In concert.

"Miles Davis, I've been swayed by The Cool.
There's just something about the summertime.
There's just something about the moon." - The Gaslight Anthem

"I still believe (I still believe) in the sound
That has the power to raise a temple and tear it down....
Now who'd have that thought, that after all,
Something as simple as rock 'n' roll would save us all." - Frank Turner


I first noticed her because she looked like my friend's ex-girlfriend. The same desert constellations of freckles surrounding tide-colored eyes. Different hair, hers more '50s inspired with a dramatic part. What you would expect from a girl waiting to see The Gaslight Anthem. An indiscernible monochrome tattoo venturing out beneath a rim of white lace and a short sleeve of black polyester patterned in a grid of thin white polka dots. Enough to hint at the visual similarities to the girl I knew but not be overcome by them. But even more a subconscious familiarity. The strangers you've never met that you feel comfortable around.

She stood pressed against a grey barricade delineating a four foot moat of pavement that kept the two halves of the crowd separated for security to roam up and down, occasionally pulling crowd-surfers off shifting platforms of hands, as well as photographers pacing and positioning, hands clutching enormous cameras, lenses like red wine bottles. I was on the other side of the barrier, another tightly-packed individual in that growing audience in a parking lot in New Jersey, the last night sky of April so clear you had to consciously acknowledge it, the lights and towers of Manhattan easily visible some miles off. My 40 minute wait for the band was an impromptu rotation mainly of looking around the crowd, talking to Ryan next to me, and looking down to text. It was with my head down rereading Kyle's message about the show that I saw movement peripherally while also feeling a shifting in the weight against my back. I turned left and saw the girl in the polka dot shirt reaching across that few-man's-land of space and the girl behind me stretching equally hard to meet her in the middle. They each pulled back looking accomplished, the nub of the joint they had handed off so small that I noticed their reaction first, and the girl behind me took about three hits off it while I smiled to myself and turned back to facing the stage.

This was a long festival show, and I rarely do festivals anymore. Coachella would overwhelm and frustrate me, bands that I love performing simultaneously on opposite ends of the grounds while elsewhere pool parties abounded. The judgement of Solomon played out in real life. This was far more manageable. Two acts in The Gaslight Anthem and Frank Turner that I was dying to see, and a few other good bands also performing that I could check out as well, none of my choices overlapping. It gave the day a really casual feel and I spent far less time racing between stages than I did remembering all those outdoor shows I grew up on in California summers. The Sprite Liquid Mix where my friend Mark tried to follow Jay-Z's invitation for everyone to rush down to the pit and got clotheslined and laid out by a security guard. The Warped Tours of high school when A.F.I. was playing a side stage at 3 in the afternoon, and we accidentally saw 311 and Pennywise five times in the course of a summer. My first real concert, a $5 admission at Santa Anita racetrack where bands played on the infield in between horse races and I crowdsurfed for the first time to "Prisoner of Society" by The Living End. That's probably why I wasn't annoyed by all the New Jersey teenagers around. I was too busy thinking of what a little shit I must have been at that age that I will never get to be again.

Brian of The Gaslight Anthem talked about how excited he was to play this show in their home state of Jersey. With tattooed hands and fingers gripping the microphone, he talked about the band still owning the van they did their first tour in and how for this show they loaded it up with equipment like they did years ago and drove everything here themselves because they loved that feeling of nostalgia and their roots. They played timeless rock songs about common emotions we've all felt under a clear summer sky with the Empire State Building visible behind them. And Brian talked before another song about the feeling that being here gave them. "This'll sound fake, but it's not, this is something real. This means a lot to us, and the feeling you give us is incredible. I really feel like you guys are our friends right now. And we're so happy to be here, with you." They launched into another song and the crowd threw their palms toward the stage, had their index fingers in the air for the chorus of "Great Expectations" and as my voice sang along I realized for the first time, after over a decade of shows, that the word concert is the perfect description for the experience. Music is the one true unifying art form. Walk around MoMA or Musee d'Orsay and you'll study the works and think of what you see in them, what elements of them speak to you. Then you can read the little plaque that elaborates on more details or influences and arguments you probably missed. At films we laugh at different jokes or are frightened at differing times by varying types of scares. Some people focus on the cinematography while others analyze the costume design, or the art direction. Think of all the various critical essays a single novel or even poem can catalyze, the arguments about the true meaning of an ambiguous ending. Live music unites us, breeding one astounding composite emotion the entire crowd feels. For those hours, despite all our differences and idiosyncrasies we had before our tickets were scanned and that we will resume again in the parking lot, for the length of those songs we are living in concert. We are one in harmony.

It happened probably a minute and a half after the first time. The Gaslight Anthem still hadn't taken the stage yet. All we had of them was a soundcheck by the drummer and their giant black and white banner featuring the band's name scrawled next to a massive multi-sailed brig forging along upon an ocean of waves. The joint was truly finished, the chemicals in the body and the weed most likely starting to interact now. The girl behind me suddenly reached over the barricade first and the girl with the tattoo and the polka dots craned her arm again from her side of the gap, and this time it was much harder because of what their hands were doing. Each had a closed fist and they struggled until the two sets of knuckles erased the chasm and met in the middle, touching briefly but firmly before retreating back. Their bodies leaned back to where they were standing before, eyes still locked in contact for a few seconds, irises smiling, before turning back to face forward and await the band about to take the stage.

