.

Syria Changes

Back in Beirut after a week in Syria, I already feel far away from Cham, which is a city that raised me, in a way.

Being in Damascus was like visiting the city of one's childhood in a dream. Everything looks normal at first, but then there are bizarre differences from real life -- exaggerations, unmarked absences -- that creep up on you until you realize it is not really the same place at all.

The changes stem from the fact that Syria is trying to open up economically and the socialist sheen is disappearing. In that sense, its society is fading into a plain old dichotomy between rich elites and poor people. People say that the middle class is dwindling.

A snapshot: Damascus has new, green public buses and people have bought new cars by the thousands -- Hyundai, Skoda, Peugot, etc. -- so it no longer has a Cuba-of-the-Middle-East feel. The number of restaurants and hotels in the old city appears to have about doubled. The government has torn up parts of the old city for refurbishment. There are more beggars on the street -- there were once hardly any. Youtube and Facebook are officially blocked, and many of the internet cafes appear to have shuttered, though I couldn't say why. Foreign companies like KFC are more prominent, and there is a big, American-style mall in Kaffar Sousseh.

Average Syrians aren't thrilled with the economic changes. They say the cost of living has shot up, and salaries haven't.

"There are only two ways to live now," one upper-middle-class Syrian told me, smiling. "You can steal... or, you can die."

The friend I stayed with in a crumbling, mildewed, shared room in a poorer Christian neighborhood is experiencing the economic climate more directly. With a college degree, he has a "good-paying" job at a bank that is working him hard. The pay is about $500 a month. Enough to get by, and have the occasional indulgence at a cafe. But hardly enough to build a future.

Of course, I love Syria dearly, and I think it has been much maligned -- and subjected to ridiculous measures, like the prohibition by the United States of shopping at the airport's duty-free -- while the greater misdeeds of other countries (ahem) go completely ignored. I also understand the need for economic reforms. I hope for a bigger Syrian role in international affairs, for its prosperity as a country, and deeper acknowledgment of the burdens it has had to bear as a result of the war in Iraq and the generosity it has shown to refugees.

I just don't think I'm hearing much support from among Syrians for the direction that's been chosen.

In any case, I won't forget the day I came into town: flying down out of the mountains on a Sunday morning in the July sun, the city sparkling, green and peaceful below, joy rushing inside me as I recited the neighborhoods through which my taxi passed, just to feel their names on my tongue. A brief homecoming.

For next time, a few comments on a more personal note...

♫

Bahia Axe in Beirut and Damascus

Just a quick update (many more to come):

I am enjoying the heck out of myself in Damascus seeing old friends, although there does not seem to be enough time to see everyone. I will feel terrible that I was not able to visit every person I have a connection with while here. But it's just impossible.

A great highlight of the last few weeks in Beirut and Damascus has been the existence of capoeira in both. There are good players here and bona fide capoeristas with years and years of experience.

That's meant an instant community for me, no hiatus in training, and something anchoring my life in places both old and new. It's what ties all the places I visit together.

Axe!

Dubai to Beirut

I just got into Beirut and I'm really happy to be here. It helps that I spent all of my last day in Dubai (Sunday) in traffic and scouring megamalls in 113 degree heat for "Canadian cigarettes," which a guy here in Lebanon had asked me to try and pick up. No luck.

The Palestinian-Syrian guys i was hanging out with are living large in Dubai, notwithstanding their residence in the neighborhood they refer to as "Karachi", a rundown Pakistani area where my friends sleep three to a room. Rent is astronomically expensive in Dubai, but goods and services are cheap. They have enough money to go out and watch Euro Cup games, and I have to say that despite the fact I find Dubai totally distasteful, I am happy to see these guys finally relaxed. They have lived in a refugee camp with something of a refugee camp mentality for their whole lives, and it was nice to see them puffing sheeshas at a seaside Lebanese restaurant called Shu, watching the football game and feeling carefree. These friends were unbelievably hospitable to me the whole time and I barely had to spend any money.

But other than that... whew, Dubai is a crazy place. And not really a pleasant one. (The fact that I got strip searched on arrival for no reason at all does not, of course, help its image!)

The emirate is a hectic menagerie of half-inhabited skyscrapers barely visible in a sky choked with desert sand and Gulf humidity. It is definitely among the most bizarre places I have ever seen. Pakistani and Filipino workers -- along with everyone else -- are walking around in the heat with a kind of dazed look on their faces. To call it soulless would not be an exaggeration. All the communities there appear haphazard, temporary and recent. It's a money pot, but not much more.

