In the Islands

This is how it went.

I arrived in Manila early in the morning, sleepless, with an upbeat taxi driver, vaguely Latin-sounding radio in Tagalog announcing NBA games (“Kyrie Irving, wowwww!!!”), before segue'ing into what I have long-known in Bangkok as “Filipino karaoke music,” those cheesy '80s power ballads that have been completely forgotten in the rest of the world, but remain close to the hearts of the 100 million-odd inhabitants of this benighted archipelago. The sun is rising, and Starship's 1987 number 1, “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now” is playing. The kick drums come in, and Grace Slick starts to sing.

“Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that

Put your hand in my hand, baby don't ever look back”

We come down off the freeway into a tangle of shacks and machine shops and freeway exits and railway sidings, and as we pull into our first stoplight, a gang of street urchins surround the taxi on all sides.

“Let the world around us fall apart”

“Lock the door! Lock the door!” the cab driver screams. I'm slamming the manual locks down, reaching over my luggage.

“Baby we can make it if we're heart to heart!”

The American-style street signs with Spanish names are smeared with smog, nine-story high slum towers spiral above us, tiny shops on their ground floors, young men of questionable mental capacity squatting on the curb, staring into the distance with vacant expressions.

“And we can build this dream together, standing strong forever, nothing's gonna stop us now!”

That is what set the tone for Manila. Mabuhay, motherfucker.

It is a city of greasy noodles and traffic-choked streets, Diego Rivera-type murals and hand-painted signs alternating with gorgeous mid-century graphics on the billboards, screaming transsexual hookers on Adriatico Street, cheery groups of youths harmonizing Taylor Swift songs and playing guitars at early morning coffee stands, jeepneys painted in peacock tones announcing “CHRIST IS KING!,” solitary teen mothers on park benches, the only other Westerners being beer-gutted American expats sweating through their tucked-in polo shirts, a cathedral full of schoolboys screaming English-language hymns with the lyrics on video screens, and ruin after ruin after ruin, dating from the Golden Age of Spanish exploration to just last week.

But the Philippines in general are an assault on the senses, and I say this who has spent years in Southeast Asia. It is a riot of color, a sublimely beautiful landscape subjected to every form of destruction known to man – earthquakes and volcanoes, typhoons and tsunamis, mudslides, insurrections both Maoist and Islamist, countered by even more horrifying state violence, most recently in Rodridgo Duterte's death squads sent for small-time drug offenders, political clan wars, petty street crime, far less petty mass-scale exploitation by the insulated, grotesque ruling classes (safely ensonced in the freakishly clean, heavily policed, Singapore-aping streets of Makati and Bonifacio) with the quiet backing of countless Chinese- and American-based multinationals, a vicious Spanish colonial regime, the suppression of Emilio Aguinaldo's revolt by the American “commonwealth,” the corrupt dictat of Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-collecting wife, the naval assault on Corregidor, the largest naval battle history in the Leyte Gulf, the soldiers left by the wayside on the Bataan Peninsula, and in the case of Manila, wholesale destruction, a city savaged, bombed, and gang-raped into oblivion by both the retreating Japanese army and the American bombers at the end of World War II, leaving a city of smoldering craters and cordite-scarred marble Virgins Mary wondering what became of their shrines.

The Catholics came in the Spanish colonial quest for gold and soul, and they imprinted the ideals of Spain at the height of the Inquisition on the populace, bringing with them the icons of Medieval Catholicism, the eerie-eyed doll that would become the Santo Niño of Cebu, and the dark-faced Christ figure that would become the Nazareno Negro of Manila, and the combination of religious zeal and bodily mortification that continues to play out in the processions of penitentes flogging themselves, in the men who crucify themselves each year during Holy Week on the high plains of Pampanga, blood and sweat hitting the volcanic-ash soil in the height of the hot season.

Then came the Americans, winning the islands in William Randolph Hearst's manufactured war, Rooseveltian men with bushy mustaches in broad-brimmed cavalrymen's hats suddenly filling the islands, occupying the country for a few decades with all the brashness of a newly ascendant empire, leaving a city plan for Manila modeled on Chicago – subbing Manila Bay for Lake Michigan, and Roxas Boulevard for Lake Shore Drive, along with streets named Taft and McKinley, Forbes and Lawton, Babbittian institutions like the Rotary Club and the Jaycees, diners and art deco hotels and billboards taken straight from Humphrey Bogart film noir, archaic English-language first names left as if preserved in amber from the Coolidge administration, men named Archie and Gilbert, women named Edith and Daisy, along with odd constructions that sound like English names but which aren't, “Marzee” and the like, along with a taste for Hormel corned beef and Del Monte canned pineapple, the Jackie Gleason diet still going strong.

And so the whole country becomes a whirlwind tour of the 20th Century in all of its disastrous unfoldings.

Yet as soon as you get out of Manila, the country reveals itself to be a marvel. I ran into relatively few international tourists. Most of those that come stick to the beach towns of the South, Coron and El Nido, Puerto Princesa and Boracay. I was alone as I walked along the rim of the volcanic caldera in Tagaytay, overlooking the island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island. I was alone as I walked through the streets of Taal lined with ancient, earthquake-proof houses with oyster-shell windows and whitewashed arcades, the belfries of its Spanish basilica crumbling, ancient women in dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves fanning themselves in the doorways. I ran into few other tourists in the rice terraces of the Cordillera that tumble down the sides of the deliriously high mountains like giants' stairwells, or in Sagada, where coffins are perched on piney cliffs, or in cozy Baguio, another town planned by the Americans and heavily bombed during the war, where I sat in the appropriately named “Cafe by the Ruins,” where elderly Filipino bohemians drank coffee brewed with cardamom and listened to Joan Baez, where I ate freshly made sweet potato rolls and local buffalo cheese and chocolate rice porridge to stave off the evening chill.

