Love and Death

As I sit here writing this, the rain pounding sonorously off the corrugated steel roof outside my office, a pensive mood overtakes me. The office is emptying out for the day and a serene quiet is replacing the droning din of workday bustle, a quiet which somehow endures, in bold defiance of the deafening raindrops. It's been a while since I've written about Kenya, either privately or for public blogging consumption, but that will have to wait just a little while more.

This post comes with a warning to the faint of heart and anyone with an aversion to artsy-fartsiness. It's only hope for redemption is that it's sincerity might be recognized.

This morning I woke to the news of Ingmar Bergman's death. I was informed by the CNN ticker chugging its way across the bottom of the screen, drifting over my bowl of banana-laced Wheat Flakes and breaking into my sleep-clouded consciousness. I've just now learned that Michaelangelo Antonioni has passed away as well. That's two giants of film in one day. I'm still holding my breath. These things have a way of coming in threes.

Upon hearing this new, I was filled with that dull sensation of loss you experience when somebody famous passes on at a ripe old age; I didn't know either of these men personally, after all, and they weren't the least bit aware of my existence. Nor are their deaths particularly tragic. They may have played their chess matches more skillfully than most, but in the end Death will have us all in check-mate.

Yet for me, and undoubtedly I'm not alone in this, the news resonates on a deeper chord. If you've lived life to a sufficient degree of fullness and depth, you have encountered a few artists who may have shared a piece of themselves with you, created something that has connected with you more intimately than anything you've experienced in your everyday waking life.

Now, I won't think any less of you if you've never seen a Swedish film in your life, and maybe you could care less about some old Italian guy you've never heard of. Come to think of it, I hope you don't disown me after reading this. But for me, movies (or film, or cinema, or what have you) have greatly influenced my life and shaped the way I see the world. It's difficult to make it through adolescence unscathed when your best friends in 8th grade are Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. And that might be why I find significance in these deaths.

For a while there, living through movies was better than reality. It was an escape from the world I walked through each day, which to me was a mundane, flat, and generally uninteresting existence. At the same time, a serious, oftentimes foreign film could open my eyes to the beauty of even the simplest, most commonplace aspects of life.

Curiously, here in Kenya I've rediscovered an appreciation for movies as a means of escape - there's arguably a greater psychological need for escape here than there ever was in upstate New York. There are two cinemas in town that play second-run summer popcorn flicks for around $3 a pop, and I don't think I've ever gotten so much enjoyment out of these dumb, flashy movies as I have here. Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Shooter, Ocean's 13 - I'll watch them all, and with an uncritical eye. Criticism is superfluous and finding fault is completely besides the point, something I've only come to understand during my time in Kisumu.

Late night TV is blissful - after 12:30, there's a channel that plays Turner Classic Movies straight through till dawn. A lot of atmospheric '70s horror and sci-fi (like Coma and Poltergeist). The other night Antonioni's Zabriskie Point was on, and I stayed up, riveted, until 3:30am, then caught a few hours of sleep before getting up for work at 6:30. The film is a super dated hippie movie advocating free love, bad acting, and The Revolution, with a soundtrack featuring Pink Floyd and the Dead. I found myself mesmerized, though, like I was watching it for the first time. The last time I can remember getting so sucked into a movie late at night on TV was watching Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D when I was around fifteen, and falling asleep on the couch as the sun was rising.

Both Bergman and Antonioni lived long, full lives (they were 89 and 94, respectively), and their deaths shouldn't be mourned so much as their lives and careers should be celebrated. I won't bore you with obscure film trivia, but you've probably been affected by their work more than you think, if only indirectly. There's no way a Woody Allen movie, especially his earlier ones, would be the same if it wasn't for Bergman's influence. Love and Death is virtually unimaginable without the dour Swede (or Dostoevsky, for that matter, but that's another obituary). And, together with James Bond, Antonioni's portrayal of a fashion photographer in 1966's Blow Up, set in Swinging London, is basically the prototype for Austin Powers.

Sure, these guys are almost too easy to spoof. In exploring the dimensions of tragedy, strangeness, and absurdity in life, both Bergman and Antonioni took the craft of film-making to unprecedented realms, and I wouldn't trust anyone who claimed to understand the intention or purpose of their every shot. But the beauty of film is its open-endedness: an objective, unalterable image permanently committed to celluloid, which can yet be interpreted and understood differently by everyone who watches it. It's no less appropriate to laugh than to cry, and often your reaction depends on your own individual mood and circumstances, adding a wholly unpredictable element to the movie-going experience.

So, in closing, that's just a hint of what film means to me. Reflecting on the lives of the these two greats allows me to gain perspective on my own life. I'm not devastated by their passing, so much as I am mindful of my own influences and the roots of my creative aspirations. I promise to get back to Kenya the next time I write, which with any luck (and motivation) will be sooner rather than later.

Hold on, World

Yeah I'm still alive and I'll be serving up some delicious posts in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime, this should sate your appetite for wicked stuff from Kenya.

Telling stories

The other night I’m hanging around with some guys from the neighborhood outside my friend Bob’s barber shop, which is really just a wooden shack on the side of the road in front of Bob’s uncle’s house. His uncle’s name is Jibs. Jibs is sitting with us, too. We’re passing time before I head into town with Bob and Moses, another friend, to catch the Primera Liga title match between Real Madrid-Real Mallorca, the night’s main attraction. Unfortunately, I’m the only Madrid supporter present in a haven of Barca fans – Ronaldinho’s big ugly mug is watching over us from inside the shack – so it promises to be a long night, regardless of the outcome of the games.

