Check this link to read my latest essay published in the March issue of The Caravan magazine. The comments feature is now up, so feel free to prove to the rest of the internet that yes–it is actually possible to use those comment sections to say something thoughtful and intelligent.
Wang Chaoying is a Chinese artist, calligrapher, historian, etc–a mutual friend of my Tokyo family at Gallery ef, Asakusa.
Gallery ef has once again collaborated with European governments to bring Wang’s work to the West, and I am once again happy to have played my very small role in the process.
If you happen to be around southern Austria in the coming weeks, check the dates and times on the link below and see how Wang has once again made ancient, pre-Qing dynasty concepts accesible to us post-postmodern palefaces.
If you should find yourself in Bangalore on January 10th, stop by Crossword bookstore (on Residency Road– left at the bottom end of Brigade Road), for a Bangalorean instalment of the launch of The Caravan Magazine.
I’ll still be in Canada, so I’ll need reports….
D.
The Caravan
and
Crossword Bookstore
Invite you to a panel discussion on the emerging genre of
Narrative Non-Fiction Writing in India
and the launch of the new edition of The Caravan
Speakers:
Eminent historian and author of India after Gandhi, Ram Guha
Playwright, novelist and editor of DeshaKaala, Vivek Shanbag
Managing Editor, The Caravan, Anant Nath
Deputy Editor, The Caravan, Vinod K Jose
Books Editor, The Caravan, Anjum Hasan
The Caravan, India’s first narrative journalism magazine, has a history going back to 1939. In its new avatar, Caravan brings you in-depth, stylish and well-written stories on political, social and cultural subjects as well as a thoughtfully-chosen selection of fiction and poetry.
Join us for a cup of coffee, share your thoughts on Indian journalism, learn more about The Caravan and pick up your free copy.
This is the original Manali article at full length. There was quite a bit edited upon publication, so now that the magazine has had its run, here it is in it’s full splendour. Enjoy.
Dave.
MANALI
1
There is nary a soul scuttering around the New Manali bus stand. Those that do stir are there to—in one way or another—get at the pockets of weary travelers arriving on the overnight local bus from Mandi. It is about five to May in the springtime, but it is still freezing.
My winter coat is still zipped up tight and I’m curled up on the seat, as if to mimic the synthetic potato that is my backpack; two buttressed husks of lonely Himalayan cargo. The other passengers, a trio of Swedes, disembarked half an hour ago, before the sun began its Bill Viola-paced game of peek-a-boo.
The rickety bus’ brake pads shriek relief and I gather myself and my gear. My heavy feet hit the hard ground. I’m the only foreigner here—and this is comforting.
What is it, that a certain kind of traveller—the obscurity sniffer-outer, the untrodden path seeker, the pseudo-trailblazer—hates the most? As Paul Theroux once put it: the sight of other travellers.
This desire for leopard-like autonomy is fallacious for the most part, especially in today’s over-poached paradigm (Ljublijana is the new Budapest is the new Prague), yet the inborn quest pervades. And in the jostle, if you can squat a clear patch in an already marked territory, all the more kudos to you, pal.
Manali, Himachal Pradesh, is somewhat of an anomaly on India’s travel circuit: Obscure but teeming, exotic but already cliché. Divided by a tributary of the Beas River into two specific towns, New and Old, the two halves square off against each other, geographically and idealistically, with a wooded nature reserve acting as an arbitrator. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Onion, it’s an American publication that spoofs and lampoons the news. What follows is a piece I wrote that they rejected, presumably for its explicitly Canadian content, or maybe they’re just douche bags; it’s as good as anything they put out. So here’s yet another piece for you to enjoy for free while I remain in poverty.
Read on and re-post at will…
Toronto Anti-smoking Group Seeks to Brake Wind
By Dave Besseling
A Toronto anti-smoking lobby announced today it would continue its efforts to make the provincial capital a smoke-free city by conquering the last adversary in their quest for tobacco-free air—the wind.
Toronto is one of a long list of world cities with a smoking ban in place for offices, restaurants and bars. But for the Toronto Incentive for Tobacco Stoppage (T.I.T.S), the current ban doesn’t quite go far enough.
“Let’s finish what we started,” said Otis Blundell, the organization’s vice president, “The wind is the last factor of non-compliance in the march to a smoke-free Toronto.”