In 1884, a graduate of the local merchant marine academy from the Ilocos region in the Northern Philippines named Juan Luna de San Pedro y Novacio Ancheta went to Madrid to show his painting Spoliarium. He followed the old Spanish style of bloody and aquiline saints, of chiaroscuro and martyrdom, as pioneered by El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya, and painted the dead gladiators of the Roman Colosseum being stripped of their armor and dragged through the sand.

It hangs on the first floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rizal Park, near where the park's namesake was executed for his resistance against the sclerotic Spanish regime, where it stands as a metaphor for a long-suffering people struggling for freedom.

And yet when I looked at it on that sweltering day it still seemed hopelessly modern. The incomparably sweet, wonderful people with whom I drank shots of gin and San Miguel beers, the betel-chewing guitarists who bade me to sing Merle Haggard songs with them, the balut vendors who chuckled as I tried to suck down a half-formed duck fetus in the shell on the streets of Ermita, I saw them all in the painting.

I don't put much stock in the Bible, but it comes to mind when I'm in a Catholic country, and I'm always struck by Ecclesiastes 1:9.

“The thing that has been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.”

And it says something that in 2019, I see the greatest of truths in a 140 year old painting of a dead gladiator and the weeping Christians in the catacombs beneath Rome.

Pictures of Vietnam

To write about Vietnam seems, at first, to be an impossibility. They've said it all, haven't they? A million travel blogs, novels, war correspondents? Every metaphor is exhausted, every photograph is taken, whether that was napalmed children running along a road in Tay Ninh Province in 1972, or a British Instagrammer posing in front of the setting sun over the spires of Ha Long Bay in 2019. #wanderlust.

And so, before I went to Vietnam, I had in my mind a set of images, the ones everyone who travels a lot has – the rice farmers in conical hats, the Haussmannized boulevards lined with little cafes serving syrupy sweet coffee, along with the older photos, the burning monks and the choppers on Saigon rooftops.

And yet what was most conspicuous was the prioritization of those more recent photos over the older ones, the absence of the history that has etched the name “Vietnam” in the American imagination. There are traces everywhere – the memorials to the fact that this was once the village of My Lai, that this was where the French came a cropper at Dien Bien Phu, the prison cells at Hanoi's Hoa Lo, with captions about the “serenity” of downed American fighter pilots who were held there (including photos of a visit by the late douchebag John McCain), a concrete bunker in the middle of a rice paddy somewhere near Da Nang, the gaps in the French-built cantilevers of the Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi, the occasional dusty case in an old museum captioned with the Politburo verbiage of another era (“The poison of reactionary culture of US-Quisling troops”), the mention that a temple had been a Viet Cong Hospital, the sight of an occasional Agent Orange victim.

But ultimately these are vague traces, hidden behind the present, like a painting painted over.

One goes to the imperial citadel of Hue, or rather, what's left of it after the bombing of the city as part of the Tet Offensive, and most of what you see are reconstructions resembling a Disney version of the Nguyen Dynasty, with barely a word as to their destruction. Or to the fact that to a generation of Westerners, their main knowledge of Hue came from the last scene of Full Metal Jacket, Matthew Modine belting out the Mickey Mouse Club theme as he marches through the burning city.

And when the remnants are made apparent, they are transformed into other tourist attractions, more things to see, more moments of sublimity for the shutter-happy traveler. You go to the Hanoi Hilton as part of the standard things-to-do-in-Hanoi list. Whole tourist shops are dedicated to propaganda posters.

So I spent a bare minimum of time encountering the recent past. What was presented to me was the mythic past, the trading city of Hoi An, old Confucian temples, the self-conscious romance ingrained in the French colonial architecture, the folkways of Hmong villagers on display in Sa Pa. The past that is presented with enough distance that the present can approach it without apprehension.

And as for the present, I can't hate. I can think of few better ways to enjoy the dusk than to sit by the Hoan Kiem Lake with a glass of bia hoi and a plate of sauteed clams.

Or any of the other moments of loveliness and transcendence – the rainfall on ancient cedars, plates of pigeons nested in fresh herbs, an old cannon fort on top of an island, crumbling concrete overlooking a crumbling limestone landscape, eating at by the relentless interaction of acid and base, whispering palms on beachsides, the delight of local hooch served in a reused water bottle, sliced green figs and starfruit, the pattern of the sun through the brise-soleil, the crusty old waiter who only addressed me in French – “l'addition, monsieur” – and the woman singing a Vietnamese-language cover of France Gall's “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son,” the almost certainly false presumption that a gorgeous Vietnamese woman getting into a taxi on a Friday night in Hanoi was smiling at me.

I travel for two reasons: the first is the understanding.

There's the Gauguin painting of Tahitian natives that I always keep in mind, undoubtedly in my mind my favorite Gauguin, possibly the strangest of his paintings, with the cryptic phrase, equally cryptically capitalized and punctuated, written in the upper left-hand corner:

D'où Venons Nous

Que Sommes Nous

Où Allons Nous

Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

To travel is to position oneself in the grand arc of history, geological, biological, anthropological, sociological, psychological. Not to answer the question, but to extend one's understanding of the question itself.

But the second reason is also embedded in the painting, in the sheer sensuous delight of it.

That second reason is what I found in Vietnam, as cliché as it might be. And the knowledge that memory, as cursed as it can be, is the one thing the bastards can't take from me. I can always spend my time among the arabesques of my past, point to point, city to city, mountain to mountain, sea to sea. In 20 years' time, I might be keeping out the acid rain, three months' behind on my rent, holes in my shoes in a city threatened by the rising tide. But I'll have that bia hoi and those clams.