People as places as people.

"It's hard to get hold of, and hard to let go.
Always something we look for from the day we were born.
Instead, we're the people that we wanted to know,
And we're the places that we wanted to go.
Yeah, we're the places that we wanted to go." - Modest Mouse

" 'No man,' said one of the Greeks, 'loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.' " - C.S. Lewis


It was my senior year of high school, so I must have been seventeen, but looking back it seems far longer. I feel I was much smaller then.

I was using my mother's camera, her metal Nikon from the '70s, and only now, typing these words, I realize she might have used it to photograph the same views when she lived here, the same sights that I was visiting then. Our nearly identical green and yellow eyes looking out the same viewfinder to frame the same concrete, twenty some years apart.

The photographs were in black and white; they had to be as I was developing them myself at our high school's makeshift dark room, and I guess I remember the photographs more than the place itself because in my memory the Palace of Fine Arts had the whitewash of Athenian ruins topped in dark grey rather than its actual maple and nougat tones. And it was atop one of the city's many hills, overlooking countless townhouses rising from pavement frozen in undulation. But really, I was recalling the view from Telegraph Hill, or from the apex of Lombard Street, rather than on the water by the Presidio. Returning now, ten years later, to a city I'd been to so often growing up, I was able to see familiar sights with unfamiliar eyes. I was able to see the details that my memory had stored falsely, and to be drawn anew to other virtues I'd glossed over. That decade of absence had been a decade of influence, and with my interests and perspective changed, the variable could now to return to the constant to measure its own deviation. Recognize its progress. See the spots on the map where allure and boredom had traded places. I could see the path I had taken by seeing the city once again.

But that was only a little of it.

I thought that I came to San Francisco to make it easier on Jeffrey and Aaron. As a thank you for their trip down to L.A. when I visited last September, I would come up to the Bay this time around and try to talk other friends in to coming up as well. Our core group of six friends from those immediate post-college years in Los Angeles is now scattered thanks to the three of us. I left in July 2009 for New York, via the world, and they each chose Northern California shortly after.

People continue to ask me if I'll ever move back to Los Angeles, and I've always answered No... That I love New York. True, but only partially the answer. I belong in New York because it fits me; who I feel I am now, and who I want and strive to be. It is a city that, like no other I've ever experienced, pushes you, constantly, to be simply... better. Smarter, wittier, more charming, more culturally aware. I relish this challenge that New York forces upon me, even if the results are subjective, and vary depending on who you ask. But none of this explains the missing part of that answer: the lack of lasting guilt that I felt for leaving Los Angeles. After moving, I had homesickness. Pangs of, if not remorse, then at least of wanting to exist in two places simultaneously. But except for birthdays, or occasional concerts, those are gone now. That burden was lifted and I never thought to ask by whom. I realized this weekend that my friends had unknowingly taken parts of it with them to their new homes. By leaving soon after me, Los Angeles would always be a setting for some of the best casual memories of my life, but no longer the place that I had to live if I wanted to make new ones. By following their own desires, they'd given me far more freedom than they could ever realize.

Seeing Jeffrey and Aaron over the past few days, along with Corey, another member of that disassembled band, was phenomenal, and despite 7 months of being apart, we picked up like it was a weekend away. But it wasn't like old times. It was somehow even more natural. We were finally us. Seeing my friends again, I recognized that they were more than just filled with potential, they were now well on their way towards achieving it. They were more themselves than I had ever seen them, and it was the city of San Francisco that was doing so much to make this happen. Personality alchemy. Juxtaposing what makes a city great, with what makes my friends the amazing people that they are, and watching that marriage become mutually beneficial. They fit there like they would nowhere else, and coming home to New York, I know that I love the Bay Area now not for what I saw back as an adolescent, or a teenager about to leave the comfort of high school, or even solely for its own merits, but really for what it is bringing out in them. So part of why I love San Francisco is part of why I love DC, or Los Angeles for my friends that are thriving there, where some of them truly do belong. Inevitably this means we're destined to be spread out, dots on an unfolding map. But it also means I have the potential to become the same sort of destination to them. The inevitable New Yorker of the group. The brutally honest, hyperbolic, less-than-patient, and yes Aaron, occasionally pretentious one.

There are scores of chasms that form in your mid-to-late twenties. Friends and lovers once inseparable totally dissipate. It's at this point each person becomes the individual they truly are, and opens his eyes to see all the new distance between himself and those that had been around. The natural tendency is to see that alienation, that gaping emptiness, to have that become your focus. Obviously, those ruptures have happened to me in two years of near-exile, across the country from most people I know. But it's all endurable once you see the ones that have moved closer. Because that motion is genuine. It would have to be since it's natural. It's what they saw when they opened their eyes as well.

I used my own Canon Rebel T2i to shoot the Palace of Fine Arts on Saturday afternoon. Irwin was reaching over a chain in a vain attempt to hug a swan, Jeff and Aaron looking around out of brightly-colored Wayfarers, all of us trading instantly-forgotten jokes fueled by the bottomless Mimosas we'd been downing the past hour. We walked around, all inevitably awed by how beautiful the structure was. Even more striking than I remember it being from years ago. And a hell of a lot happier too.

