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David Byrne Journal

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1.14.07: New Science Terms

Breathers (AKA — discrete breathers): A phenomenon in which energy piles up in an irregular and non-linear fashion, rather than dispersing evenly, as one might expect it to do. Some scientists are now saying that non-linearity is the norm in nature, despite most physicists’ tendency to focus on linear phenomena. To me, not only is “breather” a cool and creepy sounding word, but the implied non-linearity around us seems like a potentially useful metaphor for all sorts of non-physical things.

The Local Bubble: A region of interstellar space (through which we are traveling right now) where, as a possible aftermath of a supernova, space is emptier than the space around it. A lacuna in space.

Heliosphere: A gigantic magnetic bubble around our sun, enclosing all the planets, made by the solar wind (a “wind” of charged particles streaming from the sun). This bubble “protects” the solar system, and us, from receiving an excess of cosmic rays.

Local Fluff: A cloud of interstellar gas and dust, much of which floats around inside the local bubble. We are traveling thought the local fluff now (bring your dustbusters) — and will be for the next 10 to 20 thousand years, a blink of the eye in space-time. Mutation rates of life could have been affected by the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth, it is thought.

The Heliopause: The boundary or outer edge of the Heliosphere. A turbulent area. We can’t accurately measure interstellar space (or the “interstellar medium”) because the Heliopause is in the way. Voyager 1 and 2 are approaching the Heliopause — right now Voyager 1 is in the “heliosheath” — the thinning part of the Heliosphere just before you reach the boundary. It will cross into interstellar space in 10 years. Then The Fluff will have a chance to listen to Chuck Berry.

Lastly: There are 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in the human body. That means we are basically a means for bacteria to become mobile, to complete their life cycles and to procreate. We think they are living off us, but it is we who are living for them.

12.6.06: Steinberg rediscovered, Anytown USA

Steinberg rediscovered

I stopped off yesterday and saw the Saul Steinberg show (Illuminations) at the Pierpont Morgan mansion. It made me laugh out loud. Wow, he was good. Don’t know when I’ve ever smiled as much at a museum show. It’s work that is profound, clever and funny often at the same time — there’s also a lot of political commentary and sadness — and it’s not just the famous drawing of a New Yorker’s xenophobic view of the world from 9th Ave. west.

Steinberg

I flatter myself, but I think he had a similar problem to my own in his art career — he was a contemporary and friend with Rothko and Pollock and the other big U.S. official fine artists at the time, and he showed in the “right” galleries as well, but his work was never accepted as high art the way theirs was. Maybe it was the size — his stuff is small compared to theirs. Big stuff can be sold for more money. Rumor has it that Warhol began grouping his silk-screens in pairs and bunches because they would then fetch a bigger price — and they did. Maybe Steinberg’s problem was also because his work is sometimes funny — funny is not serious. Or maybe it’s because he was successful as an illustrator — his commercial success sabotaged his art career.

Anytown, USA

From the Center For Land Use Studies — a fake “town” in California where cops practice shoot-‘em-ups. (Car chase track in background.) Note the name of the bar.

Anytown

Watch out, because if you lived here, this could be you — two of the targets:

Targets

Looks like he got hit a lot more than she did. What does that say?

11.23.06: Flag Mirrors

The Cuban flag:

11_23_06_a_cuban_flag

The Puerto Rican flag:

11_23_06_b_pr_flag

10.24.06: Happy Idiots, Weimar Reality shows

Happy Idiots

If religious people do indeed live longer and are indeed happier, as some studies claim to show, then the evolutionary basis and reason for the continued existence of religion in the face of rationality and common sense is self-evident. Humans would have evolved a propensity to become religious because it helps their survival.

The truth may set you free, but you might not be as carefree and happy. It will eat away at you — what hurts you does not necessarily make you stronger.

I would maintain that a healthy (i.e. substantial) amount of denial is therefore genetically heritable, that it allows us to blithely go on (despite reading Beckett) and to ignore the basic sadness and desperation of life. We can live in an illusion — in fact we are genetically predisposed to do so. These illusions can be small — I am just as good at catching game as Bob, my rival, for example — or they can be very large — that death is not the end and that I will be rewarded for my faith and Bob, the apostate, will rot in Hell.

Either way, they allow me to go on, to persevere in the face of unlikely odds or limited chance of success. We have evolved to be less rational that one might think, and to be slightly more delusional and even stupid.

Weimar Reality shows

This was in the 20s. Erwin Lowinsky’s Weisse Maus was a cabaret night that encouraged hopelessly amateur performers to get on stage — dreamy housewives, deluded bank clerks. They were encouraged to make fools of themselves. Sounds familiar.

The Black Cat Cabaret featured theme nights — nude girls in imaginary sacrificial Mayan ceremonies, mock bullfights, and naked novices being humiliated by lesbian nuns — with rituals involving silver crucifixes.

Then came Hitler.

8.28.06: Verified

Rode out to Grand Army Plaza on Saturday and yes, Kenny is right, the arch is indeed filled with puppets. While we were there a woman and her daughter stopped by and the little girl was trying on (some of these are big puppets) some of the heads for size. A spiral staircase winds up to the crossover, where performances are sometimes held!

(They’re open Saturdays noon to 4PM tel: 718-853-7350. Link)

08_28_06_puppets

8.19-20.06: City of Machines

Went to visit the UNESCO world heritage industrial ruin in Essen. It’s not really a ruin, as it only closed a decade ago, but it does have the feeling of an abandoned city, from a sci-fi movie maybe, or City Of Lost Children. From the web: “The Zollverein mine-cokery combo started in 1847, creating the largest coal mine in the world.” The goal was steel, and the region is dotted with coalmines and foundries. Here they connected an incredibly large mine in one area with a cokery via an elevated tube that moved the coal, in train type cars, hundreds of meters through the air to the cokery — a wall of vertical ovens that would cook the coal and covert it to coke, which burns hotter, and is needed for making steel. The cokery is a factory, but looks more like a bizarre machine that puny humans attend and feed. It’s as long a two football fields, and the heat (these are ovens, after all) and the coal dust must have been unbelievable. (The venue we’re playing in Bochum was a former gas works, supplying gas to these various factory-machines.) The architects, Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, inspired by the Bauhaus style, designed the buildings. Zollverein XII remained in operation until 1986. I remember seeing it right after it closed — I was scouting locations for a film interpretation of The Forest, the piece I did with Bob Wilson. The Gilgamesh character in that story had been updated to an industrialist like Krupp, whose steel factory was nearby.

Cokery

It’s a massive site — the size of central park, almost — and has been turned into a combination park, memorial to industry and cultural center. The cultural center part is aided by the legendary German arts budget, but even so it still moves incrementally. Only one of the giant gasworks buildings has been converted into performance spaces, for example. Next to it sits a turbine hall — 2 turbines still squatting there in the semi darkness.

The Essen site sprawls across grassy paths linked by pipes and elevated conveyers. One building houses Russian artist Kabakov’s “Palace Of Projects”, a kind of imaginary world’s fair pavilion as if made by a group of high school science students — crude, handmade and full of preposterous utopian and visionary proposals. It’s like a magical Calvino book come to life.

Essen buildingscape

Another building will soon house the Essen art museum, which has outgrown its current site. There are plenty more empty shells available after that.

Buildings like these, but on a much smaller scale, have been converted in the U.S. — the Mattress Factory in Pittsburg, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., and the DIA Nabisco factory in Beacon. But nothing approaches this scale or sheer amount of metal. This region is doing a wholesale changeover from industrialkulture to the culture industry.

The next day Thomas takes me to another Essen industrial site — this one the blast furnace complex. We view a semi-outdoor venue that is often used for the Century of Song dates and an indoor black box theater above a turbine room that can be reconfigured according to the needs of the show. A possible venue for Here Lies Love?

Blast furnace

The blast furnace here, and its small hole, about half a meter across, at its base, is the ultimate focal point, the goal of this whole industrial valley — the coal mines, the cokeries, the gas works, the trains, the barges and ports are all about making the molten steel pour out this relatively small hole at the end of the process. Hard to conceive so much manpower, effort, creativity, sweat and resources with their vanishing point, their glorious final product, the glowing red steel that spews out the mouth (or ass?) of this giant furnace. All the elements brought together — by pipe, road, train and sea — all to make this substance that would be used to make other machines. Trains, rails, cars (eventually), cannons, ships, tanks, bridges, dynamos, girders, tools, guns. The steel makes machines that allow for the production of more steel.

There is one bridge over the Rhine from which one can see the smokestacks and cooling towers dotting the landscape in an amazing 360º panorama. Most of these factories are inactive, but a few are still puffing away. I was told that during its heyday the Ruhr valley was like Pittsburg, where the skies were so darkened by the amount of smoke that one had to turn on lamps in the daytime.

Someone else said to me, “it was here that the two world wars were ‘made’.” It’s puzzling then that the factory buildings are still standing — Berlin and Dresden were reduced to smoking hulks while so many of these factories and steelworks, so essential to the German war effort, survived. Did the Allies think they would do a Halliburton and take them over for themselves, and therefore they spared them the bombing? Or maybe they realized that without industry a defeated Germany would have no possibility of reconstruction — they would be shattered refugees — desperate, pathetic, ready for anything that would restore some dignity.