On one of my last days in the country, I climbed to the top of a hill on Cat Ba Island, only to find my intended location, an old cannon fort, closed. “Hey,” some French tourists called at me, “go up that path instead.”

I climbed up a rough trail, past the graves of the workmen who built it, to a new transmitter station embedded in the concrete of part of the old fort, a relic of the colonial era, with a view to the hundreds of tiny limestone spires below, the boats. I sat alone with the dust and the sun, amid the ruins for nearly an hour, not wanting to leave for anything in the world.

The two pictures intersected, old and new. And somewhere in my mind I knew it.

The Haunted Landscapes of The Simpsons

I've been finding myself drawn, during odd periods of downtime at work, or on solitary late Saturday nights, to a point of nostalgia, probably my most salient point of nostalgia, and probably the thing that shaped my worldview more than anything else – classic episodes of The Simpsons. 

I say, “classic episodes,” because like most 30+ year olds (and like many younger), I stopped watching as the show got shittier. This is a woefully unoriginal observation, to the point where every time someone brings it up I cringe a little. And besides, many people more talented than myself have written whole essays on how and why this happened, as well as why this tends to happen with long-running series in general (jumping the shark and all that). But the fact remains that watching newer episodes feels a little like running into the coolest kid from your elementary school – the one whose parents shelled out for a pair of L.A. Lights and could sing all of the lyrics to Green Day's “Longview” – and seeing him 50 pounds heavier than his high-school prime at a Main Street bar, before he cashes out his tab and drunkenly swerves his car out of diagonal parking.

In a way, I never left those episodes behind – I still remember banks of dialogue, and it's how I received so much of my early cultural education.

Here is a story about how this works in a different time. In 1944, Patrick Leigh Fermor was sent to Crete to capture a notorious Nazi officer. Having found that the general hat already left the island, he went for a secondary target, a career soldier named General Heinrich Kleipe. For days, he had marched the general through the rain and over the desolate terrain, until in a cave, having a smoke together, they see the peak of Mount Ida emerge from the clouds.

“Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte…

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.”

Being of this century, my points of resonance with strangers from across the ocean are nothing like the odes of Horace. Rather, my version of Fermor's encounter with Kleipe is bound to be something more like me running into an asshole Irish expat going off about something, and muttering across the table: 

Itchy runs afoul of an Irishman... 

And one of my tablemates responds: 

Look out Itchy, he's Irish! 

Fermor had Horace. I have season 7, episode 18 of The Simpsons.

Of course, I'm pretty sure that classic episodes of The Simpsons does have far more universal appeal than Horace, even Horace 100 years ago when your options were far fewer. But not everyone took the deep dive like I did, although quite a few did, and wherever I've lived, I've found those fellow souls who, as Fermor put it, drank at the same fountain.

So the dialogue was at the surface of my mind, that I knew. But there were still things to be discovered.

The thing I notice more than anything else, that I never really understood before, was that part of the reason I was drawn to The Simpsons was that there was a loneliness at its core. Sure, a lot is made of the show's much-vaunted “heart,” which it had in spades in its golden years, but that sense of heart hinges on a deep-seated sadness. This is a family consisting of a father who worked a job he hated day in and day out, the housewife who once had dreams, the fundamentally good kid whose rebellion was inevitable, the isolated intellectual daughter, the youngest child who literally doesn't have a fucking voice.

And the aesthetics of Springfield bear this out. I know I'm late to the party in discovering it, but I keep finding myself drawn to the Scenic Simpsons Instagram page. Each image is by and large devoid of human presence, and consists of all of the background stuff that forms the show – an open telephone book, a flickering television screen, interior shots of familiar buildings, landscape.

Its creator uses the word “beautiful” to describe the imagery collected there, but that to me is missing the point. Rather, the first thing I am reminded of is the terrifyingly empty piazzas of Giorgio De Chirico.

 As a kid, I adored maps and photos of unknown places – my first childhood hero was Indiana Jones – and Springfield was just such another place, fictional and unknown and yet totally familiar to any American in the '90s. It was another thing I wasn't aware of then, but the background drawings of Springfield are hyperreal. It is a painfully anodyne suburban or small-town landscape, simplified and abstracted to almost childlike levels, and yet with the colors exaggerated and the occasional touch of the absurd, the laconic simplicity almost evoking something hidden, the scenery becomes resonant.

And this, too, reflects De Chirico's idea of the pittura metafisica. To De Chirico, the haunting effect comes through contrast, between light and dark, between monolith and emptiness, and, like Springfield, between the everyday scenery of the Italian city and the patently surreal.

 

It has embedded itself deeply in my consciousness. I need only look to the peace lily on my coffee table, my tweed sofa, the garden outside with its potted palms, and it takes only the slightest stretch of imagination to see it stylized, oversaturated, and transformed into flat fields of color, odd details haunting the corners.

Main Street USA

When I was in the fourth grade, I went to Disneyworld for the first and only time. For the most part it was a pretty standard experience. Like all kids, I was both totally pumped and completely shit-scared on Splash Mountain, I was just as shit-scared on the It's a Small World ride for completely different reasons, and I somehow realized, even then, that the Epcot Center reflected a kind of techno-optimism that already seemed passe, even to a child in 1996.

But my first view of Disneyworld was Main Street USA. This isn't exactly a hallmark attraction, but it's what you see when you first come through the gate, and its equivalent, which I'd experienced much younger, is also what you see when you first come through the gate at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, where I had my formative funnel cake and log-ride experiences.