Up up, down down, left right, left right, b, a.

"Ever since my childhood, I've been scared, I've been afraid
Of being trapped by circumstance and staying in one place.
So I always keep a small bag full of clothes carefully stored,
Somewhere secret, somewhere safe, and somewhere close to the door." - Frank Turner, "The Road"

"But you should never be embarrassed by
Your trouble with livin'.
'Cause it's the ones with the sorest throats, Laura,
Who have done the most singin'," - Bright Eyes


Video games harm children. I know this from experience; from the harm they did me. This isn't the Bill O'Reilly/Joe Lieberman culture war. I don't care about the violence some contain, or their slothful distraction from exercise, homework, or other aspects of life. They never harmed me in any of those ways. Where I went wrong was that I had very little video game integrity. Sonic gets killed unexpectedly on an easy level, my Steelers give up a deep touchdown in the first quarter of Madden, and I lunged for the reset button. A thumb flick and my angst became a black screen, a loading page that diluted my embarrassment. And with that, none of it ever happened. That frustration. That dejection. Evaporated.

Around New Year's I saw a ton of status updates of people who couldn't wait for 2010 to end. What the fuck were they doing wrong? Yeah, I had some rough patches, some 2 a.m. confidings with friends I'd like to forget, but even with those, 2009 and 2010 were far and away the most exciting years of my life. And 2011? I was starting work NBC (one of my 2 dream companies to work for), had a group of my closest friends committed to joining me in Spain for San Fermin, a lot of other promising situations on the horizon. I had zero complaints of any kind. Had every reason to feel that my lucky number 11 would be my year, even greater than the two it succeeded.

I'm not really sure what happened.

I don't remember the initial pebble that the snowball grew around before it started hurtling downhill. I definitely know it gathered serious momentum on and after Super Bowl Sunday (seriously, what was that, Steelers?) and in the less than 60 days to speak of in 2011, I could think of 4, maybe 5 good experiences overall. Aside from that handful, of all the Charlie Browns in the world, I was the Charlie Browniest. A victim of the sophomore slump. The winter of my discontent. And as urgently as I grasped for one, there was no reset button to speak of. My Pavlovian expectation courtesy of Sega, Nintendo, and Sony had failed me. Maybe for the first time I felt trapped by my life, rather than stretching greedily in the freedom of it. Correspondence grew one-sided as I let emails and texts accumulate without response. I felt years removed from the person who wrote the posts below this one, from the backpacker drenched in Naples, penitent in Hiroshima, invigorated in Warsaw. Even from the one of last October, defiant in Havana.

I reached out to one friend. Even that was unintentional. I was just trying to catch up; to allay her fear that my M.I.A. status had anything to do with her, or anyone else really. I didn't mean to delve in to my problems in detail. But the moment our voices connected, they joined hands and leapt. Instantly. Surgingly. Maybe not surprisingly to those who know both of us, but she and I were on parallel trajectories. (We think the same things at the same time. We just can't do anything about it.) Alone, that is. Conversation as commiseration, briefly. But then conversation as construction. The comfort not in someone else suffering with me, but whom that person was. Realizing that whatever negative energy out there was strong enough to bring someone like her down too wasn't something you defeat at its height. It's something you ride out until you see the hint of an opening. Then spring at that. My answer didn't come by looking in the mirror, but by listening to it.

That hint of an opening was two days off from work in a row in my now erratic schedule. A Tuesday and Wednesday with nothing to do. Where some people would see midweek errands or catching up on sleep, I saw a window that lead both forwards and backwards. An opportunity to go somewhere I'd never been and to remind myself of a life, and an identity, that had escaped me for too long. Without hesitation, without much planning, I shipped up to Boston.

It wasn't so much what I did, or what I took in of the city that was quintessentially Boston. No stories of Sawwx Fans at Fenway, dispatches from Mike's Pastries, or anecdotes bred over beers with townies in Southie. I enjoyed the sights I'd never seen before, but it was the ones I already had that stuck with me. I'd never been to Boston until 2 days ago. But there were parts of it I'd experienced before. Standing in Fenway after dark, there's a building by the Prudential tower, in the highrise cluster between Back Bay and South End, that echoes the Atomic Bomb Dome. The high winds last night chilled like those two night strolls on Memorial island in Hiroshima when I couldn't bring myself to leave it. A darkened stylized room in the Museum of Fine Arts displaying Buddhist statues, sparingly and accurately decorated, meant to evoke a temple. For me it was instantly one on the grounds of the Ten-Ryu in Kyoto. I chewed different malts, crushed hops in my hands at the Samuel Adams Brewery, and if I kept my eyes closed it could have been the Heineken tour in Amsterdam. The lone head of a deva statue at MFA; I had seen hundreds of its surviving brothers that lined the bridges approaching Angkor Thom. I thought of my barely 20 tuk-tuk driver who drove me around Angkor, his even younger wife who worked at my hostel. Remembered how the eyes of the Asura demons from those bridges were identical to the orange eyes of some of the elephants walking past me, and how I felt connected to the millenia-long-dead craftsman who shared that thought.

I got to see some of Boston. But I got to experience more of myself, walk around places I didn't think I'd be again, immerse vividly and authentically into a moment, to toggle sleeping memories back to the present once again.