Before/after photos of bombing in Essen (Link):

Essen factory bombing

And more about the bombing of the factory (Link):

Q. During WWII, what made Essen, Germany, a primary target for combined US/British bomber forces?
A. Founded by Alfred Krupp and greatly extended by his son Friedrich the Krupp iron and steel works at Essen became one of the most powerful industrial combines in the world and the largest manufacturer of arms in WWI. In the mid-1930s the factory was the centre of German rearmament. Bombing had destroyed 70 per cent of the works by 1945 and the Allies confiscated the remainder but the courts restored the works to the Krupp family in 1951. See The Encyclopedia of World War Two edited by Thomas Parrish.

Thomas W. tells us that the Chinese wanted to buy this entire site when it closed — their own coalfields are not entirely depleted — not just yet — so they can actually reanimate this creature. As this Essen colliery/cokery was the last one in the area to close the local government hesitated approving the sale, and decided instead that their glorious industrial past should be remembered, memorialized rather than obliterated and forgotten, so they declined that particular offer. They call them industruialkulture monuments. Cathedrals of Industry. Other nearby sites had been sold in entirety to the Chinese — in Dortmund a similar site was completely dismantled and shipped to China. Hundreds of workers were shipped in, housed in tents on site, meals and facilities provided, as they took the beasts apart. How did they do it? We gaze at the tangle of pipes around us, the huge metal machines that dwarf human scale. How could anyone keep track of the parts? Where would you begin? The scale is like ants taking a car apart and then reassembling it — and hoping it works.

Empty industrial room

Inside smokestack Bochum

The face - Bochum

Last night was our first performance — 3 encores, so I guess we did all right. I was pretty nervous — if you get off the rails with the orchestra they don’t accommodate, they keep right on playing what they’ve got in front of them… so you have to kind of surf their wave, and if you’re successful the connection feels natural and the intensity of my singing, for example, will anticipate what they’re going to do. If it works it doesn’t sound like anyone is following or being led; it sounds like you and the orchestra are emotionally linked. Luckily for me many of the songs have some kind of groove, so I can focus one ear on Kenny’s percussion or hi-hat and hope the orchestra and Anthony the conductor do the same. Watching and paying attention to Anthony’s baton is fun and exciting, but conductors tend to give the rhythm almost a full beat ahead to an orchestra — sort of a “this is where we’re going not where we’re at” — so looking for a downbeat from the baton is hopeless — but the tempo and the crescendos and diminuendos are all there.

The orchestral Philly soul version of "Here Lies Love" went over well, as did "Un Di Felice", which was a surprise, as I thought I’d get giggles from the classical crowd on that one.

8.18.06: Volare, Klein, Puppets

A story from Thomas Wordehoff, one of the coordinators of this festival:

“Volare”, that song some of us remember as a kitsch lounge standard, and others from a TV commercial advertising a car of the same name, was about…Yves Klein, the painter! The chorus of the song goes “volare”, but the original title is “Nel blu dipinto di blu”, a reference to the famous Klein blue that the painter made his signature.

I wonder if volare, meaning “to fly”, is a reference to the famous photo of Klein caught in mid air, seeming to be doing a swan dive out of a Parisian window?

08_18_06_a_yves_klein

Drummer Kenny Wollesen revealed this morning at breakfast that the “arc de triomphe” at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn is hollow, and it houses the New York puppet lending library! The arch is filled with puppets! In fact, a spiral staircase winds up and the walls are filled with them, many life-sized, categorized by type, one of which is insects. (Verification)

08_18_06_puppetlibrary

5.8.06: There is Chemistry Between Them

Recent research and discoveries connecting chemistry and love:

• Yes, Always. Prairie voles are monogamous and meadow voles are not. However, by injecting meadow voles with a virus that “carries” the prairie vole gene to the meadow vole’s brain, the meadow vole becomes monogamous. Ladies, take note.
But vice versa — if prairie voles are given drugs that block their vasopressin receptors they become as promiscuous as their meadow cousins. Dudes!

• Trust Me. Oxytocin is a chemical intimately related to emotions and sex. Its levels rise after orgasm in women, during arousal in men (note the timing difference) and the levels rise even from touching and massage (Kevin Costner, read on.) Oxytocin also boosts trust. Given a whiff of oxytocin spray, hypothetical “investors” would hand over all their money to anonymous “trustees” with no guarantee of return. Kenneth Lay, please hand over your aerosol can.

• Bad Judgment. Left on our own we tend to select partners who have a set of genes known as the MHC complex that are dissimilar to our own. Pairing these different gene sets produces healthier offspring. It is thought we do this by scent. (Here’s to sensory abilities we didn’t know we had.) However, women on the pill tend to select men whose MHC is the same as their own. Something gets blocked or short-circuited. They make what is not necessarily the best choice…but, they won’t have a child anyway, so it all evens out.

• It’s Dope.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter whose levels rise when we fall in love. The levels also rise when we snort coke or pop amphetamines…or exercise. (That’s why the long bike ride I took the other day was such fun! And that’s why jocks are, well, jocks.) This does not answer the question “does dopamine ‘cause’ love?...or is it just a by-product?”

• Chocolate. The neurotransmitter phenylethylamine (PEA) is also known as the “love” molecule. It induces “excitement and apprehension” according to the magazine New Scientist. Sounds like a roller coaster ride if you ask me, and maybe that’s not a coincidence. PEA is also found in chocolate and its levels also rise when you exercise. So, when I jog am I getting a little bit of that loved up feeling and is that good or bad for my personal life? The ancient Maya valued chocolate (cocoa pods) possibly more than gold.

To be honest, the prospect of oxytocin sprays and chocolate flavored PEA drops is frightening (and tempting). It’s hard enough out there without chemicals clouding the issue even more. And what happens when some scam artists and white-collar crooks get a hold of this stuff — if they haven’t already? I see a counter-development of substances that can tell if your “friend” is using, spraying, or not. Sort of a Breathalyzer test for love potions.

3.27.06: Tulum

There are soldiers on the beach. A couple of them appear at one end and then, after sauntering leisurely, overdressed in their camos for this heat, they disappear around some rocks at the far end. I’m reminded of my military prejudices. Although in some countries and in some places they are seen as representatives of the people — they are usually ordinary boys from ordinary homes — I cannot help but view them as representatives of power, the government and politics. To me they represent the government’s will to manage the people, often their own people, not to protect them.

Some of this prejudice probably stems from my youthful experience and politics — the debacle of Vietnam and then the Cold War paranoia established in my mind the military as oppressive, righteous, frightening and narrow-minded. They were by nature, in this view, serving the interests of the ruling class — and still are. The lads have been brainwashed to believe they are fighting for freedom and peace — lies that have been told to soldiers for thousands of years.

So, when I see them on the beach my instinct is to stiffen, though I suspect that in Mexico it might be some poor Mayan community that is being squashed and not a handful of pale tourists.

I realize that my instincts are unfair. In some places and at some times the military does indeed represent the people and not just the greedy adventuring of those in power. Sometimes the military persist as politicians come and go, are made up of skilled professionals out to do a clear-cut job, and will stand up to the lying politicians and ally themselves with the population. There comes a point where their own professionalism is at stake.

This happened with the People Power movement in the Philippines in the mid 80s, and it threatens to happen now in Iraq. The U.S. military may just bring the Bush-Cheney adventure to a speedier close. The soldiers are being stretched beyond reasonable limits, the troop commanders are being asked to put their men in danger — and for what? They’re approaching their limits. Has there ever been a revolt emerging from within the U.S. military?

 

The Maya have many Gods and “saints” — some dedicated to tattoo artists, comedians, lovers and….suicides! And, of course — corn (maize). Their staff of life. Archeologists and anthropologists propose that the structure of their mythology is at heart maize-related. They see their myth of a God who dies and goes into the ground only to miraculously sprout back to life as a metaphor for planting and of the mystery of agriculture. The God is a seed, dead it would seem, who, when buried in the earth, suddenly returns, living again, bringing benefits for all.

Isn’t Jesus the same thing? Dead, buried in the ground, a seed in a hole, miraculously returning to life with benefits for all.

What do we have now, when for many that faith is gone? Post Enlightenment we put our faith in science and technology. Jung proposed that Flying Saucers were mechanical God metaphors — perfect mandala-shaped symbols from the sky — technology perfected, transcendent, loving, beneficent.

Flying Saucers

Flying Saucers

I would look at our art and museums as well for an answer — our contemporary secular temples. Modernism certainly celebrated the machine, the machine-made, the shiny and mass-produced. The cult of scientific self-improvement — perfection, progress. It’s all a kind of faith.

Modernism, for the most part, has passed. Science and intellectual rigor — its handmaidens — are revealed to be as slanted and biased as religions ever were. The great industrial revolutions did not deliver utopia. What will take their place?

A surge of millennial movements is everywhere. The oil and fossil fuels that powered the explosion, expansion and development of previous centuries are running out. An end is within imagination if not within sight. A way of life is coming to an end. The plains Indians created a millennial cult as their world collapsed under the Westward expansion — the Ghost Dance.

This movement found its origin in a Paiute Indian named Wovoka, who announced that he was the messiah come to earth to prepare the Indians for their salvation. Representatives from tribes all over the nation came to Nevada to meet with Wovoka and learn to dance the Ghost Dance and to sing Ghost Dance songs.