And maybe that's because the welcoming experience is designed to be a comforting, familiar Americana, reproduced at 3/5 scale. It is an imagined America of the sort that Ronald Reagan invoked in his speeches about the horse-and-buggy days in Dixon, Illinois. We want to believe that at some point in America, there was this transcendent and indivisible notion of community. Nowadays, we think of the 1950s. But when the first Disney park opened, in the actual 1950s, the time of nostalgia was the 1910s, a time when Main Streets were indeed more vital, when small towns were still served by the railroad. And even in the 1910s, in the era of Fords and suffragettes, nostalgists invoked some kind of vaguely Jeffersonian or Jacksonian ideal.

It's hard to escape this particular cultural delusion. Both left and right political currents continue to appeal to “Main Street,” despite the fact that this is by and large a hologram.

Sure, there was a Main Street in my hometown – the “Main Street Cultural District” as it was eventually re-branded. What was “cultural” about it I never quite figured out. What it actually is and was is a strip, a few blocks long, of largely characterless early 20^th Century buildings, occupied by an American Legion hall, full of shops selling things like quilting supplies and diabetic footwear, and a clutch of bars at one end under the shadow of a coal-burning power plant -- an area I remember from my childhood as a vaguely sinister but somehow thrilling strip smelling of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, filled with the sound of clacking billiard balls and the roar of trucks from the nearby lumberyard.

Maybe the people in the 1950s or 1910s thought differently. But even in the 1910s... that was when Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street, the landmark work about the hypocrisy and loneliness of life in a small Minnesota town, considered a classic, but increasingly little-read as that world becomes a memory of a memory.

Yet fewer books have had a greater impact on me. His store-by-store description of the Main Street of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota on a hot summer day, as experienced by the young doctor's wife, Carol Kennicott, of the rotten bananas in the shop-windows, the feckless locals at the saloon door, the rusticated masonry designed to provide a semblance of architectural manners. More than anything else, this seemed to be something that related to what I knew.

At that age, 15 or 16, I devoured books that seemed to get to that idea, reading nearly forgotten writers like Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe and Booth Tarkington – writers whose books I found on dusty library shelves and under cats at used bookstores. And I didn't just love them because they spoke to my experience, I loved them because they seemed to see through the veil in a way that contemporary writers didn't (and still by and large don't, but I'll leave that for another day).

We look to the Main Street iconography nowadays because of the spiritual poverty and hopelessness of the present, in the same way that people of Lewis' and Anderson's day looked to Main Street because it seemed to represent a purer America than the industrial cities. And more often than it ought to, it forms the backbone of a grotesque and reactionary politics.

So I decided to go back to where it all began – not in person, but through the all-seeing eye of Google Street View. And not to Disneyworld's Main Street USA, which is probably the same simulacrum it has always been and always will be, but to the basis for Main Street USA, Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri.

I knew what to expect. Few areas of America have been as thoroughly depopulated over the past 100 years as Northern Missouri, an area of soil too poor to compete with the rich black loam of Northern Iowa and Minnesota, and rangeland too constricted to compete with the plains of Kansas and Texas. Lacking in substantive industry, mineral resources other than a sulfurous coal only suited to steam engines, or towns of any size to serve as hubs, largely isolated from major transit routes, and without the mountains and lakes of the southern part of the state that attract droves of tourists, Northern Missouri, along with adjacent areas of Southern Iowa and Western Illinois, has become a dead zone.

What one sees in Marceline, Missouri, is a town, like many others, destroyed, with a vacated town square, American flags fluttering outside abandoned shops.

 

Meanwhile, in Anaheim and Orlando, and at the versions Disney has exported to its properties in the greener pastures of the Far East, it is still a place of parades and baton-twirlers, barbershop quartets and soda fountains. Somewhere in the distance, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" or "Daisy Bell" plays.

Most of the clientele has never seen a quartet sing in a barbershop, never been to a soda fountain, and the songs that are playing were hits before even their grandparents were born. But the nostalgia is not their nostalgia, it's the national nostalgia. And like most nostalgias, it acts as a cover for the fact that we have given up hope.

Travelers' Conversations

You're on a long trip somewhere, and after a day on the road, you've finally come to a place where you can rest -- maybe it's a coffee shop, or a bar, or the common area of a hostel. The fact that it is a place popular among other travelers is its sole distinguishing characteristic. It doesn't matter what the specifics are, and it certainly doesn't matter what country you're in. This could be Cambodia or Costa Rica, Antwerp or Agra. What matters is the company that you're among.

You have settled in. Maybe your coffee has arrived, or a glass of the local beer.

Suddenly, you realize that someone is looking at you.

"Oh, hey, you're reading that book? Oh my god, I loved it but not as much as I loved The Martian. Have you read The Martian? So much better than the movie, right? Oh you haven't read it? You have to!"

And with that, the book goes on your lap, and you politely smile and nod in assent, neither really agreeing nor disagreeing, nor really giving a shit.

"Oh you were in Laos too? How long? Just a week? I was there for two."

A man with dreads rolling a cigarette in the corner pipes in. "Yeah, Laos was cool. I was there three weeks."

They begin to compare notes. "Yeah, I went on this trek." "Of course I went to the Four Thousand Islands." Another chimes in. "Ohhhhh, well I was supposed to go to Si Phan Don" -- using the Lao name, a surefire way to establish credibility -- "but I had stopped over at this gorgeous riverside temple, and I just couldn't bear to leave."