So it is great to be back in Beirut. It feels like a homecoming. Everything is familiar -- the big trees, the humid but not suffocating Mediterranean air, the bars with their neon signs in narrow streets, with the shadow of mountains looming behind them. At moments, it feels like it was only yesterday I was last here (it was October 2006). At others, I simply feel it has been far too long. I'm anxious to experience this region with Beirut as a door to understanding it rather than Damascus.

Um Pouquinho de Dendê

Watching the United States-Barbados qualifying match on Sunday, I was struck by how the American team -- even as their technical skills improve -- continue to play like cardboard cut-outs of soccer players. The friend I watched the game with pointed out that U.S. star Landon Donovan personifies this style of play.

Now, I'm about to be a real Long Gone Daddy -- off to Lebanon for two months for a journalism internship. When I asked my friend what I should look for out of my internship, he said:

"Just don't play it like Landon Donovan -- textbook perfect. Give it more than that."

That's no disrespect to Landon Donovan. He's a far better footballer than I could ever have hoped to be.

What my friend really meant is summed up in a capoeira song we sing: Eu vim aqui buscar um pouquinho de dendê: I came here to pick up a little bit of dendê, which is palm oil.

It means, put a little oil in your game. Make it smooth. Do the unexpected and play with style.

So as I head off today, that's what I am keeping in mind!

Peace, America. I'll see you on the flip side of summer.

Gentrification: Same Story from Harlem to the Bay

When I was walking a friend home in Harlem near 118th and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in May, a mumbling, stumbling man crossed our path. I caught a few of his words.

"Back in the day, a white person get robbed at this hour in Harlem," he said, among other things. (I'm white; my friend is a black grad student; the man was black.)

I was annoyed on a personal level, but I did not feel surprised or wronged. I can hardly blame people in the neighborhood for feeling more than a little uneasy about the incredibly rapid changes that are happening in Harlem, especially south of 125th Street. Harlem has long been the capital of Black America and a beacon of culture in America's most repressive times, even though it has also seen (so I read) its own ups and downs. And suddenly, it is becoming full of chain stores and upscale cafes full of outsiders.

I thought of the mumbling man when I read about "root shock" in Harlem in this article in the Times. One of the most startling things in this article is one longtime Harlem resident's claim that he was happy that shootings happened in May, because it would at least scare off the newcomers.

I got to thinking: A big part of the problem is not only that the neighborhood is becoming more expensive or that new people are moving there, but also the insensitivity of some of the people who are gentrifying. (As a white grad student, I'm one of those people, whether I like it or not, though I am trying not to be so insensitive.)

Rather than adjusting to the neighborhood and accepting the existing stores and institutions, people want to bring what they are comfortable with to the new environment and keep Harlem's African American culture as a sort of decoration on the top of their routine of wine-bar- and Starbucks-patronizing.

It's like, if you move to Harlem, fine, but can you not walk your poodle while chatting on your cell phone and sipping Starbucks and throwing all the symbols of your white, outsider power and oblivion into everyone's face?

I think sentiments like those of the guy who said he was happy there were shootings actually come, in part, from people living through Harlem's most hopeless days, and knowing all the pain and struggles and strength it took to stay in the neighborhood when crack cocaine was at its peak, and then seeing that history erased and other people building their fantasies of cheaper good living on the ruins of that. (Here's a great video clip on about the same subject.)

I'm not sure people who live through gentrification and hate it -- and that includes me in my native Bernal Heights, San Francisco -- really know what they want or how they can stop big changes, in the context of a capitalist society.

But I am sure that if the neighborhood was being changed in a way that respected what was already there and had some continuity with the past, the anxiety people felt would not be so acute.

Prospect Park Thunderstorm

Two friends and I chilled yesterday on the big rolling green of Prospect Park near Grand Army Plaza. The day was sunny and warm, with an increasing sheen of clouds that made the quality of light like that softened sun that happens during a California wildfire.

We sat on the grass and looked at the scene of mixed groups of people -- I love Brooklyn for its diversity -- picnicking, playing footie and volleyball and enjoying each other's company. It looked like a tableau from that crappy kid's magazine High Life, which we grew up on. I mentioned that, and we laughed, but it made it a little sentimental, because the scene was indeed picture-book perfect.