In early October of 1890, Kicking Bear, a Minneconjou, visited Sitting Bull at Standing Rock. He told him of the visit he and his brother-in-law, Short Bull, had made to Nevada to visit Wovoka. They told him of the great number of other Indians who were there as well. They referred to Wovoka as the Christ and told of the Ghost Dance that they had learned and the way that the Christ had flown over them on their horseback ride back to the railroad tracks, teaching them Ghost Dance songs. And they told him of the prophecy that, next spring, when the grass was high, the earth would be covered with new soil, burying all the white men. The new soil would be covered with sweet grass, running water and trees; the great herds of buffalo and wild horses would return. All Indians who danced the Ghost Dance would be taken up into the air and suspended there while the new earth was being laid down. Then they would be replaced there, with the ghosts of their ancestors, on the new earth. Only Indians would live there then.

 

On our way to Coba we stop at a large roadside restaurant. A giant thatched roof over an open area with plastic chairs and wooden tables.  A sign on the way in says “Di no a las drogas” (Say no to drugs). As we’re leaving the girls point out to me that one of the waiters was dealing to a group of guys in a pickup parked near us in the parking lot.

Over one of our meals the girls trade notes on who at school is faking ADD. It seems that if you are certified as having ADD, and better yet if you are on medication, you get extra time to do homework, take tests (including SATs) and it doesn’t go on your record. You’ve got a built-in excuse and the world will cut you some slack. So at least half the students are on Ritalin or some similar drug. Some are “diagnosed” but don’t take the drug, as it interferes with their other activities (sports). But many are zonked much of the time.

I tend to see this as a big pharma conspiracy. Create a public awareness of a new medical “disease”, supply “experts” to document it and then, miraculously and conveniently, provide the “cure”. The aim of big Pharma is naturally not to get everyone well, but to convince everyone they are sick.

 

I am constantly reminding myself of what was happening in Europe while the classic Mayan civilization was at its height. Early middle ages, massive cathedrals being built as well as scattered walled cites. Learning and knowledge confined to proscribed sects — priests and alchemists. Little general exchange of information, goods or communication. The general population fairly well off and content as far as diet and health goes. (This contradicts what we were taught...but from reading the French historian Braudel he seemed to imply that daily life was O.K. — my sense is that there was some revisionism going on and the middle ages — the "dark" ages — were the victim of Enlightenment propaganda.)

The art too was similar — exaggerated and stylized. It is sometimes assumed that this approach was a regression from the high realism of the classic period, but that attitude is not universally accepted now (particularly as our own art is so abstract and stylized.) Stylization and abstraction of figures and scenes taps into a more transcendent and universal emotion. It’s a choice, not a lack of technique.

The Mayan images are filled, overflowing, with resonant symbols. The king stands in profile, animal faces surround his waist, curlicues of smoke emerge from his brow, and on his head there is a massive biomorphic crown surmounted by yet another creature. He is a piece of living theater. His sandals are jaguar skin, his cloak, puma. He appropriates attributes from these animals. Feathers form a huge array behind him, like a heavenly aura or the rays emanating from the Virgin de Guadalupe. He’s a walking palimpsest of mythological symbols. Layer upon layer, super dense and baroque. He can be emotionally felt and read. He’s a mobile temple.

 

The Maya survive. After decades of U.S.-supported genocide and persecution in Guatemala they are achieving some measure of power and respect there — the survivors, anyway. In Mexico the government push for tourism has had a profound effect on the culture. It destroys what it reveres. Like stockbrokers and merchant bankers moving into an arty neighborhood. There are still completely Mayan towns, but much of the land often gets appropriated and turned into gated resorts.

Gated Resort

I suppose our little group is a guilty party too, even though we were staying in more modest “eco” accommodations.

4 days ago a photo-op at Chichen Itza:

Chichen Itza

3.26.06: Mayan backstory (continued)

Geology as destiny

So, it’s proposed that given the weird water situation, and the fact that limestone and its soil are notoriously limited for agriculture, the Maya did amazingly well, given the extreme physical limitations of their environment. As they mastered field and crop rotation, water and irrigation, and plants that could grow in the poor soil, their population grew — to the millions, it is estimated. So many survived on such a fragile ecology that when the scales tipped — there was a drought that lasted for years — the civilization began to fracture. This was all well before the contact with Europeans… and one wonders at possible contemporary parallels — economies based almost entirely on oil, for example.

First contact

According to Lost Cities of the Maya (Baudez/Picasso) the first meeting between the Maya and Europeans was with Christopher Columbus in 1502. The ships of Columbus appeared to the Mayans first as floating islands in the bay of Honduras, islands with only 3 leafless trees on each of them (the ships’ masts.) The local king met them in the royal canoe, bringing gifts, and a pleasant exchange took place. The Mayans were slightly taken aback at the hairiness of the faces of the Europeans — to the Maya this made them appear monkey-like.

These Europeans never set foot on Mayan soil.

The next meeting was not so pleasant. A European boat was shipwrecked off the coast of Jamaica and the scrawny survivors washed up on the shores of the Yucatan.

They were taken to the Mayan city where they were seen as a God-given opportunity for sacrifice. Handy as well that they were complete strangers, so no local grievances would arise. A group of them were then sacrificed almost immediately — in the accepted manner, one assumes — the still-beating heart torn out of the chest (exactly how this operation was performed by the Maya was not described — I’ve read Aztec accounts.)

However, as these “gifts” for sacrifice were all so undernourished and scrawny they were not the best quality as sacrificial material goes. So the remaining survivors were locked up and began to enjoy the local cuisine, until they too were sacrificed. All except 2. One man became a loyal slave to the king and another managed to escape to a neighboring town where he married a local gal and settled down.

Others followed. Though the subjugation of the Maya didn’t happen as quickly or easily as the Spanish in particular might have hoped. Shades of George Bush and Co. Murderous priests intent on destroying the local culture and Christianizing the Maya, gold seekers, conquistadores and others all made inroads, but couldn’t conquer the little people.

None of the Europeans at first could believe that the little people around them, living in tiny villages of thatched huts with dirt floors, could have possibly built the massive complexes that surrounded them. How could these people have done this? And then how could they have no recollection of it?

The Europeans came up with other explanations. One explorer believed that the great Mayan cities were a remnant made by survivors of Atlantis, the disappeared mid-Atlantic utopia. Others thought that, somewhat logically, the builders of the near east must have made their way here — the ziggurats of Babylon and Sumer were similar, no? Romantically inclined explorers proposed that the classical Romans must have landed there. And if they didn’t stay, they at least imparted some of their classical skills and wisdom to the locals before departing. It seemed obvious that these locals could never have come up with this by themselves.

Priests and missionaries, possibly viewing the monstrous faces and serpents adorning the Mayan temples and other buildings, became convinced that only the Devil himself could have made these cites. They could only be the cites of the Evil One himself! Ay!

From a Catherwood painting — one can see where the missionaries got their notions.

Catherwood painting

Lastly, post-conquest, even some Maya themselves became convinced that their own ancestors could not have created the network of cites and roads around them. They saw that the only people they knew who seemed capable of such great works were their new masters. So when asked who built the cities they answered, “The Spanish.”

Wandering through these sites I ask myself, “What is this fascination with ruins? Explorers followed by tour busses, all gazing in rapt wonder and awe — what’s the deal? It’s just a pile of rocks, right?” Ruins are a classic romantic image, used again and again in paintings and poems…and now in movies and TV…of a once great Ozymandias and his people whose only legacy is an impressive and inscrutable pile of rubble. The Europeans were endlessly fascinated, as the planet seemed to be revealed to be filled with the remnants of faded greatness, now covered in jungles or desert sands.

Ogling ruins is way of meditating on our own inevitable deaths, and also, one assumes, of acknowledging our own hubris and that of our own civilizations. A humbling reminder that, yes, it all does return to dust, no matter how tall, massive or impregnable the buildings might be. There is, I admit, impressive survival — the tombs of Egypt — but it’s all for nothing in the end. The collapse, one senses, is always inevitable, despite leaders’ claims to eternal good and greatness.

I asked myself, “Where are the contemporary ruins? Where are the ruins in progress? Where are our once great cites that are being abandoned as these ones were?”

I came up with Detroit. (Sorry, sports fans.) Vast stretches of the city are already uninhabited, crumbling. The central temples, yes, are still in use — the temples for sports, conventions and ritualistic music concerts — but for how much longer? Will the beautiful deco buildings erected as working shrines by what were once the largest companies in the world (GM, Ford) soon be abandoned? They’re already surrounded by a no man’s wasteland; it seems only a matter of time. And then how long before people wander into that zone and ask themselves, “Who built this incredible building?”

Detroit inner city urban decay (thanks to Ian Freimuth for the photos):

Detroit, urban decay

Detroit, urban decay

Or New Orleans, possibly, the first urban victim of global warming.

I can also imagine formerly vast Soviet cities in the Russian heartland that may have already been abandoned. Cities, like Detroit, of steel, industry and manufacturing. With temples to the Party and the Worker, now derelict  — filled with grass and stray cats, like the once great factories of the Ruhr valley.

The beautiful Fisher building, Detroit:

Detroit Fisher Building


Part 2, Tulum

Various European explorers canvassed the region during the 1800s. John Stephens and Catherwood, his illustrator, published books based on their travels around 1841 that entranced the English-speaking world. Catherwood’s engravings and paintings were romantic, as were Waldeck’s before him, but Catherwood’s possessed more accuracy and had the aura of scientific objectivity, as did Stephens’ texts. They still indulged in the romantic aesthetic of Lost Worlds and were entertaining as mysterious and dangerous adventures, but their renderings of the architecture and reliefs were more accurate and less pseudo-classical than those of Waldeck or Castañeda. Catherwood used a camera lucida, an optical device that made drawing more accurate. It made the drawings and lithos look like what the eye was seeing. (See Hockney’s theories about historical artists using scientific optical devices.)

