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Memphis, Tennessee
Thursday 10 May 2007
Many would undoubtedly scoff and wonder why the hell I had come to Memphis at all.
I didn’t go to Graceland. And i didn’t bar-hop on Beale St. I didn’t even see live music. I barely went down town. And I didn’t eat BBQ. Or not the meaty core of BBQ. Just beans and ’slaw.
Memphis, the continuation of the plummet south, into warmer climes and vivid greens. Memphis, Tennessee, a city in a state of what was briefly and bloodily the Confederated States of America. I was in Memphis to get a taste of the South. Doing so took all my time, and left nothing for Elvis or the Blues.
On the Greyhound south we passed a sign advertising ‘all you can eat catfish buffet’. This I took to be quintessential South. Much of what I experienced felt the same way.
Memphis was hot and sticky. My body surrendered to the rhythms of the day; siestaing was accidental but inevitable. Big meals and hot middays meant a lot of time spent sitting in the shade or indoors. It is a rhythm I remember pretty well from Latin America and Spain. The mornings and evenings are all a-bustle. When midday comes I could be found seated in the shade at one of the two houses I was welcomed into. There was beer and there was malt liquor and there were a few of the artsy folk of the city.
In the south, you eat. Even if you don’t go for meat or really like the rather gruesome BBQ adverts, you still eat. When you go to the drive-in to watch gorey zombie flicks, you still throw a couch and a grill and some beers in the back of the pickup. Maybe here at last is the logic behind the huge truck phenomenon; how else can you be sure of being well-fed and well-rested wherever you go? Again, you surrender to the rhythms of the South.
The food, as mentioned, is big. It is also spiced and spicy. Memphis was the first I saw of any sort of popular alternative to the fast food joints that so proliferate. The typical BBQ place is dingy in old vinyl and lino, with a rusted, faded or missing sign. But it is local run and local patronised. And each one isunique and has its own recipes. The food, to be fair, is still greasy and enormous and salt, sugar and vinegar heavy. But at least it has taste. Even a vego eats big and eats well here.
An afternoon excursion took us and the pickup out of Midtown, and way out into the greenery and fecundity of the Mississippi woodlands. On a thin road hemmed in by tall trees and wire fences is hidden Voodoo Village. Local legends tell of this community variously kidnapping and sacrificing animals, chasing off outsiders with machetes, or blocking off their retreat with an old bus. They also speak of strange rites, rituals and healings.
The place when we arrive is deserted, save for some very loud, very angry, very ragged looking dogs who bark from behind the barbed wire fences. Further back beyond the fences is a mess of rusted old cars and dishevelled houses or shacks. And in amidst dog, car and house are hundred of strange works of art, painted in garish, bright colours. Some are completely abstract, some are shaped like people, or suns or stars or houses. Some are covered in nails, the spikes sticking outwards. Despite the intense reds blues and yellows, they are an unsettling assortment. The sheer number speaks of a manic, inscrutable frenzy of production. The gateway bears the name GOD carved over and over again, forwards and backwards in red blue and white. i don’t think the allusion is to American patriotism. It too is unsettling.
The mangy dogs slipped through the fence somehow, and we decided to leave quickly. I still have no idea what that place is all about. Again though, one of these perfect crystallisations of the South. Or rather what the South has been mythologised as. In Memphis I began to see that a lot of these images have to come from somewhere. The South is very much what it is imagined as. But it loses nothing for all of this; its reputation is already so sordid and surreal and full of contradictions and mysteries.
One final Memphis experience. A night out at the speedway, its rickety grandstands jutting out over a sea of trucks in the muddy carpark. Not many sedans parked here. Stepping through the mud and up to the ticket booth felt like slipping back through time. I don’t know how far exactly, certainly before all the 9/11 hysteria and mania. There was no weapons check and no X-ray machines. There was no request for ID when buying beer. Before the national anthem everyone stood silently while the announcer prayed through the loudspeakers, for protection and blessing for the drivers, for blessings for us all. And then the anthem, hands on hearts and backs straight, eyes proud.
The racing itself was all noise and speed and mud. Cars hit walls and spewed smoke and spun in the mud. The noise was intense, clods of dirt showered the audience. There were cheers and there were engine roars. There was brightly coloured steel and battered old cars that were all engine and nothing else. And there was the checkered flag and winners, but i have no idea whether the winners won anything, or whether they just like driving in circles around the muddy track.