The variations of this game of one-upsmanship are endless. The most places you've been, of course, is the main competition, but there are countless others. Whether you went somewhere or really went somewhere, really experienced it. The allotted minimum of time needed in a certain place. The roughest country bus rides, the spiciest meals, the foulest local hooch, the friendliest locals, the wildest parties, the most miserable hangovers (contrasted with whatever intense activity they were supposed to be doing that day, which usually involves having to climb a mountain), the most unspoiled beaches, the most overrated destinations, all one great footrace towards some very nebulous and very Eurocentric notion of "authenticity."

There is also, of course, the conflation of a brutal tight-fistedness and transcendence. These conversations tend to be long gripe-fests involving flight deals, discounts, haggling skills, hand-wringing about how much someone overpaid for something, the most exorbitant tourist scams, the best way to avoid said exorbitant tourist scams, and of course beefs with "dumb tourists" (which can generally be interpreted to mean most anyone other than the person speaking).

Somewhere, typically around beer number three, the ethnic divisions start to show. This is where you meet the Japanese tourist who tells you the Rape of Nanking never happened, the Brit who defends his arrogance and pettiness by saying "you don't understand English sarcasm," the German who mutters something about Muslims, the American who loudly and bitterly complains about the lack of vegan and gluten-free options.

When I'm in this situation, this is typically the point where everyone else goes to the club, and I go to bed.

And it's the point where, when I go up to my hotel room and stare at the ceiling, then at my phone, then back at the ceiling. In my cheap room, I can hear the water run through old pipes, see the headlights sweep across the walls, again and again.

I'll be thinking about my own attempts to try to escape the fucking chokehold of late-capitalist expectations, about my own frugality and the very Protestant way in which I see it as a sign that I'm winning, about my own gripes as I travel, about my annoyance at the sanitized tawdriness in Amsterdam, the unsanitized tawdriness in Phnom Penh, about my self-consciousness about my American traits -- the terminology I use, the tendency to act like a big kid while drunk -- about how I get just as pissed at the people I consider to be the dumb tourists.

But then I wake up in the morning. I see the steeple of a Medieval church cutting across the sunrise, or smell baking empanadas from a back alley kitchen entrance, or hear the sounds of drums in a Chinese temple. And in that moment, the breeze crossing my face, it is mine and mine alone.

Mark Fisher and the Haunted Present

In 2017, Mark Fisher took his own life. This was something that was little-noted at the time. Like all too many people, it was only in death that he got the renown he deserved, especially outside his native Britain. 

Like most people, I was late to the party. I only read his landmark work, Capitalist Realism, last year, and found it to be a flawed but ultimately prescient book that described so much of the contemporary cultural landscape, even if obliquely. And it was just recently that I read Ghosts of My Life, a collection of essays on politics, music, film, and literature that describes our cultural landscape so perfectly, less through any kind of overarching vision than by hitting various touchstones, each of them with an elegant and precise critical eye.

If there is a theme, it's his notion of hauntology, a term he cribbed from Jacques Derrida, whom he admits is a frankly impenetrable writer, but which can loosely be described as a nostalgia for a time when a future seemed possible. In a world of incipient climate change, increasing global political uncertainty, and an economic recovery that seems tenuous at best, we are ultimately haunted by the futures that could have been.

This seems like a pretty abstract, even abstruse notion. And yet the more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that we live in an essentially hauntological era.

What we as a public are offered as a route forward is cold comfort. Neoliberal capitalism seems to suggest that progress is purely therapeutic, with physical wellness, self-care, positivity, and mindfulness offered as personal panaceas, an Instagram mentality that means next to fucking nothing when you look at how little is in your bank account. The only social thought given is a sort of woke neoliberalism in which it doesn't matter if you're gay, trans, whatever, as long as you keep buying, keep clicking. In which public shaming of the problematic and cancel culture are the only accessible avenues of justice.

Meanwhile, reactionary ideologies in the form of Trumpian conservatism, Putinist traditionalism, Salafist Islam, and Hindu nationalism allow for a sort of cathartic, collective rage, permitting solidarity, so long as that solidarity is done in the name of the oppression of others. And on the eastern edge of the Asian continent, Xi Jinping's China and Singapore under the People's Action Party (along with authoritarian governments in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, as well as the essentially-colonized petits régimes in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) marry exploitative economic theories with brutal political repression and icily efficient technocracy, suggesting that the only way out of the world's current quandaries is through state capitalism.

What Fisher suggests is emphatically not that the past was better (we all know it wasn't), but that the hope that the future would be more enlightened, more rational, more equitable has been decimated. The examples he cites include the music released on the Ghost Box label (Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, etc.) with its samples from 1970s educational films and hypnotic analog synths, or William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, a series of minimalist electronic samples played on modern machinery until they quite literally destroyed themselves as they played.

This same hauntology, Fisher believes, is found in older media too – in films like Memento and The Shining, in '90s jungle music, in the novels of J.G. Ballard which show the human tendency towards base violence triumphing over technological intervention, in the Joy Division albums made when Britain seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse.

And I see it in the contemporary trends towards ambient music and lo-fi hip-hop. Being an American, my points of reference are more likely to be Ariel Pink, Danny Brown, Death Grips, Laurel Halo, Earl Sweatshirt, Chromatics, or SZA, all of whom seem like their frantically trying to assemble something out of the disused, analog bits of a not-too-distant past. Or in the viscerally disgusting and eerily familiar VHS world of Adult Swim shows like Tim and Eric, or the work of filmmakers like Panos Cosmatos, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Alex Garland who conjure up the imagery of '60s and '70s sci-fi.

 

You could say I'm cherry-picking examples from my own cultural sphere. But isn't it a major feature of the top of the charts too? Really, what's that different about The Weeknd, Drake, or Lana Del Rey, and all of their pop songs composed of distorted fragments of past hopes? Or all the Soundcloud rappers for who try to palliate their anxiety with Xanax and MDMA, only to be left as isolated and fucked up as ever? What's different about the way that young-adult dystopian novels and their filmed versions depict the tragedy of inheriting a world in which promise has been destroyed?