(You use the lens to view your subject and the drawing becomes more like copying, to our sensibilities, a photograph. Here is a camera Lucida. $7 at the time.)

Camera Lucida

Here is one of his works — apocalyptic and yet accurate:

Rendering

Naturally, like any kid now who has seen Scooby Doo cartoons or Tomb Raider, the 19th century world was entranced when they saw these images. These were tourist brochures for the unconscious. A confirmation, in fact, of what the European imagination had seen only in their darkest dreams. Freudian and Jungian images, before those men existed.

Charney, a French explorer, visited Uxmal, the site pictured in the postcard style view earlier. He came upon the large plaza just beyond the pyramid of the Magician (a structure of 3 low buildings now called the Nunnery) and decided he needed to stay there in order not to waste time traveling to and from the nearby village where they had set off. He decided to camp inside one of the rooms that faced the large plaza. The Mayan helpers begged off — they wouldn’t stay the night — which he naturally attributed to silly local superstition. You can tell what’s coming next.

The first two nights he set up his gear and a hammock in one of the ancient rooms and nothing happened. But on the third night he awoke in the middle of the night to find himself covered in huge bugs, crawling all over him, even in his face. They were everywhere, and they were sucking his blood. He fought back, massacring the lot, in a horrible bloody rampage. He went back to sleep, but it was no use, they had discovered him.

He moved to another room — the plaza has many rooms facing it — and had another good night. But soon they discovered him again. He moved once more, and the insects found him once again. It seems the native “superstitions” were not so crazy after all.

His account of all this, like Stephens’ book with Catherwood’s engravings, could be seen as an early blog, an entertaining (I hope) journal, of which this one is a much abbreviated contemporary example.

Why are the Mayan Gods so monstrous? Here is one from the Lost Cites book that to me looks an awfully lot like the monster in Predator:

Monster

Is the spirit world so full of danger and death that it is almost entirely populated by demons of one sort or another? Are there no angels or beautiful Goddesses? Is there no blissful heaven with glowing maidens beckoning? Are these scary creatures possibly a truer reflection of the natural world and the struggle for survival than the images of Athena and Aphrodite? The word for love in Mayan — yail — means both love and pain.

Here is a (protected) skull from the center of a ball court. This game was for keeps.

Skull

Here’s one that looks like Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars 6. The European eyes are a conceit — added by the European artist, but the teeth — those are meant to be teeth — are accurate.

Darth Vader-esque

Pain was something the Maya were familiar with. Not only were prisoners and slaves ritually sacrificed (children — bastards and orphans — were highly prized for this) but even the elite during the Classic period let their own blood be shed. On specific dates men would use a stingray spine or an awl to pierce their penises and, as is shown on some stelae, the holy blood would drip down. The blood splattered on “paper” which was then used to anoint the idols. Women used a different technique, of course. They would draw a thorny branch or tendril (like that of a rose) through their tongues! Priests engaged in fire walking. Needles were jabbed through ears, cheeks and lips as well, but that all seems tame these days.

Many of the Gods, and many of the personal doppelgängers, are animal/human hybrids. Dog-faced or jaguar-faced humans. Parrot beaks on jaguar heads on a human body. And of course the serpent with feathers — now confirmed by dinosaur science to have actually existed in some form. Birds are indeed descended from dinosaurs, and flying feathered lizards did exist as one time — so this stuff is not all imaginary, it’s not all the result of those peyote enemas.

Part of the Mayan aesthetic mixed aspects of youth and age in these creatures — a creature with a child’s body and the face of an old man was common. The Gods, being of many aspects and avatars, crossed what we see as the line between humans and animals. The Maya saw no such dividing line.

What if, and this is a big if, not all of these chimeras were mythical? What if not all of them were figments of the Mayan imagination? What if the Maya had some kind of genetic science, lost of us now, which enabled a limited creation of these monsters? Don’t laugh. Plenty of the world’s knowledge has been lost, though much of it has been “found” again — the science and astronomy of the Arabs was “lost” to Europeans for centuries, then “rediscovered”, resulting in great leaps forward. Other skills and techniques of ancient cultures are still a mystery to us.

So, given that we now know you can indeed mix a pig with a fish, maybe these people actually did it. Maybe the monsters on these walls and frescoes are not mythical, but are historical. This nasty dog below probably existed. It is known that dogs were bred to be hairless (the escuintle still exists) and barkless.

Dog

It took centuries for archeologists to realize that much of the rest of what is left carved in stone is historical. Previously they had thought it was all religious décor. These are the records of kings, of their times. There are kings entombed in the pyramids — well, in some of them, for sure. Long descending stairs — purposely blocked with earth and huge triangular stones — lead into the heart of the structures, where bodies of the kings lie, the desiccated corpse wearing a beautiful jade mask. The carvings illustrate real battles, real rulers and…real monsters?

The beauty aesthetic too is far from ours. Babies, right after they were born, had their heads bound between two boards, to achieve, as far as possible, the aesthetically pleasing look of fore and aft flattening.

Being cross-eyed was also seen as a pleasing look, so mothers would leave the babies with a beads on a string dangling right between their eyes, in the hopes of training the eyes to go more inward.

Crosseyed

O.K., this seems a sure sign of cultural and aesthetic relativism. We might like to think that our ideas of the beautiful — swollen botoxed lips, emaciated women, men obviously on steroids — are universal. Or at least approach some universal ideal of physical beauty. Others maintain that the Kouros figures and sculptures of Michaelangelo and others evince the true ideal.

Classical Sculptures

But no, as we can see, there are others whose ideal is, and this is but one example, a cross-eyed pinhead, so where is the universal ideal?

Evolutionary biologists maintain that the universal ideal is found in symmetry and suitability for child bearing and rearing, for women, and survival and security, for men. The signs we interpret as beauty, they contend, are actually obvious outward signals of biological health and potentiality. Do swollen lips do that?

More to come.

3.24.06: Coba

First things first.

My reading material tells me that the Maya took hallucinogenic enemas. Amongst the materials found at digs and matched to images on walls or codexes were leather and/or rubber tubing and narrow bone funnels for inserting up the bum. Through these would flow pulque (a fermented agave brew) or chih (dunno what this drink is)…or hallucinogenic teas. The Huichol (central Mexico) still do this with infusions made from Peyote buttons. No pictures available.

25 years ago I seem to remember that the roads other than the main Merida-Cancún highway were mostly dirt tracks trough the forest. Cabanas existed around Tulum, but not the hotels that are going up now. Highways and road improvement proceed rapidly. In fact, many of the newer nice paved roads that interlace the peninsula are not on any of the maps. They can't make new maps fast enough to keep up with progress.

Backstory

The Maya were possibly the last large “civilized” group of indigenous people in the new world to capitulate to the European invaders. Yes, there are still small scattered groups in the Amazon, and the Lacondon (a Mayan subsidy) in Chiapas have preserved some of their way of life, but the Maya were still fairly organized in large cites when the Spanish arrived — though their massive empire had dwindled a lot. (It's estimated there were millions in the larger empire, which may have been part of the problem.) They were still worshipping at the pyramids in 1930 when the Mexican government took control of some of the sites and instituted tourism and conservation programs. That makes 5,000 years (at least) of continuous culture — some kind of record.

When the Spanish moved in they created a series of race-based “castes” based on the various racial mixtures that occurred in the New World (results of interbreeding between European, Indigenous and African peoples.) The castes have curious names — Lobo (wolf), Tentenelayre (have you up in the air) and Saltapatras (a jump backwards.)

The Maya rose up against the invaders a number of times. They fought guerilla style — so the Spanish could never fight them on open ground or in broad daylight. The Spanish, for decades, took terrible losses…there was no central head to cut off as there had been with the Aztecs. In 1847 the Mayan uprising was called the Caste War and a cult of talking crosses arose simultaneously. The rebel bases were at Carrillo Puerto and Tulum. When Carrillo Puerto fell it was left to Tulum, which was ruled by Maria Uicab, the Queen of Tulum, to defend the remaining Mayan forces.

These forces were not militarily subdued by the Mexicans until the early 20th century. Whether they were ever culturally subdued is doubtful.

The tiny Maya endure. The civilization is in the people, embedded and quiet. The temples have crumbled, only 5 codexes remain in all the world out of thousands, the roads between pyramids are overgrown, but the little people who were always there are still there. Living life not so different that what they always did. The kings and priests are gone, but the people remain.

Coe suggests that much about a culture can be explained by geology and agricultural science. This is a bit the Guns, Germs and Steel school of analysis. The upper Yucatan peninsula has no rivers. No rivers! Where on Earth are there NO rivers? So, after the rainy season, there is no fresh water. It has all sunk into the earth or evaporated. Yes, there are giant ceramic jars in abundance, but how many months of dry season will that last?

The peninsula is a limestone plateau, heaved up from the seabed where the limestone was created and deposited. It's flat as a pancake. The rainwater seeps down into the porous stone and eventually etches out caves, as often happens in limestone-rich areas. In the Yucatan this is where the water goes — it ends up in underground lakes, ponds and aquifers. Occasionally the roof of one of these caves in, and a way becomes available to the fresh water below. The Spanish called these cenotes. Here's one:

Ceynote

It's hard to see, but in the lower left corner there is a wooden stand with a mattress propped up vertically at the back left. A kid has rigged a zip line that runs from the far right earth surface down into the hole — if you can't stop, the mattress will cushion your impact. For a small fee you can try your luck.