Some residents also feel wind is the last obstruction on the list to appease non-smokers who must endure, against their will, exposure to public space.
“Now that the weather is nice, I like to eat and drink on patios,” said Church St. resident Steve James, “but sometimes there are smokers on the sidewalk, and the wind blows the smoke into the patio area where I’m eating.”
While it is still legal to smoke on patios in Ontario, Caffe Voltron, a popular beer bar and eatery on Yonge St., confiscates its ashtrays every evening to comply with a by-law restricting outdoor smoking where the danger levels are at their highest: under an awning.
“We don’t allow smoking when the awning is shading the patio,” said Voltron serveuse Michelle. “When the dinner rush is over, say around 8 or 9 o’clock, we retract the awning, then it is safe to smoke again.”
The current Ontario by-law assures that the dangers of smoking in these high-risk shaded areas, as opposed to on the public sidewalk where the awning ends, are nipped in the butt. Provincial politicians responsible for the awning by-law would not comment whether or not city council had begun to draft the hotly debated anti-wind laws, laws that in their divisiveness have already toppled municipal governments in the UK and Ireland, where it is even windier than Canada.
Clinical research by Reese Laboratories proves that smoking in the shade is especially hazardous to health. In the absence of sunlight, carcinogenic molecules in cigarettes become what researcher Rory Tate calls “hyper-charged,” and in the absence of UV rays, are prone not to rise into the air, but to embed themselves in any food on the tables, causing pub meals unwanted flavour and smoothness.
But even the hard science behind the ban on smoking under awnings isn’t good enough for the T.I.T.S, who, through petitions this week, have successfully closed the loophole that allows patios not with awnings, but with umbrellas, to harbor smokers. If a police officer sees a patron smoking under an umbrella that is touching an umbrella shielding an adjacent table, the offender can be fined up to a maximum of $500 CAD.
With yet another amendment-in-waiting to the ban, the offense of “smoking near flowers,” only days from being addressed at City Hall, T.I.T.S is padding itself up for the next battle for public health—that malevolent wind.
Under the proposed act, wind would be banned from all public space in Toronto, subject to fines not yet decided upon.
Torontonians: look for supportive local politicians to have their T.I.T.S out, canvassing a neighbourhood near you soon. MP Bob Mars plans to address the national parliament in Ottawa as early as the fall with as many anti-wind signatures as possible. Outside legal council has been sought from the firm that represented Monsanto Canada in its case against farmer Percy Schmeiser.
“It is our right as Canadians to demand sterility in our public spaces,” continued Blundell, of T.I.T.S. “And when gusts blow down the wind-tunnel of Yonge St., it is the city, who has built this perpendicular downtown core, who must deal with this wanton nuisance caused by the wind. Someone must stand up to this menace.”
On the long drive back to Peterborough from Port Elgin, I found my mind wandering while taking in the puffy clouds that looked like smoky plumes exhaled from a Godsize pipe over the vanishing point of the horizon…
In a parallel universe, where people and events of this world could be shifted and interwoven at the behest of a satyrish spirit, without the constraints of timelines, I made a mental list of how I would alter the history of our sphere to make the view through the looking-glass more interesting and possibly more stimulating.
First, as the drag n’ drop creative cultural force, I’d see to it that these musical forces were given life:
-Fela Kuti Live with John Bonham.
-BloodSugarSexMagik era John Frusciante joins James Brown and the JB’s.
-Dave Grohl stays on as drummer for Queens of the Stone Age.
-Massive Attack featuring Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain.
-Nina Simone produced by Rick Rubin.
-Serge Gainsbourg? meet Tom Waits.
Books to be written:
“On the Campaign Trail: Germany, 1939” by Hunter S. Thompson.
“Love in the time of Cholera” by Chuck Palahniuk.
“Crash” by Oscar Wilde.
“The Master and Margarita” by Salman Rushdie.
“The Castle” by Martin Amis.
“The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Tom Robbins.
and (thanks to The Kids in the Hall); “The Bible” by Dr. Seuss.
News headlines to be altered:
“Yoko Ono weds Barry Gibb. BeeGees’ fate shaky”
“John Lennon wounded in assassination attempt—full recovery expected”
“Richard Nixon wounded in assassination attempt—death imminent”
“Bill Hicks undergoes surgery, cancer removed”
“Jimi Hendrix’s stomach pumped, guitar restringed for next show”
“Jinnah dead, Muslim League loses power, Indian partition called off”
Amazing what dying will do for a career, eh?
