Currently browsing 'activism'
Summer Book Rec: How to Be Idle
I am reposting something from last year because it’s summer (in the northern hemisphere) and your minds are more easily prone to indoctrination by this manifesto. Free your soul!
“I have a dream. It is called love, anarchy, freedom. It is called being idle.”
-Tom Hodgkinson
Urban Book Club Rec: A Confederacy of Dunces
This one was found by C-mixto. Highly recommended for the cynical, the nerdy, the intelligent, the social outcast- this book is comical with a healthy dose of chaos. It also has a halo of tragedy.
Ideas for the Greek Markets
So Greece is in a state of unrest… What are some brilliant ways we can fix this problem?
- Start marketing frappes like you do Fage yogurt. This is an untapped market
that can rival the Dunkin Donuts brand. - Become lifestyle consultants on how the rest of us can: drink crazy amounts of instant coffee, smoke like chimneys, lather ourselves with olive oil (not sun screen) and soak up the sun, f*ck like porn stars, argue ’til the veins pop out of our heads and still have one of the highest life-expectancies in the world. Here are some no-brainers: siestas are good. Loving life is good. Sun and sea… eh we all can’t have it all but it helps.
- Become the next eco-gurus of Europe instead of one of its more infamous offenders.
- Reclaim your agricultural roots, feed yourself first and then export what you want.
- Keep working on your beautiful, neglected wines.
- Forget credit cards, the stock-market and all other non-tangible nonsense.
- Become a national consultant agency for how to strike, community organize and instill populations with a sense of advocacy.
On another travel note…
Tribeca, NYC April 2010
Another way to have an odyssey. Let the world move around you.
Household Census Wars
It’s Census Time, people. Time to assess what is in your house and how the government calls the things that live in your house.
Question 1 & 2… How many people live in the house.
- Straight forward I suppose except if you had overnight party guests on the night of April 1st.
Question 3: Is this house, apartment, or mobile home–
- Choice 4: Occupied without payment or rent? Is this what you check if you are a squatter?
Question 9. What is Person 1’s race?
- Ahhh this is the fun and depressing one. I hearby invent Puerto Greekan as a race. For all I know we are an undercounted race that needs to stand up in the Census. Somebody please fix this race thing.
Questions 10: Does Person 2 sometimes live or stay somewhere else?
- Dear Census Question 10:
Yes, indeed my husband, aka person 2 sometimes lives somewhere else. You see he has a double life. In clubs and events he disappears for minutes without a word. So as a patriot, I feel obliged to report this uncanny behavior. He probably is being counted in someone else’s household survey, so I wouldn’t want you to double count.
Wait there are only 10 questions?
If Cuba had a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade…
Once again I was not able to get myself out of bed at the crack of dawn, shuffle to the packed train, and join the mass of out-of-towners with their spawn in tow and witness the spectacle of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I’m not hating on the parade. My childhood memories are filled of being dragged out of bed to go to it (after staying up late having visited the balloon set up the night before). Really I just wanted to go because it meant a container of hot chocolate and perhaps a visit to a Greek diner for some scrambled eggs. And we didn’t go to the musical orgy on 34th street- we kept it real as a parade should be enjoyed: people passing you, you cheer hooray! and then you walk away.
That said I watched some of it on TV this morning, not with child wonder eyes but as an anthropologist. We all know this, but either this year’s new balloon additions drove the message home more or things are getting worse: it is a parade of raw Dinsey packaged consumerism! All I got from watching that parade was what movie is coming out soon (Smurfs, 2011), whose CD is coming out next (Andrea Bociello Christmas albums and a plug for the opening musical, White Christmas), what retro toys are making a comeback (Care Bears?!) and that Planter’s Peanuts (making a cameo in his Monopoly Man tux) is now being made with sea salt. The recipe Macy’s uses is the same witchcraft Disney utilizes to mesmerize our oh-too-innocent young seeds.
That said, I wondered what a Thanksgiving Day Parade might look like in Cuba:
If Cuba had a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade… – continue reading …
Pelvic Thrusting Your Message: Gozando en la Habana
No disrespect to Miami as I know there can be some political charge and subtext behind this song… “Celebrating in Havana, Crying in Miami.”
This Reggaeton beat is infectious and it becomes a pulse of the Havana night when you hear it on the Malecon while people celebrate. Poignant to hear this live, blasting with its back turned to the US interest section/Embassy, the mass audience facing the embassy singing towards it.
Havana Cabs
The Havana cabs are a diverse species. Just like other material objects in Cuba, cabs are a wedding of what’s available. You have your standard checkered yellow, George Jetson Cocotaxis, pedicabs held together with some clever salvage craft, and then these… the ones that defy time, science and embargoes… what makes Cuba feel oh so 1950s. More on taxis to come.
Havana Days: The 5 Senses
Note: The Havana entries are evolving reflections of Cuban odysseys. They should not be taken singularly… meaning they should not be taken as a generalized finality of experience. They should be viewed as a part of a continuum of experience, which includes reaction and ongoing reflection.
Arrival.
Sight
Rain. Shit and slime covered cobblestones. Oily green and brown pools of fetid water. Cracked crumbling roads, decaying buildings. Urban murals that are shrines to the orishas.
Sounds
Voices, singers, ping pong ball hit back and forth. Man coughing up his morning phlegm. Kids going to school. Motors. First edition ever 1980s home printer sound (prints with the sound of a laser gun on the paper with perforated sides). Rustling plants in wind by barred windows. Rain drops, metal clang of window chain knocking against the wood door shutters. I keep getting up to answer a wind ghost that isn’t there. The soft banal voice of the colleague, overridden by the cowbell, cantante, and piano… he’s been here for years but still his voice is overwhelmed by the music.
Smells
Raw sewage,vapors seeping from the stones of road into my room. Mildew walls and streets, dog shit. Never the smell of food.
Trapped with a group who speak a language of science, while all I do is dream the symbols of language. I care more about the movement of the potted plant behind my colleague than his instructions, more about the irony of the music drowning away his voice, and I cheer for it to overwhelm him.
Taste
Canned string beans, spam ham, morro, yucca… Eating is a means to satiate, not pleasure. One of the first food things to import if the embargo is lifted is Goya seasoning (or some simple pepper). Eating is enjoyable in someone’s home.
Touch
The least used sense for me in this trip. My memories of touch are only of hand sanitizers, to erase the memory of touch. Cuba, will you crumble if I touch you? Cuba answers: No, new arrival. I am stronger than the facade of my infrastructure. Touch me and learn.
Havana update-
A quick postcard from Havana (as dial-up internet in random hotel lobby is very, very slow. plus I am without my urban odyssey notes for this very special city).
Probably one of the more interesting cities Nova has visited (as I write this, a young Cubano is asking me for a peso, now reading this over my shoulder asking me questions- telling me how bonita I am, then pointing to the hole in his shoe, asking me for a peso again… he is what, 7?)
It is as if time has stopped here in the 1950s for anything material (buildings, cars, equipment, furniture) except it still decays. People here, though, are vibrant, alive- with music, singing, life pouring out “from every crack” as LL put it to me.
For Americans it is hard to grasp- what is life like without (much) commericialism? without much “private property” (or at least to the extreme degree back at home?) What if branding didn’t exisit? What constitutes pleasure and human happiness?
Ok, I should be off to enjoy the city more- stories for us to all reflect on when we get back.
Viva la Cuba.