Here's a painting of how the ancient Maya got water:

Ladder

Like something out of Myst or some work of 19th century imaginative fiction….like those on which the Indiana Jones series was based.

Nowadays many of the cenotes are tourist attractions. We descended into one near the Coba site (many former cites were build to include cenotes or with ones very nearby.) From the surface one can see a hole in the ground about as big as a child's wading pool. Inside is a spiral stairway that goes down about 4 stories. At the bottom was a Mexican man making sure no one broke off any stalagmites, and a crystal clear pond. Clear fresh filtered water. I went swimming. In other cenotes one can go scuba diving through various underground chambers.

Underground Swimming

3.13.06: Adelaide: Surfing, cuisine, syntax, megafauna, last show

Went for another surfing bout yesterday. Last time was about a year ago in Perth. Mauro was the organizer, naturally. He's the most avid surfer. We had to drive south, to the bottom of the peninsula, about an hour away, where the actual sea was. Lovely beach, if a bit windy, and I could get up on the board as far as my knees and steer with them — and be hands free!

Saw llamas, parrots, kangaroos and some ibis as we drove back north.

Bird

Stopped at McLaren Vale winery area for an early dinner on the way back and fell out when I got back to the hotel.

More Aussie cuisine:

• Hundreds and thousands — (also known as freckles) — Tiny candy sprinkles.
• Spiders — ice cream in a soda.
• Capsicum — red or yellow peppers (not the hot ones.)

Here are some local election posters — Keep those bastards honest, Kate!:

Election Posters

Nice piece in 3 Quarks Daily on Trapped In The Closet. I’m jealous. It’s a lovely musing that begins with observations of this surprising pop phenomena and segues into thoughts about how our brains organize our thoughts and how we tell stories — with some words I’ve never heard before.

“…if it's true that it all comes down to syntax, then you could also say that human thought can be divided into two basic categories, paratactic and hypotactic. They are the two most elemental ways of putting thought together.”

Ganda cooked over 100 dumplings for everyone last night in her room after the show. Dana’s mom dropped off cupcakes that spelled “Here Lies Love”.

I went by the museum and took some pictures of their lovely dioramas — but was stopped for using a tripod. But I managed to get a few off before I had to put it away.

Diorama

Tonight is the last show…until when?

Giant animals that used to live in Australia:

Megafauna

In Pleistocene times, giant "megafauna" inhabited Australia. These animals mysteriously disappeared in Australia about 15,000 years ago, including:

• The great rhinoceros-like Diprotodon, the giant kangaroo standing 3 metres (10 feet) high
• A giant marsupial wombat
Megalania, a goanna 6 metres (12 feet) long
Quinkana, a land crocodile 3 metres long
Wonambi, a python 7 metres long
• The flightless birds, Genyornis (giant emu) and Dromornis, which matched the great Moa in size

Here they are seen in a kind of Antipodean garden of paradise.

Aboriginal stories which have been recorded throughout Australia indicate clearly that the animals were a part of the environment of early man on this continent, remembered with both fear and awe for generations.

The oral tradition goes back that far…15, 000 years! It makes written history seem — well, not worth the papyrus it’s written on.

Tonight’s show was the last one here. It was probably the best played one we’ve done. Really beginning to lock and rock on many tunes. Kind of sad to be putting the performances on hiatus for a while, but we’ll see. Got lots to think about — how the narrative can be transmitted without my talking bits — which are fun but kill the momentum, etc. etc.

Had a pot luck late lunch in Graham’s room…almost everyone brought food or cooked food in the hotel kitchenettes and we had loads of leftovers that we ate after the show.

12.25.05: Trip to the Philippines

Manila: Why am I here?

(See previous postings re: Here Lies Love.)

Here’s a quote from James Hamilton-Paterson’s book America’s Boy, one of the best accounts of the Marcos era, putting it in the context of both village life and global politics. From the chapter "The Politics Of Fantasy":

“There are moments when it seems that the world’s affairs are transacted by dreamers. There is a sadness here in the spectacle of nations, no less than individuals, helping each other along with their delusions. This way what is thought to be clear sighted pragmatism may actually be shoring up a regime’s ideology whose hidden purpose is itself nothing more than to assuage the pain of a single person’s unhappy past.”

And these quotes from "Imperial Grunts":

“Just as the stirring poetry and novels of Rudyard Kipling celebrated the work of British Imperialism…the American artist Frederic Remington, in his bronze sculptures and oil paintings, would do likewise for the conquest of the Wild West.”

“‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain I heard from the troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq…the War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.”

These two quotes encapsulate for me why I am here in the Philippines. Granted it is a very short trip. And at a peculiar time of year. The Here Lies Love music project might be about this conflation of fantasy, personal pain and politics that runs through history and that played itself out here in a dramatically obvious way. Hamilton-Paterson nails it better than I could.

I suppose besides gathering some more research and archival material (hours spent watching archival materials and looking through old books at the Cultural Center are missing from this journal.) I hope also to catch and absorb some whiff of the Philippine ethos, sensibility and awareness — by osmosis — and by conversation, too. I believe that politics is an expression of the landscape —  the streets, eroticism and hum-drum lives — as much it is of backrooms, ideologies and legislature. Geography, religion, sex, weather, music, food — these all contribute to a national policy and how it functions.

As in current genetic thinking, the word “expression” is appropriate here; just as there are elements in the genes waiting for chemical keys to allow the cells to express themselves as a chicken liver or a human heart, there are elements in a place that trigger expression in action and in culture. Much human behavior is a kind of expression of latent keys — genetic or geographical and cultural — unlocking tiny doors.

Joel Torre, an actor, generously met me at the airport,  and everyone said hi to him as we walked to the car pickup area. We drove by the Cultural Center on the way to the hotel — a giant Lincoln-Center-type edifice that Imelda built.

The disco music has stopped outside my hotel. I must say, given that I’m filled with thoughts of the HLL project, the music is actually inspiring rather than annoying — though I’m glad it doesn’t go on all night. A song with a radical synth squealy pulse gave me some ideas. A cover of “In Da Club” was the last thing I heard as I pedaled towards the old city center. (I brought my folding bike.)

Binondo is the area I end up biking to. Karaoke machines are everywhere. Even little stalls in the funky old city center have them. This is an area of crowded winding streets and vendors with tiny one-table emporiums. The traffic slows in these areas, or is relegated to bikes and little trucks that bring supplies and goods to the vendors, but other traffic avoids these areas, as the narrow streets are too crowded with pedestrians and the overflow from the stalls. Here the Jeepneys are the largest vehicles — slowly inching forward while attempting to pick up passengers — but I move faster than most of them on my bike. It’s a great place for walking, and for and buying fruits, vegetables, washcloths, bootleg CDs and DVDs, Christmas gifts (at this time of year,) fresh fish, medicines — anything that can be displayed stacked in little piles on wooden tables.

Why is it that all 3rd world markets are the same? I was reminded of Kuala Lumpur, Cartagena, Marrakech, Salvador, and Oaxaca, and many other places. It’s almost as if these areas were all designed by the same person the world over — they organically take the same form everywhere. The human scale and pleasant chaos are part of the unconscious though carefully worked out plan, as are the smells and piles of refuse here and there. One of the stall owners sweeps the rainwater and mud out of the street with a broom. There is a system of maintenance. I suppose it’s a case of similar goods and scale automatically self regulating the manner in which they are all sold, how and where. I’m glad the whole city hasn’t been malled, as some of the guidebooks claim. This is a really nice area to stroll in if you don’t mind smells and bustle.

Oddly enough, one could say some of the same things about the more built-up areas of many cities — that many of them could have also been designed by the same person — the most widespread ubiquitous designer in the world. Mr. High rise and mall design at your service. Somehow I think there is a little more conscious borrowing at work in the business towers and mall design than in this pleasant hodge podge of stalls and tiny shops.

Along the bayside walk closer to my hotel there are outdoor restaurants, many of which feature cover bands. As rumored, the bands are all surprisingly good — if by good you mean amazingly faithful in their ability to reproduce well known songs. The singing and playing is uniformly competent and professional, though of course unoriginal, which is by design. One man sings on a little stage with glowing plastic Santas on either side of him. I wonder if I should reconsider using one of these bands or these singers for HLL?

I bike past the U.S. embassy, which I first mistook for either a military base or a walled in luxury hotel complex.

Sol’s History Lesson

I meet up with a group of people whom I’d previously contacted at film director Antonio “Butch” Perez’s apartment, which is conveniently around the corner from the hotel. Marcos’ former cameraman Edgar Navarro and his very pregnant wife sit beside me and we are joined by editor Jessica Zafra (her magazines Flip and Manila Envelope, both in English, are wonderful,) poet and columnist Krip Yuson, photographer Neal Oshima, restauranteuse Susan Roxas, performance artist Carlos Celdran, adman David Guerrero, …and eventually even more filmmakers and writers.

Butch’s place is beautiful — tropical Zen sparse decor with a view over some tin roofs to the expanse of Manila Bay. “Not so many years ago this was one of the quietest places in town,” he says. “But now there are car stereos and burglar alarms, police klaxons and sirens, open-air karaoke on the bayfront and more scooter traffic, so the noise level is so much higher.” As a New Yorker I’m used to it.