When there is hope, it exists purely in the realm of the magical, the unknowable. We watch Marvel movies because hope on our Earth seems so alien, witchiness and astrology trend because the world around us seems so grim, and mediocre young men buy into the Jordan Peterson bullshit because his brand of pop-Jungianism seems to give them a secret code, and gives them any easy target for blame in feminists and academic postmodernists.

People still have their dreams, after all.

And the horror of the failed present is never stated outright, it is merely alluded to. It is haunted. 

It strikes me as no coincidence that the last golden age of the ghost story was in the late 19^th Century. It was likewise a time of ultimate transition, as the Western world moved from an agricultural to an industrial basis of production, as the urban proletariat became cemented as an entity, as the basis for empire-building were transformed from a primitive, irrational desire for brute conquest to a coldly rational expansion of state and market power.

And in our new Gilded Age, we too are surrounded by ghosts.

Let's Talk About Why Netflix's "Street Food" Sucks

I always give TV shows I watch five episodes to prove themselves. There is so little time on this planet, and especially little time to do the things I love, and so life is too short for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I know that many members of my rough age cohort are less forgiving, but I figure five episodes should give the creators some time to prove themselves, and prove the worth of their characters or plots.

After finishing season 3 of Fargo (which slaps, by the way), I moved onto Netflix's latest venture into becoming the Xhamster of food porn, Street Food. I was interested, not just because I'm an enthusiast for street food the world over, but also because the first episode featured the current doyenne of my adopted city of Bangkok's street-food scene, Jay Fai, queen of the crab omelette.

I should have known what I was getting myself into. You know exactly how everything's gonna go down. Start with a dramatic drone shot of an exotic Asian landscape or a vaguely cyberpunk Asian cityscape, all fluorescent-lit slums and smog-spewing scooters, and then zoom into a market scene of chickens in bamboo cages, elderly women beaming over ropes of garlic. You'll have the local food expert (most likely speaking in English) championing the working-class vendor (most likely speaking in their native language), followed by the inevitable story of personal struggle -- child abuse, poverty, beloved fathers dying of cancer, addiction in the family -- with the vendor eventually tearing up, cameras gleefully rolling.

By and large, food TV is designed to be comfort food in every sense of the word. And to watch it is an act of passive consumption, also in every sense of the word. The high-class version is designed as a marveling at the exoticism and luxuriousness of the products, lurid shots of immaculate sea urchin, the riotous colors of a bowl of Singaporean laksa, a Provençal grandmother lovingly making an aioli in a mortar and pestle. Conversely, the low-class version is a fat fuck shoveling triple cheeseburgers topped with crispy pork belly, gorgonzola, and foie gras into his goateed mouth to guitar riffs (and you can probably guess which fat fuck I'm alluding to here), or some polite, chipper woman with a Colgate smile crafting chemically enhanced product-placement atrocities out of Cool Ranch Doritos and frozen gnocchi.

When there is anything that disrupts the comfort, it's either giddy reality-TV drama of the sort accompanied by dramatic judges' table sound effects (the last place where vocal synths are still used without irony) or maudlin descriptions of personal tragedy. You know, prepackaged feels -- just add water.

Of course, the producers could address how the personal setbacks and disasters reflect social realities and the often unspeakable poverty of urban-slum Southeast Asia. They come, at various points, annoying close to actually saying something -- they could actually open the discussion a bit, and talk even for a minute about the wealth gap in Thailand, religious tensions in India, or the fact that Suharto, who's mentioned as a big fan of the vendor in the Indonesia episode, oversaw the murder of one million fucking people -- but that would be a buzzkill, so any kind of larger issue is barely even mentioned in passing. Jiro Dreams of Sushi, perhaps the glossiest, most opulent food porn ever made, took a beat to discuss how Japan's rapacious appetite for fish was draining the ocean, and placed a critical emphasis on the pressures placed on sons in traditional Japanese society. But in Street Food, nope, instead you just have the tear-jerker story, the actual tears, followed shortly thereafter by the story of individual triumph, told with swelling strings and slow-motion, high-definition onions sizzling in a wok.

The great lie is that we live in the "golden age of television." Sure, The Sopranos ushered in a new era of high quality television liberated from network standards-and-practices doofuses, and likewise liberated from the time constraints of conventional cinema, and I love The Wire, Mad Men, and all the rest just as much as everyone else does. But as more and more shows compete for the "prestige" audience -- including the "prestige documentary" audience, the Wild Wild Country and The Jinx audience -- the result is more and more recycling of prestige tropes instead of actually good television. You get tired, recycled material -- shows like House of Cards and Making a Murderer – that are filmed beautifully, but which have no originality of purpose, no meaningful content, no soul, as sterile and as packaged and as focus-grouped as brands of detergent.

Street Food fits firmly into this rubric. It's like they took the more provocative, more imaginatively produced, more socially conscious food programming pioneered by Anthony Bourdain, David Chang, and Eddie Huang, and turned it into a garish, melodramatic parody. Regrettably, as occurs whenever I encounter any kind of low-caliber creative work, it makes me question whether the things it's imitating were any good to begin with.

This is where I would normally implore you, the reader, to go out and eat some good street food for yourself, and in Bangkok, this is a luxury that we take as a given. My one, sole, remaining hope is that decent food programming actually inspires viewers to go out and explore, but I know full well that the vast majority of viewers who are watching a sushi maestro place a single pristine piece of mitsuba on a glistening pile of salmon roe will be staring at their flat-screen between swigs of Pepsi Max, their television the sole source of light in their living room as the sun goes down, the pixels reflecting off of the half-eaten Chipotle burrito on the glass-top coffee table.