The green trees were seething all around with sap and leaves -- all the longing for energy stored up during the hungry winter. The clouds closed in and long rich thunder began to rumble from distant corners. Finally the skies opened and flashed. We ran back to the Grand Army Plaza station -- I had to go back to Manhattan and the two SF natives I was with, to Crown Heights. Lightening exploded in front of us on the plaza, near the arch and the fountain. Rain soaked us to the bone.

It was wonderful.

You're Way Too Beautiful, Girl

"You know how I feel about San Francisco?" I said to my friend as we cruised out of Golden Gate Park toward Ocean Beach on our bikes about two weeks ago. It was a warm day, and a cool ocean breeze was settling on Beach Chalet.

"You're way too beautiful, girl, that's why it'll never work. You'll have me suicidal, suicidal, when you say it's ov-er."

He laughed and let out a "Whooo!"

We grabbed a cup of coffee and a brownie from nearby Java Beach Cafe at Judah and the Great Highway, and settled into the dunes to enjoy the view pictured above -- on that day and about six others in the last couple of weeks.

It's true. The City is just too damn nice -- it'll have you damn near suicidal when your visit is ov-er.

I spent the last weeks there savoring every moment in its mild air and soft light. It is beautiful yet unpretentious, full of street fairs and book stores. Not too much noise or too much consumption. People are united in some sort of unspoken agreement about a general set of priorities: community, outdoors, good times, good food, good music, liberal values. (Any side of the debates we have about the City's future share these, but have different ideas of what they look like.)

I had to leave before I got too attached. Even so, wrenching myself away was painful. Here are some of the highlights of my stay in my city:

Biking across the city, over and over again
If you are in moderately good shape, you can get from almost any point in San Francisco to any other within an hour. I took advantage of this as much as possible. Avoid hills wherever possible if you need to move fast. (Search them out if you went to see less-traveled corners.) My preferred cross-city route (Bernal Heights to Golden Gate Park, for example) is Mission-Valencia-Duboce-Fell. You feel the different vibe of every street and empty out into towering Monterey Cypress in the Panhandle, amidst basketball games and weed aroma.

Sunset at Ocean Beach
If I live long-term in SF again, I'm doing this at least twice a week (on vacation I tried to do it everyday). There is nothing like the wind in the dunes and the wild Pacific to put everything in perspective. Doesn't cost a thing.

Take the 14 Mission
I take this bus to hear the stories of the people in my neighborhood.
Common said it best in Black Star's Respiration (minute 3:42):
"So some days I take the bus home, just to touch home
From the crib I spend months gone
Sat by the window with a clutched dome
Listenin to shorties cuss long
Young girls with weak minds, but they butt strong"

You could spend two weeks on the 14 and write a novel with the material you observe and hear on the extra-long bus.

Nightlife: Guerrero, Valencia and Mission between 16th and 24th
The most unpretentious place is Skylark. I have the best time at Baobab and Elixir. You will not find technical "hotties" like in L.A. But you will find a lot of down-to-earth people who are beautiful in a totally different way. This is only a small sample of what San Francisco has to offer, and I recommend it all. (Although I usually don't venture to the Marina. Yuck.)

Day-trip to the East Bay
I always felt like the East Bay -- especially Oakland and Berkeley -- and San Francisco are equal partners in the Bay family. I try to go at least once every time I am around. You can't go wrong with Ethiopian food on Telly, ribs on San Pablo, Indian on Shattuck, or a walk around Lake Merritt with someone cool.

Dwelling in the Southeast
Bernal Heights, Portola Heights, McLaren Park, Outer Mission, Cayuga Park, Lakeview and Ingleside, Bayview and Hunters Point: Take your bike throughout the neighborhoods, turn down side streets. Every corner has its own character.

Anyway, don't worry for me. My visit is over, but I'm not suicidal, just in pain. Turning over San Francisco memories in my mind is kind of like reading old love letters stumbled upon while cleaning your closet. They might bring you a tear or two, but you can't help reading them one more time...

Remembering Bo Diddley

"When Bo Diddley comes to town/ the streets get empty and the sun goes down"

Those lyrics, from the 1960 Bo Diddley song "Bo Diddley's a Gunslinger" are no exaggeration of the man's stature in rock'n'roll music.