I describe the HLL project to everyone as best I can, which isn’t saying much. The CD of demos I brought and especially the compilation of Peter’s rough video edits explains the concept much better than I am able to. The videos especially are well received — though some of these folks view them as if their own lives were being replayed, so theirs is hardly an objective view. Painful memories, some of them.

Sol Vanzi joins us — she lives on the same floor. She informally handles Imelda’s relations with local and international media. She runs a website that collates Philippine news: http://www.newsflash.org. She’s 61, she tells us, and she immediately sits down, opens a beer and launches into a tirade during which she disputes all the conventional wisdom about the Marcos regime and Imelda. She just naturally assumes (rightly, I suspect) that she’s not addressing a group of loyalists.

She says, for example, that she instructed a video cameraman to hide in the basement of the palace when it was being overrun — after the Marcoses fled — with instructions to videotape the state of things as they were the moment the family left. She claims that this video shows that the various stories of half-eaten tubs of caviar and other evidence of excess were “urban myths”, as she referred to them. Proof that these things were planted — by Cory Aquino and others, so she claims.

She also claims the Americans most likely killed Aquino (I thought Marcos said it was the Commies?) and that Imelda was never poor as a child. This latter claim is relative; she certainly wasn’t as poor as the people living in the shanties squeezed along the riverbanks:

Shanties

— but, well, by all accounts she did live in a garage while children of the fist wife lived in the house, and then things went downhill from there. As someone from an important local family she was relatively poor.

Sol segues into a riff on the very limited class mobility in the Philippines. How, if you are from a provincial town you are handicapped, even if you are from a “good” family there (this mirrors Imelda’s situation.) Anyway, she implies, as do others, that it is almost impossible to rise above your station — your accent will give you away, and even if it doesn’t folks will ask you where you’re from and then the game’s up. Shades of the UK.

What I also learn, despite all her endless protesting claims that no one has voiced, is that things are not as black and white as I, or many other left-leaning westerners, might prefer to think. The Marcos regime, though corrupt from the start, was no more corrupt, at least at first, than many others. What distinguished them was that they did instigate health programs, highway building, cultural centers, a high school for the arts and many other programs. (The high school produced many of the creative types who are still active.) The Marcoses were truly loved by many Filipinos at the start…and, according to some, they continued to be loved in the provinces even during their ouster, an event which somewhat baffled the country folk. At one point (in the 60s) the Marcoses intentionally modeled their image on that of the Kennedys, posing for family snaps in Malacañang Palace wearing versions of native dress, and looking young and glamorous, which they were. As with the Kennedys, the public loved it, as did the international media; the Marcoses were featured in Time, Life,  etc. etc. Everyone bought into the fantasy, just like they bought into the Kennedy myth, which was around the same time.

Of course, beginning with Marcos’ ‘69 reelection campaign and continuing to when martial law was declared in ’72, the scales gradually tipped, and the chicanery, human rights abuses, murder, corruption and lies eventually outweighed the love and good works. “Here Lies Love” indeed. At first. As power seemed more secure after a reelection it must have been irresistibly tempting to use it — none of that nasty inconvenient time wasting money squandering politicking anymore — power made things more efficient. But it seemed to me that soon enough the need to hold on to that power took precedent over almost everything else — as usual. The palace in the end became a miasma of schemes, intrigues, paranoia and backstabbing.

One book I read claims that Filipino politicians don’t look on politics as a means to realize their ideology as much as a means to hold power. So sometimes politicians there will switch sides if they think they stand a better chance of winning as a candidate from the other party. Marcos did it early on. It worked. The parties seem to be allegiances that can be remade at will, um, much as they are elsewhere, though most other places make a pretense of ideological continuity.

This flexibility goes way back. A “hero” who fought against the Spanish colonial rule, Aguinaldo, felt that Bonifacio, the firebrand leader of the revolution, lacked the requisite military skills, and he broke ranks with him. Aguinaldo made a demand to the Spaniards that in return for peace and a promise that he would leave the Philippines a huge payment would be made in installments — climaxing in a final payment along with a public apology and the playing of “Te Deum” at the Manila cathedral.

In 1897 Aguinaldo signed the deal with Spain in a cave where he was holed up, and upon receiving the money he split, with the cash, for China (or Japan) and in the process suddenly declared his loyalty to Spain (!). What? After all that he just skipped off with the money? (To be fair, the Spanish did capitulate to the peace demands, but with some U.S. help) In ‘98 he returned, and disavowed his disavowal, and then pledged to fight the Americans, who had helped to oust the Spanish. The Americans had decided that the land was too nice to give up. (This war to oust the Yanks lasted 10 years — America’s first dirty war, all but erased from U.S. history books.)

Aguinaldo resurfaced in the public eye again in 1935 when the Philippines became a quasi-independent nation. He ran against Manuel Quezon in the first election, but he lost. Anyway, the point is that he changed colors, back and forth, and no one seemed to mind, or they just took it in stride. He seemed just as passionate about whatever side he was on.

Dinner and karaoke

After Sol’s lecture we head out. Joel has two chicken restaurants in town. We stop at one and a group of us sit around a little wooden picnic type table outdoors. The restaurant used to be simply a counter and a few tables in back, but it’s become very popular — the chicken, the livers on a stick and the garlic rice were delicious. There is a smattering of all ages, races and types hanging out and chatting over drinks and chicken. If there were  dishes other than what we had I didn’t see them — the barbecues installed on the nearby roadside where the birds were being roasted were all filled with legs and livers.

On the way back to the district where my hotel is Butch says he needs to stop at a karaoke bar to say “Merry Christmas” to his production designer and erstwhile muse, Marta, who is now “playing for the other team” and is there with her girlfriend.

We are led by an attendant down a buttery yellow hallway past a series of identical doors and the assistant opens one and there are 4 friends of Butch’s singing to a TV screen. We order beers but fail to join in the singing festivities. Someone programs “Burning Down the House”, maybe in the hopes that I will sing, but I just stare at the screen as a guy that looks like 80s Bon Jovi poses with a guitar while a model house burns. Marta, who is exhuberant and very pretty in plaid pants, sings along, though my phrasing in this song was a little tricky.

It is claimed karaoke was invented here as the Sing Along System in ‘75 by a man named Del Rosario. TVK/Video karaoke clubs are everywhere and come in all shapes and for all incomes. Maybe it’s a way for everyone to sing — singing is therapeutic and fun to do, I know this from experience even though I was a party pooper at the karaoke club. They sing western pop songs here — and some Filipino pop songs too, many of which are in English. Singing western pop songs here is not like singing a foreign song — western pop, especially U.S. pop, was such a part of Filipino culture that they feel it is their own. And it is, in a way. Who can own the experience you have when you hear a song?

There’s even a karaoke TV channel. Endless cheap corny videos with music playing and scrolling lyrics. You can stay at home and sing along with your television. Like some kind of radical conceptual art piece — but super popular.

Makati

The next day I bike up to Makati, the district where Imelda lives now. An area of high rises, gated communities and shopping malls. Not really typical, but a source of local pride.

Makati

Biking here is not always easy — there are no bike lanes as there are on the bayshore and the fumes from the jeepneys and motorized tricycles are overwhelming. Here’s a nice jeepney front:

Jeepney

Foreigners notice Jeepneys right away. Freakish progeny of leftover U.S. Army jeeps that have mutated into a kind of cheap tricked-out public transport. (Jeepney rides in Tacloban, where I took quite few, are around 9 pesos — about U.S. 20¢ at the current exchange rate. This can get you as far as the neighboring town or to the airport!)

Jeepney drivers adorn their vehicles with names and sayings. A kind of jeepney wisdom:

“Lovely”
“Mama - Cita”
“Metal Mania”
“Pray for Our Way”
“Grandma’s Pet”
“Reconnaissance patrol”

The traffic sometimes devolves into pure chaos.

Traffic

The above is borderline gridlock, but mostly it is O.K., and I make better time than most of the 4- or even 3-wheeled vehicles. Jeez I can’t believe I was pedaling through this.

One of the Makati high-rise condominiums was taken over by a group of disgruntled soldiers in ’04, but they were soon ousted.

This, for many Americans, is the land where maids and nurses come from, and that’s all they know about the Philippines. I have to admit I’ve seen quite a lot of men and women in medical attire. The Philippines are anxious that Japan, for example, employ some of the trained medical personnel from here, but the Japanese are uncomfortable dealing with foreigners, and prefer to spend their efforts developing robots to take care of their own mundane needs.

After Makati I explore the landfill area where Imelda built many of her cultural projects — like the Film Center, which now hosts a Korean cast doing an Egyptian themed drag show. The building is haunted, or cursed, as part of it collapsed during its rushed non-stop construction and it is rumored that some of the bodies are still in the concrete. I am told that Koreans don’t believe in ghosts, so that’s why this show is running here.

The Cultural Center and the Folk Arts center are here as well, and those are still quite active.

Malacañang Palace

The next day I ride my bike through a funky shopping district (Quiapo) and through San Miguel (where Imelda grew up on Gen Solano avenue) to get a pre-arranged tour of the Malacañang Palace.

