The Nerd's Eye View

Dec 19th Khartoum, Sudan 7:17p local time

Khartoum is where I spent my formative years (junior high and high school) and, for a place that I didn't really spend that much time in, I am tied to it very strongly. The city, and the country, have changed considerably even in the two years I've been away. After my last trip I had lamented the rampant consumerism that had suddenly engulfed the country, and on my return I find it even more pronounced than before, yet also more refined. To go back to my note about marketing abroad, I notice how different print advertising is here than it is in Abu Dhabi. Most new print advertising is very Sudanese in character, showing Sudanese families or individuals engaged in whatever behavior the phone company or the producers of toothpaste want them to.There is a tinge of humor (and good humor) to these billboards, which one does not find in Gulf advertising, and to my mind has a lot to do with the national character.

That national character appears to be changing, of course, as everything inevitably does. I accompanied my cousin, Gift of Gab, and his wife to one of the new garden style cafes that have sprung up around the capital. There under a large neem tree (what is the English name of those?), and various large, fancy new umbrellas were arrayed around a lot of clean, glass-topped tables. Here in the land of cold Pepsi and somewhat cool water, was a menu with ice mocha frappacinos, Slush Puppies, and so on. This may not seem like much to the casual foreign observer, but growing up, there were only a few options: water, Pepsi (not Coke), fruit juice (of whatever kind happens to be in season), or tea (only hot, only black). The embarrassment of riches that these new choices represent is mind-blowing in light of this fact. The clientele of this cafe was not composed primarily of foreigners (and Westerners in particular), but mainly of Sudanese from a wide variety of age groups. The young folks were dressed in incongruously conservative clothes, which somehow managed to also be revealing and fashionable (this schizophrenic fashion is something I notice but am ill-equipped to discuss - you can look up a wide variety of articles on youth culture in Iran to get a feel for what I am talking about). The open flirting between tables of high school aged boys and girls is, again, not something remarkable to foreign sensibilities but quite surprising to those of us who have seen this change. While there is no where on earth where young people do not make goo-goo eyes at each other (and I mean nowhere), the openness or subtlety with which they do it marks out the inhabited boundaries of the culture (beyond which, of course, only dragons lay).

The second thing I noticed was the condescension of the young folks congregated at this cafe directed towards those who didn't belong there - including myself. With everyone dressed to the nines to see and be seen, my own much more casual style of dress marked me out, not as an expatriate but a lower-class pretender sullying the sanctum of their much more sophisticated world. Perhaps the small class warrior that unaccountably lives within me saw more than was actually there, but it seemed to me to be a sad commentary: that the gap between the haves and have-nots in the Sudan had widened so much, and that there was some perceived shame to being "poor" in a country that is composed primarily of poor folks.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mon Dec 15th 2008 1:23pm Abu Dhabi

Still in Abu Dhabi, having made the grand tour of the new Sheik Zayed Mosque and the homes of various Sudanese friends and family last night. This morning my aunt mentioned that she needed to pick up a few things for her own trip back home. We got to a store with the ambitious name of "The Ambassador" and started browsing.

In the Ross-like aisles Bollywood hits played in the background as I browsed through racks of ugly turtlenecks and sweaters that would make Bill Cosby blush. Beside them were Confederate flag buckled belts (and yes, that is a mudflap girl silhouette on the buckle for good measure).

I'm always interested in media around the world, and particularly in advertising and the like. How is "cool" conveyed in different places? What are the particulars of how you get someone to buy your particular brand of hair cream? So when I am wandering around in shopping centers, stores, etc my eyes are constantly seeking out the outsized smiles of models, and the phrases emblazoned on the fronts of T-shirts and the like.

Along with whatever language is spoken in the country you happen to be in, invariably there is a lot of English (or "English") spattered across product packaging and in-store advertising. What confuses is how little effort (or worse how much effort) was put into these blurbs, and how little I feel one gets out of them. You're pretty much limited to the feeling of "hey, that's English! Awesome!". A particularly enjoyable example is the advertising for the "couture house" Louis Phillipe, whose motto, "The Upper Crest", is coupled to winsome looking white boys pouting at the camera or exclaiming with well-paid joy. Those of us who are part of the "upper crest" of society appreciate this little nod and of course would buy no other lime green striped shirt. For the kids we see a lot of T-shirts emblazoned with phrases like "I do it coz [sic] I like it!" and "We are the Team [sic]!" But these are all frivlous ad copy, right? It doesn't extend to care tags does it? Which you'd think until you were picking up the 100% silk "machine-washable" ties labeled "Lavorazione a mano" (I'm no linguist but I think that means "wash by hand" in Italian).

