Equivocality

What I do in my Wednesday and Friday morning aerial class is mostly sucking. These are the sort of classes you take if you want to be an aerialist, a trapeze artist or something. Accordingly, my Russian instructor has made me hurt. She’s thoroughly professional, but isn’t known for being warmhearted or encouraging.

This would be easier if I wasn’t usually good at things. In fact, it was many years before I got bad at anything. When I went to university, I even made the lucky decision to study something I already knew something about. There were always these kids in the back of the class going, “wait… what??” but I was never one of them. In fact I didn’t even understand such people. I mean, how could you sit through class after class and never, you know, bother to work out what the fuck we were all talking about?

I know better now. In circus school I sit at the back of the class.

Varanasi is perhaps what I thought I might find in India. The ghats (wharves) are— well. Hindus and painted faces and temples and cows and signs painted on the narrow alleyways, and elaborate lacy (Moghul influenced?) architecture, and stone streets, and everywhere filth and garbage and exuberance. Walking along the ghats in the evening, reveling […]

As far as I can tell, most Russian scientists do not believe in global warming. This was a shock to me. It’s one of those things that is obvious when you’re on the ground in a country, yet surprisingly little known elsewhere. I discovered this during an after-dinner discussion with my Russian host. I don’t even remember how the topic came up, except that I half-jokingly proposed a tour of all the great beaches of the world before rising sea levels swallowed them up.
I believe that humans are changing the climate, while Dmitri does not. Both of us can cite references and argue our positions fluently. How did each of us form our opinions, and which one of us is using a more reliable method to find the truth?

There are myths to travel. There are mythic voyages of the ones who went before. A long time ago, somebody rode a motorcycle all through Indonesia, and then spent four months in a crumbling room in Jakarta penning the very first Lonely Planet. We all want to be that person, every last backpacking one of […]

St. Petersburg is gray and opulent. It’s splendid and magnificent, a beautiful imperial city that even 80 years of communism and eight months of sunless winter can’t completely disguise. It’s also falling apart, slightly shabby, and strangely ordinary at street level. It wants to be grand, but it isn’t, not quite. Something isn’t quite […]

Enter YouTube. Enter MySpace, Facebook, and all the others. Enter blogs, cheap DV cameras, cheap professional-grade software, cheap everything. If the point of Web 2.0 is to blur the distinction between information producer and consumer, then surely that shift applies also to art. Just as the journalism establishment has been forced to rethink itself after the advent of blogs, the Art Establishment may very soon find itself forced to reconsider all aspects of not only the creation and distribution of art, but what it means to be an artist.

Is captialism inherently flawed, violent and unfair? Are the WTO, World Bank, and IMF to blame for huge amounts of the world’s misery? Is transnational capital flow or multinational corporations an inherently bad idea? I don’t know. Read that again. I don’t know. This is what I am saying that the author of the above quoted paragraph is not. The world is big and very, very complex. I’m seeing as much as I can personally; for the rest I must rely on second-hand accounts.

I have just finished Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The Kalahari Typing School for Men. This is one of the books in a series called The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, and like all of the books in this series, it is set in Botswana, where Smith was born.

It’s a pleasant enough read, apparently aimed […]

Eventually I realized that I knew nothing about Africa.

I’d heard something about millions of people starving, about AIDS, about war, corruption, and drought. I’d seen the infomercials. I’d caught snippets of Live-8 on television, and I couldn’t avoid the GAP’s huge advertising campaign. Donate money to the cause, Bono told me. But all of it was just a bit too mythical, heavy on pathos but shy on fact. There remained for me the central unanswered question: what is wrong with Africa?

So I went there.

If not everyone has an equally sexy body, how do we deal with this fact in a fashion both healthy and realistic? This is the question I want answered.