This may sound like a cheap shot, but it's not intended to be one at You the Consumer (and certainly not a shot at the street vendors of the world, bless their souls) so much as Them the Producers. I can't blame people for wanting a bit of escapism, after all, we all do (however that may manifest itself), but I also know that anything this brutally symptomatic of late-stage capitalism is bound to depress the hell out of me. And now that I've watched my five episodes, I'm ready to move on.

The Doomer Meme: A Case Study by Someone Too Old to Comment

It used to be a sign of getting old that you could no longer keep up with new albums as they were being released. I suppose that in the era of Spotify, this is less of an issue than it once was.

Now, the sign seems to be that one can no longer keep up with the meme economy.

I only just became aware of the Doomer meme, which apparently has been making the rounds of the fuck-my-life Internet for the past few months. And has become the topic of a whole Subreddit which seems to consist of sad young men with a fondness for walking around dark places late at night.

The original version, first seen September 16, 2018

As in the Book of Ecclesiastes: nothing new under the Sun. For at least as long as the period known as the “modern,” there have been subcultures that are reliant on the fundamental tension between a vague sense of hope that fails to coalesce into any kind of coherent vision and a more overwhelming sense of impending doom. When I was in high school, there were emo kids. Before then, goths. All the way back to the Dadaists, and before them the youth across Europe with Goethean pretensions who dressed like the titular character of his 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, and perhaps all the way back to Diogenes the Cynic, who jerked off and shat himself in public and then said something along the lines of “sorry for being REAL, you fucking sheeple!”

Some wallow in self-hatred. Others plot grand unworkable theories of human past and future, whether fascist, Maoist, Salafist, or whatever, to invoke some specter of power in the face of powerlessness. And some move on, get married, have kids, live happily ever after.

This is just an iteration in the era of late-capitalist accumulation and climate change, and as far I can tell a relatively small one, one which will in all likelihood barely if at all be remembered by history.

On the one hand, I'm tempted to view this as mawkishness and sentimentality – emotional bathos deployed in lieu of genuine connection – but that's a cheap shot, and ultimately one that comes off as condescending, and much to my horror, condescending to my younger self. For some reason, I'm paying attention. Maybe it's the fact that people are finding a common experience revolving around an inability around a sense of personal failure and misery that doesn't actually seem to fetishize that failure and misery, but instead seem to genuinely want to get better in the face of insurmountable odds. Maybe it's the fact that these seem to be people who realize the bullshit of late capitalism but haven't found a way to articulate it, especially given the absolute drought of humanistic education at the present moment.

And what triggers the most empathy is the having tried and tried again, and still failing. There's the tendency to turn inwards into poorly defined concepts of self-improvement, or into chemical self-medication, or into its close cousin technological self-medication. Which is something that comes so, so close to something that could have happened to me, and that kind of did happen to me.

Particularly, it's the nightwalk concept that actually interests me – another subject that has its own Subreddit – which given the isolated young men with poor prospects that seem to be attracted to this particular form of communication, often tends to be the aggressively bland streets of suburban and exurban and small-town America.

And I can so distinctly remember the vibe of isolated walks around a town in Iowa, tract housing and highway bypasses, a Panera and a Long John Silver's and a Hobby Lobby, the cardboard signs for discounts on 30-racks of Natty Ice and cartons of USA Gold cigarettes, the frigid fluorescent lights over rows of Monster energy drinks, the flash of an old boxcar – Denver, Rio Grande, and Southern – an iconic design from another era, a poem from the past, the bilious lights coming on in the old hotel downtown, peering into the lives of its residents, an ancient man with a bottle of Cutty Sark in the window, a mentally disabled woman in her 30s with a hacked-off blonde bob and a stained pink hoodie, seeing them look out into the February night and wondering what the fuck they saw in it all.

The only difference is that instead of listening to Soundcloud rappers and Spotify ambient mixes, I was listening to a Limewire'd and burned CD of Godspeed You Black Emperor's F#A# (infinity).

I avoided the worst. I didn't become an insufferable gamer, a vile political reactionary, an otaku. I became someone who more or less passes in polite society. But there's a performative quality to it, and nothing will shatter the mask more than, say, listening to a song I like on Youtube, only to have it followed up by an ad with a cheerful voice telling me to buy Head and Shoulders. And at the end of the day, I find a greater sense of kindred understanding in a W.G. Sebald novel, a Joan Didion essay, or a Joy Division album than anything else.

Nation Without a Name

Ask the average American what they know about Taiwan. The first thing you'll probably hear is something along the lines of “where your shit comes from,” vague memories of “Made in Taiwan” stamped onto the plastic undercarriages of the Matchbox cars they had as kids.

And of course many will know about the country's occupation of a gray zone in international law, the fact that it doesn't officially exist as an independent entity, the legitimate government of the Republic of China in the eyes of certain old Kuomintang stalwarts, the group marching under the banner of “Chinese Taipei” at the Olympics, a requirement for awkward phrasing for all but the 17 of the world's recognized sovereign states who still regard the Taipei government as the legitimate single China.

Until not very long ago at all, my response wouldn't have been much different. Because to Western eyes, the country is a cipher, a country people know, but seem to know little about, and even fewer visit.

Which means that like all ciphers, it can be visited without preconception. TripAdvisor can only take you so far. Without knowing all that scaffolding that typically constitutes “nationhood” in the popular imagination – an awareness of traditional culture, literature, film, pop music, cuisine, iconic architecture, and natural scenery – you're at a loss.