But I digress. The main point here is the separation of advertising from the run of real life in the country (even more so than it usually is), especially in the surreal world of the Gulf nations.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll be posting notes as I complete them. Hope everyone enjoys them.

Dec 13th 2008 Abu Dhabi

The Trip Starts
What a day, I guess technically it's two days, which would explain why I am so wiped out. My itinerary took me from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Dubai, the latter portion of which is a good 15 hrs on a plane - and I've still got the Dubai-Khartoum leg to go! The good news is that my return trip to San Francisco is going to be direct from Dubai which knocks off about 5.5 hrs from the return.

As usual I'll be just noting down some observations from my trip, to give a taste if you will, of the surprising sandwich that travel can be. I'll try to be brief this first time since I am so loopy, though. San Francisco airport was a blur. Frankly the only remarkable thing about it was the fact that I got singled out for a random screen (random) and got to go through the "puffer" machine. I'm not sure precisely how this machine operates in screening you for dangerous materials/weapons etc, but it basically puffs 7 air jets at you briefly as you stand in a booth that looks like it should transport you to the surface of an alien planet. The jets are hard enough and fast enough to make you jump slightly, which I did. The overall feeling is one of being groped in an elevator and I emerged from the booth feeling slightly dirty.

LA was more interesting, mainly due to my aggravation with it. My luggage had been checked through all the way to Dubai but for some unknown reason I couldn't get a boarding pass for the second leg of the trip. So I was forced to leave security, make my way to the international terminal and get into the check in line for my flight on Emirates. The line itself could have been for a flight to Mumbai or New Delhi judging from the faces I saw. Parents, squalling children (was I the only person on the flight without a small child?) and pot bellied Indian-American Princesses abounded, leaving me with a sense that I was on the wrong flight. I was immediately noticed (flagged?) for my lack of luggage and called to the front of the line and after assuring the agents that I had checked my bags through to Dubai, I was given my boarding pass and given the opportunity to wander.

LAX was a blur of mustachioed women and incongruities (like the one jam-packed security line only 50 yards away from the one completely empty security line; or the Aeroflot economy class counter), and I couldn't muster the enthusiasm to do anything other than call my brother and some friends and twitter a little. I discovered far too late that my seat assignment was completely wrong and as I got onto the plane realized with horror that I had been sent to the back of the plane and wedged in a middle seat between a fat man and an accountant. Rather these were the designations I gave the two men flanking me, since one was fat and the other looked like a old bookkeeper who had never managed to advance at his firm. Fortunately there was some last minute shuffling with another man moving to a different seat which left me with a little more room.

The flight was uneventful except for all the turbulence, and I managed to sleep some which was a blessing. The only thing I could honestly complain about was the mass of children running up and down the aisles, crying, singing loudly and generally making me wonder why there are no FAA rules for this type of terrorism. I traveled a lot as a child and I don't ever remember myself or my siblings being this badly behaved on the plane - at the airport was another story, but you get my drift. Needless to say, I was grateful to be on the ground when we arrived and even more to see my aunt in the arrivals hall.

Dubai has changed significantly since the last time I was here 4 years ago, and if possible it is even more shiny and new than before. The terminal we arrived in alone was such a mass of gleaming stone floors lit by LED lighting that I imagined that it must have been completed about an hour before our arrival. The rest of the city at night seemed to be an oversize, illuminated forest of construction cranes, beyond which one could make out the lights of skyscrapers in the distance. The Dubai real estate market has suffered with the global economic situation, and all the major projects seem to have ground to a standstill in the absence of credit, but it's hard to tell from the road. I'll spare you a treatise on the economics situation of the Emirates though, in favor of a less visible problem.