Death has always been good for business in the arts, but who could have thought old creepypants Michael Jackson could have half his life–the sordid and the pathological– wiped off the public record by overdosing on a shot of painkillers?
What is truly amazing to me is how so many people are suddenly rock solid with MJ’s legacy, and have been ‘true fans’ all along. Even through his recent phase as a cultural fugitive.
To argue such subjective bandwagoneering would be hard, but what can be objectively argued about this whole kerfaffle, is that the guy hadn’t written anything good in ages.
Did I listen to Beat It and Billie Jean when I was growing up? Of course I did. But just because something was present in my rearing doesn’t automatically turn it into gold when the author expires and I’m old enough to remember it. Jeezz. And objectively, those lame synths, piss-poor lyrics and Eddie Van Halen solos are not eternal–or no more eternal that those garish red leather suits he used to wear–they’re just passé. And everything after (and mostly including) Thriller sucks. Yes: Sucks. Amazing, the amount of nodding zombie heads that will just agree with whatever the radio tells them is legendary. That album Dangerous? It’s horseshit. Listen to it again, and tell me it doesn’t have more in common with Tiffany and Debbie Gibson than the teenage Michael Jackson who, admittedly gloriously, blew his creative load with Off The Wall.
If MJ had written songs like ‘Trouble Man ‘on the other hand…I may have shed a tear, but Marvin Gaye died like a proper rock star, and his music has aged well. MJ died like a soft option ego junkie. His leering megalomania was only more disturbing than his Diva-like travel requirements. Have we forgotten about the fucker’s nose?!
Oh wait, there seems to be a post-mortem statute of limitations in slagging off his plasticity, at least until we stop pretending he was part of our family.
I just watched Germaine sing at the funeral, by the way, and if you didn’t think that last teary gasp was staged, you’ve missed everything.
As the first artist in residence for the Livinginpeace project, there were essentially no parameters aside from showing up and seeing what came out. Rongo was a fledgling business, and just how the residency would relate to the rest of the project was in an experimental stage. There was beautiful, big talk, but no one really knew what could be achieved concretely at that point.
Since my stint in Karamea, spanning the three months from November 2004 to January 2005, two other artists have come through and done bigger and better things with their time and talent, and I’m happy that Paul and I didn’t get too carried away straight out the gates, but cautiously explored and discussed what the project could mean for the future of Livinginpeace. We knew we were plotting a course for others to take further. The simple foundations had to be laid before anyone could use them to jump from.
So my story is one of inner-exploration and creative planning with Paul during my tenure, where we laid out the basics for the thing to grow and expand the way it has. This is not to say it was a partnership, Paul has always captained his own ship; but I think our musings on what was possible for the project helped him to react to opportunities more quickly, and with certainty. The fact that the two artists that have come after me have taken the “exhibition” concept further to include live painting and art lessons makes me proud; and relieved as well: I can’t have humans anywhere near me when I work, and I wouldn’t have a clue how to teach anyone anything.
We thought at the time that, though the turnout would be small, people would catch the fire we were sparking and support the project through the tenure-ending exhibition. It didn’t really go as well as planned, but the lesson was learned, and we had a lot of fun learning it. If you want them to come, you have to offer something relevant to them. The subsequent community-based events seem to have hit the mark.
On a personal level, my time there was very rewarding. My style has always been based in certain techniques that get mixed and matched with the patterns, symbols and philosophies that surround me wherever I am in the world, and my New Zealand exposure was an interesting one. It was different from my time in Japan and Europe, because it wasn’t in a country with established aesthetic grandeur as such (though the Maori visual fabric is one of my favourites), but where nature itself provided all the weird and transcendent lines and shapes anyone would need. The work I produced there was a step forward for my technique, and a surprising journey for me, while I watched what the land had inspired dribbling out of my pen. Karamea is markedly different from anywhere else I’ve put the antennas out, and the isolated nature of the place encouraged my own isolated process. The isolation was almost necessary for me though, because there was always something going on at Rongo, and between there and where I was working, in a spare room in Paul’s house, was the pub—which during the day was a hideous temptation, but after a good day’s work, a just dessert.