The singer died this morning of heart failure at the rip age of 79. (Here's the Washington Post obit, and a nice slide show from The New York Times.)

Bo Diddley was a hero of mine and I am sorely disappointed I never had the chance to see him perform. He epitomized an urban version of blues music -- his tunes captured all the longing of the Southern original and thundered with the energy of Northern cities. His braggadocio surely inspired the Hip Hop era, whether directly or indirectly. His singing was proud, uncompromising, thought-provoking and ridiculously catchy.

Bo Diddley remains an icon of Black music and of American music. I am sorry to see him go!

So Turns Out I Still Love the 415

Carnaval in San Francisco always means 65 degrees in the Mission District, sunshine and seabreeze, pepper trees and pupusas, low-riders and samba dancers.

I went to Carnaval last weekend in the hope of being taken back to childhood memories of Carnaval in the late '80s and early '90s -- a time I've idealized as the last years of a San Francisco dream of diversity, low-cost living and creativity. What I found was that, despite all the changes -- demographic shifts and rising costs -- San Francisco still has a lot of soul.

Back in the days of my reminiscence, as everyone knows, the Mission was a bit different. Fewer of the Victorians were renovated. The Valencia Street Gardens housing projects were there and gave Valencia a different character (it wasn't the epitome of post-dot-com Mission trendiness it is today). There were a lot of down-and-outs on Valencia Street -- I remember that my brother and I loved to go eat there because the ramblings of the crazy people were as good as any street theater. It was thrilling.

The Soviet-style Army Street projects loomed ominously above Harrison and Army. I remember them as massive towers, and I still see the graffiti murals on their sides in my mind's eye.

Now, the Valencia Gardens are being rebuilt (to the City's credit they will include even more units than they originally did). The Army Street projects were demolished and replaced with affordable housing of a smaller scale.

Dolores Park was run by drug dealers who slanged their wares on the J tracks. (Now hippies do it semi-legally as they walk amongst the hipsters in the park).

It's all neither here nor there, really. Good changes have, I suppose, come with the bad. But it is often jarring to see how many things have changed, and to see how much the street and community life has been affected. Carle Nolte accurately summed up the changes in a January Chronicle column on the changing San Francisco in which he described it as a "boutique city".

So even as I searched for memories of my childhood Carnavals last Sunday, I walked to the Mission from Bernal Heights with a sense of apprehension. Would anything of the old neighborhood be left?

Indeed, plenty remained. Twenty-fourth Street is still covered with murals and lined with local business. Reasonably-priced taquerias, corner stores, football games (on an improved field in Garfield Park), sunbleached Victorians -- they are all still there, in the midst of the Priuses, dogs, yoga centers and remodeled houses of some of the newer residents.

The colors were impossibly vivid. The families were all out in full force. Jeans were sagging. The "SF" emblem was everywhere -- ball caps, t-shirts, customized sneakers, tattoos. Pullovers read "Giants", "Gigantes" and "Tha Sco" above a throwback Warriors motif. Hairstyles were long braids, ponytails and slicked back hair.

There were also the ubiquitous red garments and conversations about gangbangin'. That's been part of the Mission for a long time. Even though gangs are undoubtedly a negative influence on the community, so help me God, I felt that old thrill at seeing that element. Gangs are a reflection of an illness in a working-class community, but at least they point to the existence of a community at the same time: You can't get cancer if you're dead. If only that energy could be channeled into a more positive kind of unity.

The performers were as great as ever. I only caught the tail end of the parade, but the street fair was an overwhelming mix of different cultures. A highlight was the samba band on 20th and Harrison: beleza! Further down a man walked by and handed a half-smoked, still smoking joint to some women in a booth. They laughed and thanked him. A 25-person drum circle in a tent was spontaneous and listenable -- and the axé (spirit) was in full effect.

Seeing it all, I felt that these streets remember everything that have happened on them, and that they are ready for -- and can accommodate -- more and changing memories. San Francisco moves on. It's up to us -- the people who happen to live there now (or have roots there) -- to decide in which directions.

I'll tell you one thing:

If I ruled the world and everything in it/Sky's the limit

I'd move all the families back to San Francisco that were once here, and we would all run this city with community-based institutions and locally owned businesses, and send our kids to college, and live by principles more noble than turfs and dollars.

But we don't get to do history over. Luckily we have something great to work with, even if it is drastically different from the city we once knew. So the question is, where do we go from here?