All along the roads leading in and out of the urban centers are large areas that appear to be container storage yards. Upon closer inspection you see that the containers have light seeping from them and are apparently outfitted with ventilation fans. That's because they are makeshift "temporary" housing for all the laborers that it takes to keep this place constantly under construction. The signs from the road say "labor camps". I don't think anyone here realizes how terrible of a term that is.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in the Sudan. I'm on a USB wireless broadband connection and weirded out by the incongruities. More later.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 3:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll let the video speak for itself, but this is as good as the time someone tried to hit Anne Coulter in the face with a pie:

As you can imagine we saw this a thousand times on AlJazeera.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I arrived in Dubai last night and drove with my aunt and uncle to Abu Dhabi. I was relieved to find they had a wireless network set up and went to check what my peoples have been putting up at Flickr when I was met with this:

My first brush with internet censorship! I feel so oppressed, and strangely glamorous (damn you, Che Guevara!). More posts to come, hopefully.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in Abu Dhabi (having passed through Dubai) right now, on my way to the Sudan for my cousin's wedding. Don't touch my stuff while I'm gone. Seriously.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You know me, I love - and I mean LOVE - the Muppets. Growing up, I remember them as a part of my life. The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas, Muppet Babies, the various Muppet movies and even the short lived Muppet Magazine figured large in my life. When Jim Henson died, it was like a death in the family, and I thought that was it. There would be no more.

Of course that didn't happen. The Muppet Juggernaut did not peter out, but it returned with a different face, and voice. The Muppet "property" had been bought out by Disney, and the Great Mouse had seen fit to commercialize them. But in the manner of most Disney properties they were misused, put in terrible vehicles, and subsequently devalued. Even the more pure Sesame Street was tainted, adding a little red marketing tool to dumb things down further from simple Grover. So where does that leave us? Watching Avenue Q and wishing that we hadn't watched something from our past fade away.

Just the other day, my friend at The Crew sent me this link from the NY Times. FAO Schwartz, the venerable NY toy store, has a Muppet bar, where you can create your very own Muppet. I'm not sure how to feel about that. Part of me wants nothing more than to have own, to make it look like myself, my friends, my family. But the other part, well, the other part wonders whether that isn't the last gasp of the Muppets we all know and love. Endless mediocre reflections of people who don't even know them.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Saw the same Benedictine monk from the Tibet Day Festival on Saturday while riding the BART back to the city last night. Small world, eh?

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to see JCVD with my brother (who is visiting). It was surprisingly good, and I'd recommend it. Anyway, we walked past City Hall on our way to the theater and it seems there was some sort of gala going on - you could tell from all the white coated valets ranged on the sidewalk outside. The flower of Fan Francisco society was wandering in, and my brother made the best remark. To wit, "This is exactly the moment where the Riddler or somebody would swoop to hold this place hostage. 'Commissioner Gordon, if the Batman doesn't show up and unmask himself then I will destroy every building in the City!' " Comedy gold!

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Went to the Tibet Day Festival with Canadian Dave yesterday at the Ft Mason center (which is basically a glorified warehouse space). That made a lot of sense because the festival itself was basically a glorified get together for the Bay Area Tibet Society. It was a fairly amateur affair with long winded, unnecessary speeches by overly earnest people (including a white guy who looked like he'd dressed up as Obi-wan Kenobi to stand in line for the next Star Wars film).Despite all this I tried to be open minded, which was good because there were some real cultural gems to be discovered.

I'm secretly envious/proud of kids who go to great lengths to learn the songs and dances of their native lands when abroad. Listening to the earnest young quartet on stage, I had the sudden realization thatTibetan traditional music sounds a lot like Sudanese traditional music. The two singers were a comedic dream pair - the boy thin and bespectacled and serious, the girl large and boisterous and open. The two musicians accompanying them played lute-like stringed instruments, playing pressed together near an open microphone like George Harrison and John Lennon (alternately they also looked like the two guitarists for 80's power balladeers Heart)

The strange familiarity was increased when I went out back to eat momos (beef and veggie dumplings, delicious!) and drink milk tea. The tea was more milk than tea and hot with a spicy aroma to it. It reminded me of the tea one gets at the bus stops and early markets of Khartoum. My mind was cast back so far I nearly got whiplash. It was odd in juxtaposition to the rosy-cheeked, burnished bronze children running around.

Fortunately I wasn't the most out of place person there that day.There was a Benedictine monk sitting two seats to the left of a Tibetan Buddhist monk in front of me. Black robe (left) - saffron robe (right) it was a bizarre sort of comparison. Surreal.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally... blessed sleep.

Posted by Lo Fat Mo at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)