Life has no reset button. Yeah, that's impossible. But there are cheat codes out there for when you need them. I found one. And I plan on using it.

Often.


http://www.vimeo.com/17614094

My first time in hell.

I could tell you where it is, but I won't.

Admittedly it's part elitism, the relishing of insider knowledge on this matter only hours after its publicity, this solved mystery. But that's a fraction, a sliver. A significantly larger portion is out of concern. For you. For your safety. I have gone ahead; I don't think you should follow. I accomplished it with 3 other large grown men and even then our hearts were fluttering at times. We had to run briefly, slightly out of fear, mostly out of self-preservation. But the largest segment of the pie chart, the commanding majority: if you do want to find it, why spoil all the fun?

Most of you won't go. You can't. Not unless you're in New York City in the next week, maybe two. Past then and there may not be much left that's recognizable anyway. It'll be covered over, either with more graffiti or whitewashed by an embarrassed MTA. Eaten again by the City. And you'd have to be really dedicated to want to actually do this. Honestly, you'd have to be more than a little crazy.

My 11 day absence from New York ended in the early hours of Monday morning. If The New York Times had run the story at any time in that previous week and a half, I never would have known what I was missing. But there it sat, on the front page of the November 1st edition. A feature article describing "The Underbelly Project," a year-and-a-half-long workshop by major and emerging street artists conducted in a long-abandoned subway station somewhere in the five boroughs. The culmination was not an opening to the general public. That will never happen in the proper sense. Rather it was an invitation to only a handful of reporters in the world to cover the exhibit in an article, on the condition of anonymity for the artists' true names and also for the location of the exhibit.

Clearly I had to see it. Mainly for the street art itself, but exponentially more for it being held in an abandoned subway station, and that it was a giant, impossibly-tempting secret. A mystery built of sugar.

I turned my head to Kate, my friend beside me at work.
"You saw this right?"
"Yes. Looks amazing."
"We have to figure out where this is. I have to go."
She gave one of her signature pensive pauses, punctuated by a plotting smirk. "We can do that."

We rattled off the places we knew it could not be; eliminating three of the boroughs instantly. We used the other clues (the station's general size, its proximity to an occasionally reworked line) to narrow it down. Six minutes later she had her hunch. A quick search later that pulled up some images from this likely candidate station confirmed it. We looked at a photo from the slide show, an arresting piece proclaiming "WE OWN THE NIGHT" at the dead end of a track dugout, ringed by concentric rafters above. Then one from an older photo set of this likely station: it was the same dead end from the same perspective, here totally bare. It was the same photo, taken seven years earlier. One more search and she had years-old directions, admittedly vague, on how to get into this ghost station. In under 10 minutes I was set.

I texted my friends from California who were staying with me that week and set a time. 1:30am that night. A bit delayed, closer to 3, we got off the subway and crossed to the opposite side of the tracks for a better view to scout from. Encouraged by seeing an opening matching the directions, we crossed back over, then walked to the end of the platform, walked past the Do Not Enter sign and along the thin ledge of platform used only by workers and trespassers. This time of the morning we were safe from another train passing so soon and we ducked into the opening. A graffiti piece of a large Mayan-looking deity, mouth agape, lay just inside the opening. Not in the directions, but clearly where we needed to be.

We walked around several slanted aisles, each empty, or filled with discarded equipment, bottles. No stairs, no second hidden door. Embarrassed and perplexed, retracing through several times with little of anything to see I thought we had to give up. The only clue was another piece. 4 foot high letters, but the message was far too theatrical to be it. Right?

We looked up to wooden rafters and a barely visible cement ceiling some 30 feet above us. Our eyes traced that back down to see two extremely thin cords descending from the wooden banister, the one on the right making its way down to a loop at the bottom. For a foothold. Convinced this had to be the location and the means to get there, I turned back to the words on the wall. "Get Up. Get God." J______ went first.

Halfway up, "Fuck, fuck, it's breaking. It broke." A false alarm. He sturdied himself with the concrete ledge and used the still-holding rope for the last bit. He shone the flashlight. "This is definitely it. I see 'em."

My hands were already on the cord, my foot in the loop. I made it most of the way up to the concrete ledge that was the last boosting spot to the abandoned platform above, when the cord snapped. I fell back the twelve feet, twisting in mid-air to land on my side rather than with my back, which my camera was strapped to. Almost instantly after landing, before knowing that my jeans were widely torn or that my knee was bleeding, I assured them "I'm fine. I'm getting up there. I'm getting up." With a boost and more reliance on the equally flimsy thin metal pipes along the active line's tunnel than I wanted, I was on the ledge. Seconds later I was over the criss-crossed wooden banister. C______ came up as well while S______ kept lookout.

We wandered around mesmerized, I with the only camera snapping as many photos as I could. We navigated both the platform ledges and the drop-offs to the lower track-level six feet down in total darkness. After the initial shock and relief faded, something we weren't expecting became apparent. I saw them during the fractional flashes of my camera light, but had to switch to the play mode to read the tiny words on the viewfinder. That's how I learned we were being threatened.

