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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 Days
What could possibly balance a trip to the material kingdom of Disney and glitz of Miami but an odyssey to socialist Havana? Stay tuned for some Havana news, if I’m able to write there; if not, there’ll surely be lots of stories to talk about when we get back.
Pilgrimage to the Silver Golf Ball
Thanks for the crickets, people. What happened to my petition to get me inside Disney World? Luckily Nova was strong willed enough to be able to drag C-mixto there. I was on a mission: 4.5 hours to hit the entire universe of Epcot, meet Mickey or Donald, eat cotton candy, and have a German beer and sausage. Here’s my Epcot adventure, minus some ride stories that deserve their own entry:
- Take public transportation to Disney World! For the cost of a NYC subway ride, we zoomed into Walt Disney Empire in 30 minutes with only 3 stops for only $2 freakin bucks. I don’t get Disney at the end of my subway ride back to Inwood.
- The estate of Walt Disney surrounding the actual Kingdom is set up like a military base. Endless highways with checkpoints, then a monorail system that takes you through a mysterious swamp ending God knows where. Sniper Mickey’s and Donalds, Disney character rejects and other strange things must lurk in those woods that escaped the demolition bullzoders and cement of Disney.
- Disney World uses geriatric labor and indentured immigrant labor to staff all those rides (and I mean global immigrant labor for each theme of its Epcot city). The bar maid in Germany’s Biergarten Restaurant had to be pushing at least 80.
- Speaking of the Biergarten, I was very happy with sausages and sauerkraut waving my frothy beer mug back and forth in the air to the sounds of cowbells, yodeling and the Ricola horn, until the crowd belted out in unison, “Hoi, hoi, hoi!”. Suddenly I felt a bit uneasy joining a blond haired, blue eyed crowd chanting in German in unison. I am very sorry I felt that way, but I suddenly felt the urge to leave.
- Disney scans your finger as you enter the park. When I asked why, they said “to avoid someone using your ticket”. I have some theories as to what other things they might be doing with your fingerprint…
- Be careful signing the liability form when you buy tickets. There is fine, fine print in there that pledges your first born child to Walt Disney. There is a reason why the robots on their rides look so real, why there is something demonic about “It’s a Small World”.
More on rides- but do any of you have Disney memories?
Grumpy McGrumpy Won’t Take Me to Disney World
I lied! I want Orlando bad! Someone tell C-mixto that he should share. I’ve traveled 1,074 miles and am stuck in the 3rd circle of Dante’s Inferno of Air Conditioning Hell (because I threw it there) attending work conferences while the sun is blazing a glorious 95 degrees with 100% humidity outside onto a pool that is screaming for me to come inside, in a hotel in Seaworld that is the splitting replica of the one Chevy Chase had a marital crisis in when taking his family to Walley World. Walley World! That’s where I am- a mecca for consumer happiness, entertainment and rides…
I want to see Mickey and buy some mouse ears! I want cotton candy and to see the demonic dolls sing in maddening cacophony, It’s a Small World After All, because still it rings in my ears 20 years later… Disney is a drug- a brainwashing homing device placed in all our American hearts, a surrogate parent that beacons you to return to it if you come too close. Start the petitions- we only have 1 day. Tell C-mixto to take me to Disney World!
Dear Orlando…
Dear Orlando:
Finally, I’ve reached you after how many years apart? You were once an object of fantasy- an unobtainable tease that left me wanting. I was such a young girl then, let’s be fair. So now that I am a full fledged woman, what do my eyes see with eyes sharpened by wisdom, a heart less naive? You are flashy, dear Orlando. Flashy beyond your swampy roots. Once I valued how hot you were; nights with you were steamy and free… your tropical ways were a delight. Now? The truth is you are chilly dear Orlando… chilly because most of us never get to feel the real you. That’s right, us. I know there were others. Many. And this distance is your fault too. Why have you constructed so many barriers around yourself? You have us peer from concrete pillars, high, encased and removed from the warm depths of your heart. How could I have been tricked by your majesty as a young girl? The Magical Kingdom promises, the role playing characters you liked to play, like the Mad Hatter with a trick of cards up his sleave. And did you ever make the journey to visit me? No! It was always about you- sending messages through your goofy friends like that short chap Donald. Dear Orlando, I think you might be played out. I’ve said it. The magic is over, I don’t want to wish upon your star. And with me gone from your life, with my absence, how quickly will you see how wrong you were, how vast the planet is without me, and that really it isn’t such a small world after all.
Gazi, Athens, Greece 2007the messages we send: Home Girl
Please note: these comments are based on how this book is advertised in both its art and content, but not the content of the book itself (the writing and story) as I have not read it. The comments are meant to demonstrate the power of image and packaging, and point to a pattern industries recycle over and over again.
Had to share a moment in Barnes and Noble… a culture/race/class twilight zone moment that will strike you or not strike you, based on your life experiences and your placement in those three categories. Random House put out this book Home Girl by Judith Matloff. I was attracted to the happy colors and title enough to pick it up for a peak. Then I took a closer look and see that the colors radiate from a refurbished brownstone smack in between two dreary brown ones. Its windows are smiling with flowers that a dutiful husband in a tight black t-shirt is watering, a cherubic baby peeking out from one of the flower pots, and a diligent denim-clad thin woman sweeping the steps with altruistic determination and confidence that she is doing the right thing. All the inhabitants of that brownstone are Caucasian. So here is the title again: “Home Girl”. Here is the subtitle: “Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block.” The surrounding lawless block are the two dreary brownstones and its brown inhabitants: a sexy, curvaceous brown-something pushing what looks like a baby carriage (could be a shopping cart), a guy hanging out on her fence, and a suspicious character in a parked car.
The back cover parallels the brownstone owner’s story as the native daughter returning to her city New York after spending years in war torn areas of the world (like Sudan) only to find herself back (by the winds of gentrification) in scary Harlem, finally conquering the natives and bringing white order to a lawless world. the messages we send: Home Girl – continue reading …
Cities, and the people that make them
“The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.”
-Lawrence Durrell, in Balthazar
More recommended books for urbanites (and anyone fond of beautiful prose) are those in the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. It is a collection of four books, set in the city of Alexandria on the eve of the second World War. You are there, inside the tangled lives of a handful of inhabitants of Alexandria, transported by fine prose and sensual details. Through the lives of the book’s characters you feel the pulse of the old, harsh city. Though clearly fixed in its time and place, it is also timeless-the Alexandria of these pages is a city of mixed religion, ethnicities, heavy with history, burdened with the entanglements of friends and lovers. I am still reading through the quartet, enjoying every word, every line.