And some of the drivers came out, wiped the grime from their face, and sat with their wives and litters of kids in the audience. And they drank beer with their buddies and the speedway old timers. and the kids slurped ice cream and clamoured when free caps were thrown into the stands. And beyond the track the sun was setting in its most magnificent shades of red and orange.
And it was all rhythm, the older calmer rhythm of life in the South. And of life itself, the dogs barking, the trees growing and weeds insinuating themselves everywhere, the people eating, drinking and laughing and growing old. The sun setting and the heat dissipating, and it all cycling endlessly.
There was no question; I was going to Cervantino. It was destiny or something.
Four years ago, flitting about the world with amigo Andy, we arrived in a catatonic Guanajuato the day after the Cervantino festival (named after Cervantes, author of Don Quixote) had finished. Not just any Cervantino though; that year marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote. The biggest Cervantino there could ever be and we were twelve hours late. Since that fateful day Cervantino had been a kind of grail for me; we errants have to have our quests and delusions and Dulcineas.
So when I arrived in Mexico it was clear that destiny was going to be played out, and that I would be going to Cervantino. It was so clear and I so convicted that I didn’t both to arrange accommodation or transport; I just kept telling people that I was going to Cervantino, I was going to Cervantino.
The festival couldn’t have come at a better time. Guadalajara was getting cold. The sun rose every morning looking like a spent apocalypse. It was grading season at school. I couldn’t find a housemate. I needed to get the shit out of Guadalajara.
So I did, Quixote style, full of hot air and daft notions and with no idea what I was doing. And it took hours and hours and hours of wheezing public transport. It was after midnight when I bumbled and clattered my way through the front door of a last-minute couchsurfer’s house in Guanajuato. But the brutal commute didn’t matter in the slightest; I was at Cervantino, and Guanajuato was already working its magic.
What is it about Guanajuato? It is an impractical town; all bent and twisted streets strewn about a highland valley. There are no straight roads, not logical way from A to B. It is a student city, an artsy city. The buildings are painted in bright block colours, every crooked plaza has its fountain, has its cafe, has it market stall and street food. It is a city of layers, the subterranean tunnels and byways, the colonnial streets, the narrow balconies, the university and church towers, the crests of the hills and El Pipila, the ridgetop monument that serves as the city’s compass.
Cervantino had started more than a week before I arrived, and had settled into an easy festival rhythm. In the blue morning streets mountains of beer, soda and water were being piled outside every cafe and bar. Tortillas were frying and tamales were steaming. Crumpled forms lay among their bottles and backpacks in the plazas. Dazed couples huddled together in the sunlight. Accommodation of the affordable variety is in very short supply; last minute fliers were being stapled to any surface not already festooned with banners.
For a lot of people the day would contain more hours of waiting than of festivaling, but as the day progressed the streets, the university steps, the plazas and cafes all began to fill. The theme of Cervantino ‘09 was the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope, and the free films and exhibitions reflected this. Fizzing light bulbs hovering in darkness, deep space photography, nebulous abstractions in paint. The cinemas, the auditoriums, the museums and exhibition crawlspaces all filled with people. The families, the visiting artists, the couples and those that had actually booked tickets to events all savoured the offerings of the city.
It is for the night, and for the booze and the carouse that most people come to Cervantino though, and as the city turned dusky the flow of people increased until the main streets were all seething. But bacchanalia is not an official part of the Cervantino schedule; every night it must start of its own accord. The crowd of guys demanding kisses from passing gals, the breakdancers, the medievalists, the Quixote impersonator and his clanging, menacing spurs; they got the party started, trampling the no drinking in public ordinance. In their wake came the musicians, mimes and fire twirlers, and then there were competing strains of music echoing out of every plaza. The dancing began, and the staggering, and the groping, and the conga lines and the late night mayonnaise-drenched elote.
And as the rain began to fall one of the many many mariachi bands started a march through the street, and was joined by the thousands, and they converged on one of the arbitrary plazas, and still the people were pouring off buses and out of taxis and into the streets, last minute arrivals from anywhere, with no place to sleep and no way to keep dry.
The following morning was already my last morning, the streets were cool and wet but the sky was achingly blue. All-night figures sprawled in the parks and discreet tents had been pitched in grassy corners. There were many hanging head held in many hands. There were the last lingering fondlings of one night stands. And there were more people arriving, and fresh bands were shining their instruments, and the tortillas were frying and the beer was being delivered and it was all one endless carouse, all so fittingly hopelessly spectacularly quixotic.