The article stops short of the turn of the screw. Perhaps intentionally. The exhibit was not pristine when we came across it that early morning, as it appeared in the Times. The antique wooden table and chairs with a dinner set for two described by the writer was destroyed, a pile of wooden shards, except for one of the chairs which stood 40 feet away alone in an abyss. The look of a watchman's chair vacant, temporarily. About half of the works had been defaced, simple tags of static, intentionally ugly tags over complex works. Dogs pissing on every hydrant they pass. “GET OUT!”...."Fuck You, Fuck You" .... “Y'all Don’t Belong.....No No No No No”.... “The Tunnels Are OURS.” Words of anger, but ambiguously like those of a woken cyclops. One muttering in disbelief. Still debating how best to respond.

They were tags by the squatters of Hell Hou$e, their apparent chosen name for the station, furious that their turf had been breached, commercialized by whom they view as privileged, pompous outsiders. If such bile for the artists, what view of us? Something like groupies rather than guerrilla aficionados.

As arresting as the spotlight before me was, briefly illuminating scrawled threats, letting them come into existence, my mind was possessed by what our spot beam wasn’t showing. The other 330 degrees of world shrouded behind me, beside me. I kept half-expecting my camera flash to capture a figure lumbering towards me. Lumbering if I was lucky, rushing if I was not.

Down the sunken track dugout to the far side, still 15 feet from its end, my tiny miner’s light arched upon it. Upon him.

“Go. GO. Gogogogogo.”

I was briskly hurrying after saying the second, but J______ and C______ didn’t follow me until after I was done, when their lights had come across him as well. A man motionless on his side, an uncoiling fetal position, sleeping. But he did not stir with J______’s shocked yell and we never heard him afterwards. We regrouped at the opposite end, around a corner.

“It’s fine. Listen.... it’s fine. Just keep our distance, make it clear we're not trying to disturb him or anyone else.” In retrospect, absurd. The second we’d crossed the “Do Not Enter” sign back at the functioning station platform, we were intruding, disturbing him. Them. Trespassing, both on MTA property and inside Hell Hou$e, but only the latter really troubled me. (Y'all Don’t Belong..... No No No No No)

We carried on. About seven pieces later, J______ announced our warning call. “The spot has a minute left in it.”

I’d led us up but I wouldn’t keep us there without it. I photographed a few more pieces before returning to the path of our initial dugout, marked at the end by an American flag by Faile with a zig-zag pattern instead of stripes. We followed that track back to the middle and broke for the wooden banister. Five minutes of hesitant footholds, of easing down the others as they repelled, and frantic inhales of woken dust, inches of soot, and we were reassembled. Just in time for a train to rush past feet from us. We scurried around a corner, momentarily leaving our bags at the base. I doubled back to grab the gear and after hearing the line of cars pull away farther into the coming morning, we emerged back onto the ledge, then onto the public platform. The light, our first aside from the handhelds in over an hour, revealed our new layers of filth. We were covered in stagnancy, in time turned to soot, ash, and dirt.

The article came out yesterday morning. In this age of the instancy, I knew I wasn't the only asshole to figure out where it was. What surprised me was that there wasn't NYPD or MTA already waiting on the platform, blocking any possible access. What shocked me was that our hour up there wasn't filled with other groupies, other guerrilla tourists. That in all of New York City, for a full hour plus it was only us, the art, the art's backlash, the sleeping squatter we saw and any others that we didn't. That we spent an hour alone in the Underbelly. In Hell. Probably for the best that no one else tried to come up there too. Because the tunnels are theirs. And we don't belong. No no no no no no.

(post-script 11.11.10) The NYPD and MTA began sealing this up the following day. I actually suspect that the pile of wooden planks that we walked by in the alcove was a set of makeshift ladders that they had disassembled earlier that day, immediately after the article hit the public. Other people did manage to sneak in, but only a handful, and the only other pictures that I've seen were taken with a cell phone camera. A far larger number of people tried to break in and were either detained or arrested. But if you're moronic enough to attempt to break into a public transport station in New York City while wearing a keffiyeh over your face, you really have that arrest coming:

http://gothamist.com/2010/11/07/people_allegedly_arrested_trying_to.php

From where the palm tree grows.

Dear Cuba,

I found you.

It took some time, but you came. We had caught glimpses of you before. You were the children playing baseball in a grass lot with a massive visage of Che keeping watch. I heard your symphony sung by birds in the Parque Central; then a six piece band playing "El Cuarto de Tula", three singers coalescing into one voice. Yours.

On our first day here, you were a storm cloud in the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón . A four minute onslaught of pounding rain, to warn us, a display of what our week could be like if you wanted it to be. You weren't the constant unexpected sunshine that followed for the rest of the trip though. That was beautiful but inescapable, sometimes sweltering. You were that fleeting flirtation in the waning afternoon.

Dear Cuba. I saw you this morning. The procession of uniformed children tossing flowers in the river, out to sea to honor Camilo Cienfuegos. But you weren't the children; you were the many-varied petals. You were what prompted smiles to bloom on their faces. And because their innocent elation was infectious, to spread on mine.

A week chasing you left me with a blister on the ball of my foot that I felt when I rested, paused in my pursuit of you. I looked at it for the first time this morning and saw it was a perfectly-formed crimson heart. You wanted to remind me that love must involve some pain, a struggle. That only someone you love so deeply can reach you in that way. But the pain is our hurdle; it fades. Tested and torn muscles rebuild stronger. Proven capable of bearing the greater weight of our future.