I think what still sticks with me about my experience with Livinginpeace, is that if I were to go back and do it again, it would be a different place on a different level of operation, and I’d put out a different body of work. Such dynamism is in tune with the will of the great magnet. I’d probably still do it hermit style though, and I think what the thing needs now is more extroverted artists to get people involved in their processes. I’m happy to watch.
Included in the original Livinginpeace business plan was an ambitious goal: To create a programme that would allow artists to come to Karamea and run the creative gamut—inspiration, conception, execution, and exhibition—within the framework of the Livinginpeace project.
In theory, this creative loop would involve every aspect of the South Island endeavour, from the commercial hospitality facilities (used to house the artist), on-site food growth (to help feed the artist), work/exhibition space (to pay the artist) and all this provided in one of the more scenic spots on earth (to inspire the artist).
Things never seem to run that smoothly in reality, but founder Paul Murray is nothing if not adaptable. It has been 6 years since the small dairy farming community welcomed the Rongolians to town, and so far three international artists have participated in the programme. There have been exhibitions in Rongo’s central space, live painting sessions, and art lessons for local children. The seeds of the original concept have germinated in unexpected ways, but let’s face it, everyone loves surprises.
The parameters of what an artist will do when chosen to participate in Livinginpeace’s A.I.R programme will depend largely on the artist and his/her interaction with the land, the space and the community. Interactive projects can work as well as sabbatical style individualism.
Livinginpeace’s art program may have shifted a bit, but the core aspect of its commercial sustainability is only growing stronger. Paul & Co. are in the enviable position of running a successful hospitality racket, where a visiting artist’s day to day needs are absorbed into the business, thus giving both host and participant freedom to collaborate wholly on a creative level and make use of Livinginpeace’s growing resources, built and maintained with love and conviction through a dedicated group of people.
Turning out profits from an exhibition at the end of a tenure may be a ways off, but as art itself is about the process, the experience, and how we interact with the environment where we choose to create, it doesn’t get much more satisfying than this. With such a beautiful environment and a crew the likes of Paul and the Rongolians, and artist who chooses to invest in a Karamea tenure is assured of being part of a dynamic process, grounded in great ideas and open to new winds. The only thing more interesting than being a part of the process, is seeing what will happen next.
Yes, there is a strike amongst certain public workers in Toronto. Yes, it is inconvenient, but just a minute there, Mister self-righteous social commentator, you. Just hold on a minute.
That people are greedy and politicians are corrupt is a given. So that aside and further inadmissible in the argument, let’s get past the pissing and moaning, and to what alternatives to such an impasse you do not want as a result of this idealistic clash.
In reading some of the spasmodic polemic about the situation, a few factors surrounding the thing seem to have been overlooked—not so much about the fact that a public works strike demanding benefits and money during a recession isn’t inconvenient, but that people deriding these city employees are drawing comparisons between the job security enjoyed by daycare workers, trash collectors and the like, to the lack of security in their own jobs in the private sector. Why them and not us, they screech up to the great unmeaning above.
But apples are not oranges, and to transform one into the other is as problematic in reality as it is in the metaphor. There are jobs paid for by private capital, and there are jobs paid for by you who keep that wheel a’turnin: You Mr. Stick in the mud, the taxpayer.
So until our government services are totally privatised and outsourced (which no one seems to think is a good idea, [thanks for that example Mr. Bush]), or until private enterprise is reined in under government control (which I’m guessing no one would like either, [thanks Mr. Orwell]), apples will be apples. The comparison between the two cannot be made, let alone lamented.
This is the first strike of this kind in 10 years in Toronto, Canada’s largest city. Canadians fortunate enough to live in such a clean city should perhaps spend some time in Varanasi, India and see how they get along with no garbage collection at all. It’s hard to get too worked up about this when you’re awoken to a city block’s week’s worth of garbage, tossed arbitrarily into alleyways, being burned off beside your window—after trying to fall asleep while the neighbours keep warm by burning cowshit.
If it’s public workers striking in general that is making you indignant, go live in Europe for a while and then tell me what you think (France would probably be best…).
This country has a tax system that, while sharing the commonality with every other country in the world of being hated, differs itself compared to most of them that after the corruption is dealt with, there’s still enough left over to pick your shit, and take care of your little cabbages while you work, and on any list of countries with the highest quality of living, some kind of democratic socialism is also at work.
Let’s not forget how high this bar in Canada actually is compared to the rest of the world. For all the good things Canada has, it seems many Canadians are truly clueless about just how good they have it.