And I had been to Cervantino.
In April Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez reached out to Barack Obama and gave him a gift. It wasn’t a billion barrels of crude or a letter of resignation, which were no doubt what Obama was hoping for, but rather a very normal and inoffensive-looking book (this was still far better than Evo Morales’ gift, which was another round of accusations that the US was trying to kill him. Sigh).
The book was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a tome of some existing fame which became an instant bestseller as it was passed from Chavez to Obama.
The title should give some indication as to what the book is about, but given that the gift was an untranslated Spanish-language edition, it’s safe to say Obama hasn’t spent much time pouring over its pages. To avoid the potentially awkward consequences that could ensue from the next meeting between Chavez and Obama (“how did you like your gift” “oh yeah, it was pretty, um, interesting” “so which bits did you like the best” “well definitely the um, the start was pretty, like, um, hey look, there’s Kevin Rudd!” “Who?”), I thought I’d provide some cheat notes to help Obama. He’s a busy man after all; he has a Peace Prize to earn…
Title: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Author: Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist and freelance political exile.
Published: 1971, and then again later.
Chapter Summaries
Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 1: Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 2: King Sugar and other Agricultural Monarchs. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 3: The Invisible Sources of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 4: Tales of Premature Death. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 5: The Contemporary Structures of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Seven Years After. Explains how Latin America is still exploited.
Setting
Venezuelan oil fields, Bolivian silver mines, Brazilian favelas, Caribbean sugar plantations, Central American banana plantations, Brazilian coffee plantations, Chilean guano deposits and copper mines, nineteenth century Paraguay, Zapatista Mexico, the Panama Canal, Argentine prisons, leaky slave galleons, denuded rainforests………..
Characters
The Spanish. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The English, and to a lesser extent the other Europeans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the Spanish (see above). Villains.
The USAmericans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the English (see above). Villains.
The Oligarchy. Insiders that privatised, mortgaged and sold Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The International Monetary Fund. See the USAmericans.
Augusto Pinochet. Chilean general who became president/dictator through a violent coup. Friend of the Oligarchy (see above) and the USAmericans (see above). A villain.
Salvador Allende. Chilean socialist president overthrown by Augusto Pinochet (see above). A hero.
Isabel Allende. First cousin once removed of Salvador Allende (see above). Wrote the foreword to Open Veins. Likes it. Fled Augusto Pinochet’s coup (see above) carrying a copy of Open Veins (an early edition, before she had written the foreword).
Old Woman. Lives in a São Paulo hovel. Drinks coffee from small tin can and talks to author. Claims that Brazil is “ours”. An anecdote.
Quotes
“We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity”.
“The massacres of Indians that began with Columbus never stopped”.
“The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret – every year, three Hiroshima bombs”.
“There are less than 1,000 computers in Latin America and 50,000 in the United States”.
“One wonders if those that made us paralytic might offer us a wheelchair”.
“One writes to answer the questions that buzz in one’s head”.
Notes for the President (of the USA)
* Don’t take anything Galeano says too personally, after all you were only 10 years old when this book was published, and not directly complicit in, for example, the CIA’s support of Pinochet.
* Galeano is opposed to slavery, to indentured labour, to serfdom, and to other forms of labour exploitation. By aligning yourself similarly you may be able to reach out to those of the left like Galeano and Hugo Chavez. These people cannot vote for you, but being cordial to them might boost your popularity with certain demographics (most of whom also cannot vote for you).
* The CIA, the IMF, the green berets and the oil companies are for the large part unpopular within Latin America. This may be because every time they become involved in Latin America people start dying (according to Galeano). Finding less polarising cultural ambassadors to send to the region may prove worthwhile.
* Galeano wrote Open Veins in the years after Che Guevara was assassinated. Neither this event nor the ongoing embargo seem to have ended the Communist threat in the region. Cuba may be the country that has changed the least from the time of the book’s publication to today. It might be time to consider a new Cuba strategy.
* Five hundred years of exploitation has not caused Latin America to love unreservedly the Spanish (see above) or the English (see above) or the USAmericans (see above). For the USAmericans at least it is not to late to rethink this approach. It might be time to call off the conquest.
St. Louis, Missouri
Wednesday 09 May 09
Sometimes i worry that I’m getting fat. It is difficult to fight past the fast food mentality of America. It is difficult to find the bakeries or to reach the supermarkets without a car. That often leaves fast food the only greasy option within my grasp.