Dear Cuba. You were the woman that welcomed me and my friend into her family's home, and you were her fourteen-year-old cousin there. You asserted your strength, defiance, sovereignty, determination, independence, as others around acquiesced, settled, sold themselves. But you were also that girl's potential. The belief that the next generation that idolizes you will build on all of those virtues. Will manage to reach farther still.

But tonight I saw you clearest, and tonight I understood. You started with a four piece band; three guitars and percussion on an apple box. Not the one of the farmer, but of the filmmaker. The percussionist leaned back with casual artistry. I was impressed; taken aback. "Viva Stevie Wonder" was scribbled on the walls of the courtyard, the white temporal chalk on dark rojo.

You were in the third row as the bands made the air around us tremble. You had a string of flowers falling from your hair. I couldn't help but sneak looks at your dimples, your singing along to songs I'd never dreamed. I didn't walk over to talk to you. Not because I was nervous, but because I couldn't express myself with the passion that I wanted. Not a passion that I felt for you in that instant, but that I felt was required for this country. Something my second semester Spanish never covered.

Dear Cuba. I could have kept talking to the Swiss girls. They were beautiful, but had no passion. They assessed attraction by arithmetic, reduced conversation to a quantity and I needed, need, passion on instinct. I preferred to keep vigil to the night around me, to join in the chorus with those around. With you. The words a mystery but the emotion an impossible clarity.

Dear Cuba. Years of longing and months of planning to come meet you are forever passed. In your history, you were mythology become reality. And now that we've met, you're myth turned flesh, and back again to legend. My lesson that you come from dreams, and to dream you shall return.

Dear Cuba.

We fell in love tonight. I hope you remember in the morning.



(originally written October 30, 2010)

Of a revolution, two.

I walked around the back of the police car before it pulled away. Abdel and Pilar were now both inside, if not free then at least together. He had squeezed into the center of the cramped backseat, next to the teenage prostitute whose flirtation and pleading at me through the car window had quickly jerked into confusion and fear seconds earlier. Ricardo, myself, and the car that had just rolled off with its human cargo inside were each older than the policia especializada officer that we were speaking to, the one that had started the confrontation. The one that had shifted the tenor of that Havana afternoon.

I type these words for you now rather than later. With an ending as unsurprising as this, why bother building to it?

Two hours earlier I was at my leftist best. If there is a second coming of Joseph McCarthy, a Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or someone (God help us) nuttier that succeeds in resurrecting HUAC, my morning in Havana's Museo de la Revalucion was probably enough to get me blacklisted. Or exiled. Three stories of the Communist government's time capsule to posterity, complete with a giant park for relics of war vehicles. The typewriter Fidel Castro used to write "History Will Absolve Me," his brother Raul's combat boots, Che Guevara's rifle and beret, the yacht they used in the unsuccessful Granma uprising, Fidel's tank he commanded in the Bay of Pigs affair, the wreckage of the American B-2 shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a memorial flame to the dead that fought for the Revolution. Everything the embargo is in place to keep Americans from seeing, from spending their money on. But certainly no more offensive than the Ronald Reagan Library, and with about as much propaganda.

With our last sight-seeing stop during our 3 days in Havana complete, Ricardo and I walked across the street to one the countless all-purpose tiendas that heavily pepper the city. An amalgam of rum, laundry detergent, beauty products, candy, toilet paper, toothpaste, hot food, and beer for sale; we came in desperate want of the latter two. Neither a free table nor another tourist inside confirmed that we'd made the right choice. Our food was ordered, our bottles of Cristal beer were already sweating from the omnipresent humidity, and each of us looked around for some small vacancy coupled with eye contact as an invitation to sit. Ricardo managed first, and I walked around to the table's other vacant seat, next to a chain-smoking man named Abdel. A table behind me opened four minutes later. A few more minutes of indecision on where to eat, a few more Spanish captions to Revolutionary photos I could have laboriously translated, either of us going to the bathroom again before leaving the museum, and I could be sure Claudia would have seen her parents before she went to sleep tonight. Actually, any of those things and I wouldn't even know who Claudia was.

Instead it was the four of us. Abdel and Pilar with their red and black cans of Bucanero Fuerte, Ricardo and I our green bottles of Cristal. We were each ready for our next round before the food finally arrived. Somehow the smoke of unfiltered cigarettes wasn't a bother, somehow I stumbled through a description of my tattoo in Spanish when asked by Pilar. An hour of good conversation, if difficult to hear with the rowdy neighbors and TV blaring early 90s salsa music videos. When Abdel went to speak to some other friends outside, Pilar told Ricardo and I about their 16 years of marriage, their youngest child a 2 year-old daughter named Claudia.

I greeted Abdel's return with "Claudia?"
"Si, Claudia," his proud smile unobscured by the nub of a cigarette between his lips. He immediately reached for his wallet and a poorly developed dark photo of her. Barrettes, one purple and one green at the bottom of arching side braids, giving her backlit head the look of a trophy to match her paternal identity as one. Conversation switched back to our upcoming trip to Trinidad, the city that every Cuban we'd met urged us to visit, a decision that greatly pleased the couple. Soon we were invited to join them for more drinks at an African-Cuban club, a generosity and an opportunity for something so off the tourist radar we could not pass up. We'd spent days with strangers trying to coax us to one tourist trap or another, their salesman routine as stale as it was transparent. No different than my experience in India, Thailand, Egypt, Prague, Rome, Amsterdam. Experienced backpackers recognize the chasm between bullshit and sincerity, and we knew that Abdel and Pilar were on the right side of that divide.