I see the chair where Marcos signed order 1081, the declaration of martial law. On the walls are numerous photos commemorating People Power, the mass movement that ousted the couple in ‘86. Students giving flowers to soldiers, people wearing yellow. Yellow was adopted due to the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” which was adopted in celebration of the return of Aquino to the Philippines — the welcoming crowd wore yellow. Surreal, these pop connections — a connection between Tony Orlando and Dawn and a grass roots uprising that overthrows a dictator — it makes my head spin.

Unfortunately Ninoy Aquino was gunned down at the airport…but Cory and her supporters kept with the yellow from then on.

The large room that commemorates previous Philippino leaders has a glaring absence. They're all here and their memorabilia is on display — except those of the Marcoses, who are relegated to a couple of back rooms. Their absence is a lacuna in history, but the back room makes up for it — commemorative dolls, clocks, and of course paintings.

Here are two famous paintings in which the Marcoses had themselves depicted as the Ur couple of the Philippines — the Adam and Eve of tribal Philippine mythology, who sprung from a piece of split bamboo, the strong man and the beautiful woman:

Philippines_marcos_eb

Philippines_imelda_fb

So, the idea was that they were fulfilling destiny, facilitating a kind of rebirth and renewal of Philippine identity — which did happen to some extent — and these paintings make explicit their wish to become part of the national mythology. Like George Bush and Ronald Reagan wearing Western clothes.

Laoag, Ilocos Norte

I travel to the area where Marcos was from, up north, and the people still like him here. His son Bong Bong (yes, real name!) is the governor of the province and Imee, one of the daughters, is a local congresswoman. In my research it was said that this area was and is like Philippine cowboy country — a little harsher than the more tropical south, and disagreements were, and are, often settled with a gun.

I spy on a map a neighborhood on the outskirts of town named Discolandia, which sounds like it might be appropriate to this project, so I aim my walk in that direction. I wander though a neighborhood of families, residential houses, chickens, little bodegas and then past the bus depot and then sure enough suddenly there is a whole zone of clubs. It’s daytime, so there is no music or activity, except an older woman painting a young girl’s toenails in front of one club. The door is open so I ask if I can have a look. No problem, in fact the older woman escorts me in and hollers something as she leads me further and further into the club which has a few scattered chairs and some Christmas lights dangling.

She brings me to a back room, which is fairly large — it is filled with rude wooden bunk beds, most without sheets. This is where the bargirls sleep and rest, I think to myself. She hollers again and from a further back room emerges an attractive girl in red who immediately escorts me back into the club room, asking, “what would you like? You like girls?” Her face is painted white — as if she is in the middle of a facial. I remember toenail girl had this whiteface as well. With her full red lips she looks like an erotic clown.

Ooohh, now I get it. These places are all whorehouses! Why didn’t I notice all the signs saying “No Condom — No Sex”? Duh! With music and karaoke (naturally) to bide the time while you’re making up your mind. Here are some choices:

Philippines_choices_gb

I walk on. I see a few girls lazing around, some doing washing and some sitting and chatting over a soda. Signs saying check your firearms at the door. This really is the Wild West — where’s Miss Kitty?

Around the corner is the cockfight arena where a whole bunch of tricycles and cars are parked. A match is in progress. “Register your birds”. I’ve watched cockfights elsewhere, so, though it is a great scene, it’s one I’ve enjoyed before and since I’m not betting there’s not much in it for me.

I thought the epoch of underage sex for foreigners here was over, but it seems not. There are al least two geezers in my hotel sporting Filipinas who don’t seem to be much over 20. On my bike meanderings I’ve seen quite a few more — from Mr. Buster Bloodvessel ready to explode to The Professor out for a nasty holiday. It seems this is the place for a foreign man to get what he never had or get what he craved but was discouraged from indulging in back home. Maybe here one could fulfill that lifelong dream.

Once in a while I do a kind of double take when I spy a couple  — usually an older white man with a very young Filipina — in a hotel or restaurant. Most of them rarely touch, or hold hands, but many times they’ll be having lunch together. I gather there are famous girlie clubs and transvestite bars here and there, but probably the days when the Vietnam soldiers and U.S. military personnel had wild rampages of Rutting and Relaxation are past. Also spied some lonely foreigners with rent boys — one overweight limping Yank with a southern accent had two. In a restaurant he orders them around: “Salt, I need salt…and pepper.” One of the boys dutifully goes and fetches the salt. “Toast, is that toast over there?” One of the boys fetches him 3 pieces of toast. He seems temporarily satisfied. Wonder what the boys say to each other when he’s not around? I can see the temptations of power at work — the more he senses that he has power, the more he will flex it to witness it in action, to feel the pleasure of command.

“Coffee and cigarettes,” he announces. “Coffee and cigarettes is my breakfast back home.”

To be fair, not all western-Filipina relationships are about power or desperate sex. A family in the hotel restaurant is composed of an Australian man and his attractive Filipina wife and their kids. He grumbles and grunts in response to the kids’ entreaties while she texts someone on her cell phone. Hardly a perfect relationship, but not obviously predatory either.

Politics and sex. It has been said that the percentage of institutionalized corruption in the Marcos regime tipped when his affair with Dovie Beams, an American B movie actress, became public and embarrassing. (He may have been somewhat serious about this fling — his carelessness may have betrayed him. She was also canny in making audio tapes and Polaroids as “insurance”.) Anyway, he was screwed.

Conventional wisdom is that it was at this point that Imelda began to gain a firmer grip on the reins of power. When the affair exploded in the press he gave her a fiefdom shortly thereafter — Metromanila — within which she could exercise control and make her own projects with autonomy — and skim the usual piece off the top as well.

Imelda sent hit men to off Dovie, and made a few money offers to buy the “insurance”, but Dovie managed to escape thanks to help from the U.S. Embassy.

Meanwhile, Marcos’ unacknowledged Lupus was getting worse. He was a sick man in the 80s, needing a kidney transplant and dialysis machines. This tipped the scales further in Imelda’s favor. The power fell not only to her, but also to his numerous cronies and lieutenants, none of who were as canny as he. Things began to get pretty ugly. And surreal. With unlimited power and no critical press allowed the possibilities were limitless.

Bong Bong had daddy create a kind of Jurassic Park for his hunting expeditions, or so it is rumored. That’s why numerous African animals — giraffes, zebras, elands, impalas and gazelles — were brought over from Kenya and plopped on Calauit, an island in the south formerly populated solely by aboriginal tribal people. To make an African hunting reserve for Bong Bong. The aboriginal people were relocated to another island, one that couldn’t support their livelihood, so almost immediately a “Back to Calauit” movement started.

These bizarre abuses of power might be slightly amusing — if you weren’t one of the people who had lived on Calauit — but other activities were not so funny. Paranoia set in, naturally, and suspected “agents” and “spies” and “revolutionaries” were disappeared. Even those who managed to get to U.S. soil were not safe.

It’s Christmas and in Wild West Laoag kids are caroling on the streets just after the sun sets. I sing “Joy To The World” along with one group. They expect money — and not just from me, a foreigner. They go house to house, hoping for small handouts…that does not mean a hot chocolate.

You know, I don’t see any of these other foreigners that I spied in the hotel restaurants out and about. Do they stay in the hotels all the time? Do they get air-conditioned taxis to the sights and then immediately retreat to their hotel rooms?

I begin to take motorized tricycles (below, a tricycle and a view from a tricycle) on short trips. My bike is in Manila as I want to make day trips from here. A tricycle affords a limited view, so not so good for sightseeing, but they are everywhere — hailing one takes about a minute. And they look great.

Philippines_tricycle_hb

The view from inside:

Philippines_tricycle_ib

Coupled with the Jeepneys and buses they make an incredibly efficient public transport system (excepting the pollution they generate.) New York has, strikes aside, a pretty good public transport system, one that rivals, say, Mexico City, though not as clean. But this is much easier — other than the buses, which leave from designated depots and travel mostly intercity, the tricycles and Jeepneys can be hailed absolutely anywhere within minutes. And for a foreigner, they’re cheap. About P5 for a tricycle and P9 or P10 for a jeepney. This comes to about 20¢ or 25¢ U.S. A bus to Batac, or Vigan, a town 80 km away, was about P100. I think. $2 U.S. My hotel, while not fancy, is clean — shower, air con, nice restaurant, quiet, karaoke lounge (natch)… $20 U.S. a night. No free wireless Internet but most U.S. hotels don’t offer that, either.

I catch a bus to Sarrat, where Marcos was born. The house is his birthplace, now decaying and dusty. Furniture heaped in piles and fading pictures of his mom everywhere. Some manikins of the man in barongs, the traditional shirt that he wore as a nationalist cultural statement.

On to Batac, another very small town where Marcos lies in state in a refrigerated class casket. Batac has a great fruit and vegetable market where every conceivable local foodstuff is displayed. Not that different than markets in Oaxaca or Cuernavaca. I buy an orange, as hotel breakfasts tend to serve something like Tang. Come to think of it, there is a surprising Mexican influence here. It seems the Spanish colonists stopped in Mexico on the way here — it was part of their trade route — so some of the local Mexican culture and foods got transplanted. The house next to the Mausoleum is where Marcos grew up, I think. The children use it now, or so it seems, as there lying on the ground is a discarded cardboard package in shreds with Imee Marcos name written on it.