In St Louis I was out and looking for a breakfast venue. Even in University City, STL, breakfast is monopolised by the chains. Starbucks Coffee, Kayak Coffee, the St Louis Bread Co. – these are what’s on the menu. Identical coffee in different coloured disposable packaging. You cannot escape the brands here. They occupy pride of place, foremost position in the consciousness. The tip of the tongue.
So maybe it was a body image crisis or a breakfast bloating that caused what follows. Or maybe i have stumbled upon the path to Truth.
At the gates of the University City shopping and franchise strip stand, on grand leafy blocks, the pillars of society; the town hall, an episcopal (?) church, two synagogues, a masonic temple, and the church of Scientology. I was heading to the last of these anyway, but there was little choice in the matter; it was the only one that had its doors open and a welcome sign out the front.
I had come to learn what I could from these guys, to catch a glimpse of what goes on behind the madness and makeup of Scientology’s higher profile adherents. And, of course, i had hoped to do it for free. Freeness extended to the cursory tour of the rather rich furnishings of the building, and there were free brochures on offer, but if you wanted to know the real inside story, you had to pay for some paperback L. Ron Hubbard literature.
There were two other free components. One was the bathroom, replete with extensive reading material and easy ten-step toxicity tests (‘how toxic are you?’), beyond which lay the sauna room for the cleansing-off of said toxins. The other was the personality test. Now, i thought, i was getting somewhere.
How many questions were there? If our country were to go to war, would i feel hostile towards those who conscientiously objected? That’s a paraphrase.
The test done, and my results fed into a computer that created a very easy-to-follow graph of my personality, expressed as ten salient points.
I was relieved to find that I am both stable (as opposed to dispersed) and active – these are my highest scores. I am also certain, aggressive and a correct estimator. My communication level and responsibility score are ok, but could do with addressing.
But then the graph plummets into a sharp -34 trough. And what personality point is so grievously malnourished in me? Happiness.
My happiness is catastrophically low.
Now, to be fair, I had come to St Louis because it was the only way to get further south. And i hadn’t heard from my contact in Arkansas. And i was feeling a little fat. And my breakfast was bland and overpriced and slow to arrive. And i had cheered for the losing team in both baseball games i had managed to catch. And i was tired and it was hot.
But can a kid with the world at his feet, travelling across the states for virtually nothing, staying with friends and writing writing writing really blame watery coffee and rubbery eggs for a negative 34 (the minimum ideal, by the way, would be between positive 7 and 33, which is where my communication rating lies)?
And more to the point, could my happiness really lie 60 points lower than responsibility and 100 points lower than stability? My test supervisor advised that Scientology could help with my happiness rating. and also that happiness is about attaining your goals.
I sat opposite him wondering if he was staring deeper into my soul than i had ever been able to peer myself. Or whether everyone who takes the test gets a negative happiness rating.
I wondered whether I was happy.
The question now stands more lucid than ever; what exactly am i doing in the USofA? And is morbid curiosity and the visiting of friends really enough of a reason to be here? And the investigation of American religion and religiosity? The personality test was the partial satisfaction of that goal, I thought. It told me otherwise.
The test doesn’t need to be true; that is not its function. It sets you thinking. And that is the introductory claim of the church; that they are knowledge seekers. It also sets you doubting.
Or alternatively you can reject the whole thing outright and say that I am happy if I feel happy and the setting and attaining of goals is not the measure of happiness, and that happiness is not quantifiable, nor can it be expressed or determined on paper through a questionnaire, and that for that matter, happiness is not necessarily a personality trait, and that it is in a constant state of flux.
And you can decide to have further tests in other cities to find out just how this happiness thing works.
And regardless of how happy you are not sure you are, you can nod your head with certainty and feel that you have gained an insight in the workings of Scientology. And for less than the price of a boring breakfast.
St. Louis, Missouri
Monday 07 May 2007
So begins the plummet south, deviating out of my neat east to west course. And almost immediately there is a change, and it feels more southern, whatever that means at this early stage.
The great rivers of America – the Missouri and the Mississippi – skirt the state on either side as they too plummet southwards. The wide river basins have left the land absolutely flat. Flat and fecund and fertile. This is farming land. Everything is green and rich hues of brown. And there is an excess of foliage everywhere. Water is in abundance, and sits stagnant and squandered by the road side. Birds stalk through it. Heaps of rusted machinery and vehicles also sit dishevelled in the fields. Gleaming newer models are at work, or stand at attention ready to plough, irrigate, to produce. It is a land of plenitude and excess.