It took merely the width of the street to get in trouble. As we got to the opposite sidewalk, the very existence of our unlikely foursome of two very dark-skinned Cubanos, a Peruvian-Canadian with a mohawk, and 6'4" white guy in preppy shorts and laceless Chuck Taylors was all it took for Abdel and Pilar to be detained by a member of Havana's Special Police. Their response to every question I managed to translate mentally pulled my stomach lower. Pilar did not have her identification. Abdel's identification was worn, peeling, its picture admittedly sketchy-looking. Minutes of radio conversation passed between the young officer and his superiors before he allowed us to speak the calm words that would eventually set them free.

Ricardo calmed down a frustrated, indignant Abdel as my rudimentary Spanish helped the officer see my explanation for what it was: innocence... the truth. Ricardo's far more fluent corroboration of who we were and where we were headed was the lynchpin that set us all on our way. We walked again, apologizing to Abdel and Pilar profusely for causing them trouble. Pilar's response, a sincere assurance that it wasn't us, made me more disconcerted. It replaced my guilt with sympathy as she explained how they are constantly stopped for identification without proper cause. That their quite obvious African-Cuban heritage forces them to endure constant suspicion. We shook it. We assured them that the afternoon would be great. How Ricardo and I were really looking forward to this club, which according to Abdel would not be a long walk.... which was correct.

"Alto, identificacion."
Ricardo and I looked at one another then down at the officer behind the steering wheel who was speaking to Abdel. The words "no" and "fuck" are universal, as is exasperation. The officer looked at me long enough to acknowledge each of those three things from me but immediately went back to Abdel. Identical routine but this officer was more decorated than the first, I would guess just old enough to pre-date the Revolution, and clearly far less open to negotiations.
Ricardo busied himself with the officer's partner, Pilar with trying to wave down the first officer who initially stopped us less than a block earlier. I found myself looking around at those looking at me. The doormen at the expensive hotel we were in front of, the uniformed military guards at the museum's outdoor exhibition, the German tourists walking by. And the wide-eyed movement in the backseat of the police car; the officers' prior arrest. At fifteen too young for her profession, her insistent flirtation too much for both of those. Her presence really only served to disquiet me further, not just for obvious reasons, but also as an indication that this officer was not one to merely warn.

The first officer's arrival cleared up nothing, instead only prompting his superior to frisk Abdel and then cuff him, catalyzing furious shouting. He made eye contact with Ricardo and I as he was placed into the back of the car. He cut off our frantic apologies with a yell only partially directed at us: "This is the shit because of Fidel."

Pilar was next to him in the car just a few seconds later, choosing her husband over her own freedom. I stumbled another explanation to the officer. "No, no, no problema con nosotros..... Estan muy, muy simpaticos."
"Bien... estan muy simpaticos." He shrugged as he slouched into the driver's seat and turned his attention to the ignition and the sidestreet ahead. Too ashamed and guilty to attempt for eye contact with Abdel, I turned in disbelief and exhaustion to the girl beside him. Earlier she showed her own arrest was an annoyance and a joke, but the terror in her eyes confirmed that his was now more. I wondered if a younger, faded her was in a wallet somewhere in the city. The car drove away.

Ricardo's conversation with the first officer was almost over by the time I could focus on it. "They did nothing wrong-"
"Where are you from?"
"Canada."
"Canada. And there you can just speak against the government and get away with it?"
The irony answered the question for us. It took patience and restraint to keep both of us from pointing back at the Museo de la Revolucion and declaring: "They did."

I type these words in a casa particular, just after sundown, hours after I watched the police car turn the corner and Abdel and Pilar shrink away. I'm going to save this draft and place the file, like the others I have started in Cuba thus far, in a subfolder of a subfolder of an innocuously named folder on my desktop. A precaution I've never taken before in my traveling. Unless the absolute worst happens in customs leaving Cuba, they should be safe there.I type these words grateful that it wasn't me the officer asked the above question to; that I wasn't forced to lie about my nationality to a specialized police officer in a Communist dictatorship or be placed in the back of that already capacity squad car, an American caught with those in suspicion of being against the government.
I type these words hoping that Abdel and Pilar are okay. That once everyone in that car has calmed down and had their backgrounds run, that everything will check out. That Claudia will have her mother and father with her to kiss her goodnight. If not tonight then certainly tomorrow, and many after that.

I type these words with weight of uncertainty; at times the worst oppressor of all.


(***All of the above conversation took place in Spanish, but I translated the more detailed dialogue into English to make it easier to follow.)

Of a revolution, one.

"The things we need do not amount to much.
Made of abandoned wood, loose stones, and such.
This revolution maybe
Proves who you work for lately..." - Silversun Pickups

"Not all powers have to be discovered; some have to be regained." - John Fowles


A Cuba Libre is a rum and Coke, in some bars livened with a piece of mint or some lime. Its enjoyment derives from the sweetness of its individual ingredients, but also its simplicity. Anyone can make it, at pretty much anytime, with basics most people have already. From my experience, it's also what a lot of people start drinking when they're new to alcohol. It is later that they acquire the taste for bourbon, gin and tonics, martinis, old-fashioneds, but rum and Coke gets lost somewhere early on the road, crowded out by complexity.