The little museum attached outlines Marcos’ accomplishments — bridges, highways, hospitals and sessions with foreign leaders like Mao and Nixon. It refers to the Marcos’ ouster as a military coup — referring to the defection of some of the generals, which is significant in that it meant that his military enforcers had split ranks. The museum is a capsule version of the mythology he created for himself — his imaginary war record on to his accomplishments mixed with scenes of true public affection. A mythology mixed with fact, and all the more powerful (and confusing) for it. Like a Hollywood movie that depicts “true” events, the past inevitably comes to be perceived as the Hollywood version. Marcos was prescient here. He had two “biographical” films made in advance of his election campaigns that depicted parts of his life “story”. It worked. This reminds me that John Wayne’s director John Ford is quoted as saying "When people prefer the myth to the truth, print the myth." The mausoleum plays Mozart liturgical music creating a creepy haunted vibe, and, as you enter the air-conditioned chamber there are a number of staffs on either side with sculpted metal tops that resemble weird Masonic symbols. Crescent moons, stars, spades, hammers and indecipherable symbology — the security guy couldn’t tell me what they symbolized but the effect is deeply mystical, mysterious, almost Egyptian. His embalmed body sure looks more like waxworks than a real body — the glass coffin is bathed in an eerie blue light and photos are strictly prohibited. Rumor has it that the real body lies deeper below, slowly decomposing and still denied burial along with the other former presidents.

I travel on to Vigan, a small town that was spared the American carpet-bombing at the end of World War II that destroyed the colonial architecture of many of the others. It’s on the UN list of important world historical sites, so though it’s not on the research agenda I catch another bus to have a look. The center of town does indeed abound in the type of old buildings of which a few remain around Laoag and very few in Manila. Mostly wooden structures that withstand typhoons pretty well, but that usually require periodic upkeep because the tropical dampness and termites will destroy them after a number of years. Impermanence is part of life in the tropics. The windows are made of sea shells — little squares of mother of pearl that allow filtered light to enter the upper floors — and can be opened up for ventilation. Many of these in the Vigan town center are preserved and turned into a tourist destination for Filipinos and foreigners, so though many are still lived in, many a ground floor has been turned into an antique shop selling T-shirts and knock-offs.

Here’s one outside the town center that hasn’t been cutesified:

Philippines_building_ib

I stop and buy a sweet on a side street. A girl is roasting over coals a concoction held in a bowl shaped by a piece of banana leaf. The leaf gets a little charred around the edges over the coals, but it doesn’t burn. She explains that the sweet is made of coconut (shavings) sugar, egg and milk. It becomes a kind of hot crunchy custard — and it’s delicious. Wonder if I can try it at home, minus the banana leaf?

Leyte

Imelda was born in a small town in the province of Leyte and spent a good part of her formative years in Tacloban, the main city there. Her family, the Romualdezes, still hold power there — the airport is named Romualdez, as is one of the main streets, the local judge and the current mayor, on and on. However, she was from the less successful side of the family — she grew up in a garage and a Quonset hut — though family connections still counted for much. This Cinderella aspect of her past has been whitewashed or tweaked quite a bit, the poverty and pain part lessened, though she would sometimes refer to it in passing. The house they occupied for a while in Manila in a funky neighborhood she had bulldozed, a way of literally remaking her past. Wipe out those painful memories with a bulldozer.

In later years she built a “shrine” in Tacloban, ostensibly to Santo Niño, the baby Christ. The entrance room is a large chapel, but really the shrine is to herself. Jeepneys heading in this direction from downtown Tacloban simply give “Imelda” as the direction. It houses lots of her furniture collection but more importantly a series of lovely dioramas depicting her life story — or her life story as she imagined it.

Here is a nice one of her as a young girl on the shore having a family outing with an image of Marcos looming in the sky, awaiting their fateful meeting:

Philippines_marcos_float_jb

The rest of the “shrine” is a series of bedrooms and dining rooms — none of which were ever used or slept in. They too are a kind of diorama. Some bedrooms were for Imelda’s children — Imee, Bong Bong and Irene — and others are for, whom? There is a bedroom for every region (several provinces grouped together for development purposes) in the Philippines, and the décor of each is meant to be thematic — reflective of that region. So one room has Italian leather walls made to look like Nipa — palm thatch. Each room also contains one the above dioramas detailing the Imelda myth. There are 15 Stations of the Cross.

The hotel I am intentionally staying at was build by Madame and opened in 1980 on her birthday. It was a place where she could entertain local pals and cronies. It has 2 karaoke bars, a floating bar/lounge filled with foreigners, an empty seafood restaurant, and a restaurant buffet filled with Filipinos.

In the buffet at lunch I heard “Climb Every Mountain” possibly by Tom Jones on an endless loop — for an hour! Climax after climax! Occasionally I could hear diners quietly singing along.

The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of them claimed. However, it was a language that theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.

One theory is that written language is primarily an agent of control (a William Burroughs phrase — “Language is a Virus” was one of his claims.) Written language was needed once a top-down administration came into being. That and trade — which needed administrators, too. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names — who had which plot of land, how much did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? How much then do they owe me? Naming and accounting seem to be the primary “civilizing” functions of written language. Naturally, a version of the local oral language gets translated into symbols as well, these non-administrative words sort of go along for the ride.

What’s amazing to me is that what may have begun as an instrument of control has been internalized by us as a virtue, a mark of being civilized. We have conceptually turned what is often an object of oppression into something we think of as good. We accept written language so much that we feel and recognize its presence as a sign of enlightenment — “you too are a cog in a larger system — and that’s good.”

In the 80s a discovery of a “stone age tribe” in a remote area of the Philippines made worldwide news. National Geographic ran a major piece on The Gentle Tasaday, which portrayed their lives as edenic, a kind of Ur people without any of the hang-ups of contemporary civilized lives.

The Marcoses capitalized on this “discovery” (later exposed as a fraud by the post-’86 press) and restricted the area — except for visits by Madame escorting Charles Lindberg (still alive!?) and Gina Lolabrigida for photo sessions. Hamilton-Paterson called the Tasaday a clear-cut hoax in his Marcos book but retracted this a few years later in an article in the London Review of Books, realizing perhaps that in the Philippines, things so seldom are what they seem at first, even edens, even hoaxes.

Philippines_tasaday_kb

Philippines_tasaday_lb

James Hamilton-Paterson on the sounds of a small village where he lives:

“Sounds have a ringing, precise quality here. Instead of being dampened by so much woodwork they bounce around the [palm tree] columns and are reflected back down by the vaulting palm ribs overhead. Cocks crow; a buffalo groans down by the river; someone chops wood. There is sudden clatter of an iron lid on a cooking pot and a harassed mother’s exclamation “lintik ka!” followed by a child’s laughter. The clarity of the sounds is extreme, like a digital recording of a thousand years ago.”

The pharmacies are filled with skin whitening creams. There are numerous TV ads for these products as well.

There are signs around town advising that there is a 5 PM curfew for those under 18. Somehow I doubt that this is enforced — but it’s there, just in case.

A sign on a building: “The Fraternal Order of Utopia”.

In today’s paper: NPA [New People’s Army] rebels swiped arms from a congressman’s ranch here but left him unharmed. Further south, in Mindanao, a group of 100 NPA killed 2 cops. These incursions by rebels and the NPA seem an almost daily occurrence. I try to imagine what it would be like if rebel armies roamed the U.S., taking over shopping malls, country clubs and multinational corporation campuses. The country would freak out, most likely. Here no one blinks.

A man zips by on a motorcycle with a Santa hat wildly flapping.

One final fantasy image. Imelda as the nurturing mother Goddess:

Philippines_imelda_mb

So, though the Marcoses’ conflation of national mythology with their own lives and political strivings was blatant, it’s also pretty obvious in the staged contrivances and the managed press of the Bush administration, among others. The “story” of the inevitable triumph of democracy the good (and messianic Christianity too) is a potent one for a certain audience, a grand story that the media goes along with, at least until recently. Manifest destiny, the march of progress, of civilization. Once a “story” is “in place”, believed in, accepted, one need only supply the appropriate images and little anecdotes to make it seem self-fulfilling and real. Living “in” a story is more satisfying than not.

Realpolitik sometimes gets in the way, though. The “story” of the U.S. in Iraq does not play well with the actual global scramble for the diminishing world oil resources, nor does the U.S. support for Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, a “democratically” elected dictator who wheels and deal vast oil reserves. There’s a cognitive dissonance here; the two stories can’t co-exist, can they?

The “civilizing” story, old as recorded history, and the desperate greedy need for resources?

The China Airlines flights both to and from Asia have a piped-in version of the Rat Pack doing what they must have thought  of as jazzy “hip” versions of Christmas songs — they (Dean Martin?) do this glottal stop hiccup effect that is supposed to imply feeling, emotion, but is actually just an annoying tic — my favorites are the “jazzy” versions of Silent Night (!) and Jingle Bells. If I didn’t know better it I would have thought it was a parody. Maybe it is — a kind of martini-induced ironic take on Christmas songs. An odd choice for China Airlines, but I suspect the boozy irony got lost.

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Link: Torn and frayed in Manila

10.11.05: Relative Economic Growth

According to a recent survey by the World Economic Forum, Scandinavian countries are ranked at the top of the list for global competitiveness. Finland is No. 1, ahead of the U.S., for example. “It is one of the leading monitors of the competitive condition of economies worldwide,” as the Forum’s website says. Here are the top ten:

1. Finland
2. U.S.A.
3. Sweden
4. Denmark
5. Taiwan
6. Singapore
7. Iceland
8. Switzerland
9. Norway
10. Australia

Obviously MIA: Japan, France, Germany