Once upon a time Missouri was a slave state, and spilled blood for the right to keep its slaves to work the farms.
Kansas City was one of the first places I penned in to my itinerary for this trip. It wasn’t because of the jazz history or the bbq culture, although those intrigued me too. It was the launching pad for the careers and successes of Ernest Hemingway and Walt Disney. Two very distinctive American artists and icons. And yet the only evidence of either of these two in the city is the blue neon words on a building: Kansas City Star. That’s the paper Hemingway used to write for.
There is genius in the city, as usual you can find a hint of it in the free art museums, and in the stylisations of the public places and architecture. KC’s sister city is Sevilla, and there is a strong Andalucian feel to one of the downtown areas. It also boasts of having more fountains than any other city but Rome. And more miles of boulevarde than any city but Paris. To me these claims ring hollow, but the fact that they exist shows something about KC pride.
A pattern has well and truly emerged. All these midwestern cities that had their time as a vitally important crossroad or hub for America. A truly international city. But for whatever reason – the decline of the railroads, the downsizing of the auto industry – that golden age cannot last. KC also is a hollow city with a decayed downtown, that feels eerily quiet at times. The people have expanded out – it is the peculiarity of a country that always felt itself to have too much space, that needed conquering – and the interesting pockets of city life are few and far between. There are buses, but the public transport systems of America are uniformly arcane or archaic or both. There are projects downtown to bring back life. Stadiums, malls, hotels. They fill up like storm shelters. The world outside is avoided. It might be dangerous.
St Louis conforms to the pattern too. A hollow and resounding downtown, even in peak hour. Even as the people are centrifuged out to the burbs, they talk in an almost competitive and proud way about east St Louis having leapfrogged Detroit on the list of most dangerous cities in America. I’ve never heard of such a definite and quantifiable index anywhere else in the world.
Both cities are peculiar for being split by a great and unswimmable river. a river that has long been claimed by commerce and industry. And as they straddle the rivers, the cities straddle two states as well. So KC is mostly Missouri but also Kansas. and St Louis is mostly in Missouri but there is also the dirty criminal alter-ego in Illinois.
In the USofA when you seem to cross state border every few miles, this wouldn’t be so interesting a phenomenon. But when your city has one leg planted in a slave state and one in a free state, things become a little more problematic.
And when the good folk of Kansas decide that creationism and evolution need to be placed side by side in school science textbooks as parallel theories, you have to wander which state and which half of the river has the more cause to be embarrassed. The slave days are over. Kansas is still working on the creationism-as-science thing.
As you approach Kansas neon lights cryptically advertise ‘5% beer’. In Kansas it is illegal to sell beer with an alcohol content greater than 3.5%.
St Louis has a grander tradition than KC, and could be said to have fallen further. Its name, but not its pronunciation in American English, reveals a more authentically European heritage than KC can claim. And there is much talk of historic route 66 passing through here, and of the many other trails west across the country; the Mormon trail, the Lewis and Clark expedition. But none of these matter so much because what STL has that no other city has, and what remains resplendent throughout the long history of decline is the arch. A single gleaming arch, two hundred metres tall, that soars skyward, reaches its zenith, and then plunges elegantly back to the ground below. Plenty of internationally recognised icons are over-rated. The arch itself defies expectation or comprehension completely. An otherworldly thing, surreal and incongruous against the grubby city skyline. A momentous feat of engineering, especially considering you can take a ride up the inside of it to the top. and look out over the city, or down on the void and those two impossible spindley legs that some how keep the whole thing and all its hordes of visitors suspended so high above the ground.
One other thing the two cities share, and it is no way peculiar to Missouri, but it is manifest there; the great and continuing generosity of the locals. In both cities I had places to stay and, quite separately, friends to make and meet. I was an impromptu dinner guest in KC and a 6am wake-up call in STL. And still I was greeted with smiles and good food and food for thought.
I came to KC for the sake of two men no longer there, whose ghosts aren’t even there except perhaps on a postcard somewhere. I came to STL because i needed to meet up with a southbound greyhound bus. And despite those inauspicious motives, another pattern emerges; I hop the bus and leave the city, and feel like there was more to see and things left undone, unsaid, untasted. i feel like i know less about Missouri than any other state I’ve visited, and yet it and Ohio are the only states in which I’ve stayed in and sampled two different cities.
And then the road again, and the green, and the south.