It's a conversation I've had thirty or forty times. What I love about living in New York. It's really just rehashing the obvious, maybe confirming the stereotype that there is literally something to do at all hours. Any cuisine you want, any esoteric decor for a bar just a Metrocard swipe away. When bored with itself, the world turns to New York and the City, like no other in existence, quenches and electrifies. For visitors it often appears a cultural and social hurricane, but living there one is happily in its eye.

I spend most of my time with my nose to the concrete and glass mosaic, focused on the idiosyncrasies that add to the insiders' enjoyment. The brunch place in LES that will make pretty much any dish from any cuisine but will absolutely not accept parties of more than 4, the neo-speakeasies that change phone numbers every 6 weeks or can only be entered by dialing a certain number at a certain phone booth, the constant guessing game of what that night's color scheme for the top of the Empire State Building is celebrating; the little machinations that keep away the boredom in what is already the least boring city in the world. With only weekend trips since becoming acclimated in New York, this is my first true chance to step away from that masterpiece, to see what else can be found in other galleries.

Fittingly, I chose a place of further complication as my destination. The one country in the world that as an American I wasn't legally allowed to visit, where it was impossible to even look up flight prices because the embargo blocked such online searches. A country where hostels don't exist and you need to register your location with the government every day of your trip. I spent 40 minutes being searched at customs coming in, every item I owned examined in detail, the serial number of this laptop I'm writing on recorded in a customs agent's notepad in the Varadero airport. I can only imagine what's awaiting me at customs on my journey out of Cuba. And worse, clearing them when returning to the US ("A bit tan for spending 10 days in Toronto in late October, wouldn't you say, sir?") But it wasn't the complications that drew me, it was the taboo. The opportunity to not simply peek behind the curtain of the forbidden, but to spend over a week exploring what unknowns lurked beyond. An elaborate exercise in reverse psychology.

As our first full day here came to a close, my friend Ricardo and I walked several kilometers along the darkened El Maecon, much of it without conversation; but our silence wasn't born of a lack of interesting topics or boredom. For those minutes that swelled into hours, we merely wanted to observe rather than dictate. To inhale with nostrils, eyes, ears, and intellect the layers of the culture around us. We had left our casa paticular hours earlier in search of authentic Cuban food and a bar that locals would visit for this Saturday night in Havana. We gorged ourselves with seafood and flavorful entrees but failed in the latter. Few Habanas seemed to be congregated anywhere and we found ourselves for the second time that day on El Malecón, the winding highway and walkway that borders the ocean in the capital city. It was immediately apparent why the bars were empty. There were a few gaps of cement ledge in that hour-plus of distance, but they were either smaller than three feet or were the perma-damp sections where the Atlantic's waves scale the wall's height to reach land. The people of the city, what felt like the entire nation, formed a chain of laughter, smiles, passed bottles, and shared boxes of cigarettes along the salted breezes of the exhaling Atlantic. There was no festival, nothing special about this weekend for them. A beautiful Saturday night simply meant spending it along the ocean with the one person or handful of companions that they wanted to be with.

Take 10 Wall Street bankers and 10 everyday Cubans and ask who is less stressed. Who enjoys life more. Who is simply happier. It shouldn't take much to achieve this plateau; contentment is a quick, basic emotion. Stock portfolios and applications for private pre-schools, lists for clubs, closet coke habits, gambling debts and contrived crises only add impediments between us and our remarkably simple access to joy. Stockpiling of possessions and vices that build a barrier to keep us out rather than the two or three simple ingredients that can easily form a bridge. The basic combinations that can make us happy. Havana Club and Coca-Cola, a stick and something remotely round enough to work as a ball, one star and five stripes, a can of Cristal beer and conversation, a tiny waist and wide hips, the ocean breeze and the laughter of a friend, an acoustic guitar and portable bongos, eye contact and a suppressed smile.

A girl I recently ended things with didn't take it well and tried to insult me by saying "whatever, you don't even have a bed." And she's right. I don't have one. I also don't own a car, a tv, an iphone, or a normal computer. I don't have many modern distractions and conveniences because for 5 months I lived without them and felt more myself than ever. The true individual that I am, for the first time. I abandoned a lot things that in some ways prevented me from constantly feeling the emotions that most people strive and fail to feel. Or keeping me from being the person that I want to be. What I have instead is a supply of v-neck t-shirts, a pair of blue jeans, my camera and a stack of unfinished books. What I have is my passport. And vigilant determination.

I'm a New Yorker now. Only 10 months in, I feel and act like a true local, carry a disdain for snail-paced tourists, anything and everything Boston, and the G train. I'm surrounded by the machinations that keep life complicated, and fully enjoy them because in many ways they manage to keep the monotony of the status quo safely at bay. But some part of my heart beats with the rhythm of a Cubano. I'll indulge in the eccentricities but I don't ever feel ensnared by them. I don't need them. I have what I need. And because of that I am free.

(*written October 24, 2010).