Even after spending some time in the country, it was hard to create a cogent metaphor, a unified image. I suppose Taipei 101, one of the world's tallest buildings, and the tallest from its construction in 2004 until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in 2010, functions as something of a national landmark. I didn't go.

Instead, I explored the back streets of Taipei, the dizzying night markets where patient queues serve as a rough metric for quality and local reputation, the neon alleys of Ximen pulsing with Mandarin pop music, the banyan trees and decrepit arcades of the older quarters, the grand shopping boulevards of Da'an, the mouldering mid-century architecture, a legacy of the importance of Taiwan in the old Japanese colonial empire, the militarist aspirations of both early Showa Period Japan and the corporatist governance of the country in the wake of the Chinese Revolution.

Outside the city, the West Coast of the island forms a great megacity, town after town blending into one another, apartment complexes and light industrial parks punctuated by tiny fields of rice and pineapple between them, never either fully urban or fully rural, managed with the mindset of a nation with a bare minimum of arable land.

And the East Coast is wild and rocky, cut apart by steep canyons between high mountains of heavily warped schist and gneiss, a testament to the country's position on multiple fault lines, a landscape the Japanese army lost countless men trying to build roads across, still remote enough for there not to be a public transit route that crosses the mountain ranges that divide the island.

That lazy old line from geography textbooks, “a land of contrasts.”

With transportation being dirt-cheap, I managed to get in quite a few miles. To the little town of Jiufen, supposedly (although apparently not) Hayao Miyazaki's inspiration for Spirited Away, with its black beamed tea-houses and hanging red lanterns that dance in the anabatic winds that blow up the mountain off the Pacific. To Shifen, with its waterfall, its fire balloons, its train going down the middle of the street to save space in the narrow gorge of the townsite. On a boat across Sun Moon Lake, where branches full of cherry blossoms hung low over turquoise-bright water. Over the Zhuilu Old Road, through the Taroko Gorge, where I clung to a narrow cliff face over a 1000-meter drop to the valley floor. Up rough trails through forests of palms, bamboo, cedar, laurel, and pine as I ascended higher and higher, and through Taiwanese aboriginal villages where woven-rattan walls still enclosed yards of clucking chickens, the faces of the forest gods carved into trees, the birthplace of the Austronesian peoples before they migrated south and west as far as Madagascar, east as far as Easter Island. On a rickety train through the half-abandoned coal mining towns above Ruifang, where old murals of merry citizens living the legacy of Sun Yat-Sen were left to gather grime along the railway sidings, where at the little free library on the station platform, about 30 books were made available to take or borrow, the only one I recognized being a Chinese translation of the Marquis de Sade's The 100 Days of Sodom.

I ate incredibly strange meal after incredibly strange meal. Noodles with pig intestines, boar in numerous forms, shoved into fatty sausages and served on skewers with cumin, massive sugar apples and durians, sausage stuffed with mullet roe, a stew of beef tendons and tripe, smoked shark, raw duck, the hearts, livers, and gizzards of geese, a sweet green bean drink, country millet wine, “lovers' tears” algae, pig blood cakes, lotus greens, some kind of funky identified slop wrapped in sticky rice that apparently merited a 20-minute wait in the eyes of the locals, raw squid with mayo, “mountain pepper” that tasted less like pepper than Kix cereal soaked in limoncello, venison stir-fried with celery, multiple kinds of fern, and the national dish, stinky tofu, both in its fried form (edible, if not something I'll seek out again, a testament to the egalitarianism of the deep fryer) and its stewed form (which smells like wet dog and has a texture like overcooked scrambled eggs).

But beyond the concept of Taiwan, I also had to address the larger concept of China.

When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's armies crossed the strait to what was then widely known by the old Portuguese name, Ilha Formosa (the beautiful island) and its outlying islands, the Pescadores (the fishermen), they claimed to be the sole legitimate inheritors of this very old idea, the idea of China.

The National Palace Museum sits on a high slope in the Taipei suburb of Shilin, and it's where the treasures of the Forbidden City were either absconded with (according to the People's Republic government) or preserved (according to the ROC government), and carefully arranged in rotating exhibits, only a fraction of the museum's vast holdings being shown at any one time.

Anyone who's ever dealt with the influx of Mainland Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia knows the score. Like Americans in Europe in the '50s, suddenly finding themselves moneyed, they behave, by and large, like absolute pigs. The Ugly American has become the Ugly Chinese in this part of the world. Sure, you could blame Mao Zedong's seizure of the Nanjing capital in 1949 and the chaos that ensued in its wake, but the truth is that Chinese civilization had been in decline for centuries... what Mao inherited was a culture on the verge of exhaustion.

Yet in the National Palace Museum, you see wonders you couldn't imagine... delicate jades, intricate strolls, pottery in the most gorgeous shades of cobalt-blue, celadon, saffron, vermilion, and aquamarine, with detail on a level that almost makes you think they had 3D printing technology to achieve this degree of mechanical intricacy. The realization hits that Ming Dynasty China was the most refined civilization the world has ever seen, and in all likelihood, ever will see. Nothing like this will probably ever exist again.

Then, a tour-group member comes by and is taking a video of the every exhibit on her phone, not even bothering to look at the damn art.

I thought of Napoleon on Elba, the man who commanded armies now stranded on an obscure island, of Thibaw Min, the last king of Burma left to rot in a port town in India, living off a government stipend and occasionally appearing in ads for cigars.

I boarded a plane at Taoyuan International Airport, did a little light duty-free shopping, looked through my notes and my few photos. Schist canyons, Tang Dynasty scrolls, boiled goose hearts.

And I thought of the dialogue in Calvino's Invisible Cities between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whose relics I'd probably seen:

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.

'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'

Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.'”