Moses tells me this is what they normally do in the evenings, just sit around and shoot the bull. Only he says it in a way that is just so much cooler than I could ever hope to describe it.

“Yeah, after work I usually come over here to find my friends. Then we just relax, sit around and tell stories.”

Telling stories. The casual way he says it is almost poetic, which is fitting because Moses fancies himself a poet. And the storytelling itself has an illusive, poetic quality to my ears, since it’s mostly conducted in Luo, the local language around these parts. This fact also ensures that I don’t contribute much to the conversation, but nobody here seem to mind.

The radio’s on and tuned to a Nairobi station, Classic 105, which plays these amazing blocks of early ‘90s hip-hop and pop songs in the afternoon, like “I Wish” by Skee-Lo and “Everybody, Everybody” by Black Box (a Jock Jams classic, you’ve definitely heard it). At night though, “Classic 105 Loooooves the ‘80s!”, or so the DJ insistently tells us between songs. Right now it’s MJ, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, and the crowd goes wild.

“MJ is the greatest, absolutely!” Bob exclaims fawningly, which puts me off a bit because Bob is this fairly jacked guy with a deep voice and typically reserved emotions. “Oh yeah, he’s sooo, so good,” Moses echoes. “Mike, do you like MJ?” I respond strongly in the affirmative. Come on, personal issues aside, who doesn’t love MJ?

In addition to being a poet, Moses is something of a rapper as well. He’s got a rap crew going with a few of his boys and they call themselves Watchtowers. I tell him I like that name. Moses also tells me he’s a fan of Nas, Common, and Erykah Badu (“I love the neo-soul,” he says). Moses is down with neo-soul. I’m down with Moses.

A guy on my left who I don’t know breaks out into a rhyme, spitting ill about blunts and ‘40s, which strikes me as strange considering I’ve seen neither during my time in Kenya. In fairness, though, I have seen a plethora of 50 Cent t-shirts around and there’s a matatu bus in town named “Biggie Smallz” (which is ironically plastered with Tupac decals). I’m considering writing a thesis entitled “Fear of a Black Planet: The Contributions of American Hip-Hop and the Thug Life Ethos towards the Perpetuation of the Neo-colonial Paradigm within an Urban African Context”. But I digress.

Bob goes inside to get a sweater before we leave for town (it’s dropped to 18°C - the winter temperatures here really bother the locals). I’m left sitting with Moses, Bob’s Uncle Jibs, and a few other guys. Jibs starts in on a rant about politics, not for the first time judging from the expressionless looks on the guys’ faces. They listen, nodding politely but not really showing any interest. The thing that hooks me, though, is that Jibs starts talking about the Millenium Development Goals as a matter of local politics. In case you don’t stay up on your “UN promises that have little-to-no chance of being achieved but allow world leaders to save face by smiling and slapping each other on the back after they sign the useless compact”, the MDGs can be found here.

There was originally some hope for the Goals, despite the UN’s poor track record, because they established a set somewhat realistic, almost measurable benchmarks that were to be met along the route to the ultimate eradication of extreme poverty (defined as living under $1.08 US per day – roughly the bare minimum for survival), along with specific measures to be used for their implementation.

Back to our story, Kisumu’s been tipped to be among the first batch of the UN’s “Millenium Cities”, a distinction that I hadn’t heard too much noise about locally – that is, until I started paying closer attention. (registration required, but it’s free)

The city still has a few hurdles yet to clear before the official title is confirmed, but Kisumu is extremely well-positioned to be a hub of East African trade and travel. It’s right on Lake Victoria, a location that is ridiculously central to all East Africa destinations, as well as a potential tourism boon that’s criminally under-utilised. The prime lakefront property in town is used as a carwash, with a bunch of fish “restaurants” (again, wooden shacks) where street boys wait next to your table while you eat, eager to shovel the rotting fish remains you’ve left on your plate into a plastic bag to be saved for later.

So Jibs is talking idly about these matters of local politics, which happen to coincide with international development objectives, but he’s spurred on because tonight someone’s actually responding to his allegations of government corruption and his oft-ignored prescriptions for change. His case is helped by the fact that he’s chosen this part of his evening to speak in English.

We talk about the much-touted success of Kenya’s free universal primary education, which has a few catches – class sizes are too large, teachers are poorly equipped. I say this is a step in the right direction, but Jibs thinks the politicians see it as a fait-accompli, since they’ve already included free secondary education in next year’s just-announced budget - before the kinks are worked out of the primary school deal. This is true, and there’s no obvious solution to the dilemma, yet there is another positive piece to this puzzle.

For the first time ever, Kenya has left out entirely all promised foreign aid from its budget-funding proposal. That means that the Kenyan government is setting itself up to pay for all of its ambitious development projects completely internally, through tax dollars and expected proceeds from privatization of parastatals. It means that the national deficit will grow as the state stretches its domestic borrowing to the limits, but it's also seen as a huge step towards self-sustained economic growth. The IMF and World Bank are no doubt enamored with the plan, and it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

Bob comes back out after a while and we make our way into town to catch the kickoff at 10:00pm. Before leaving, Jibs takes me aside and earnestly tells me that he hopes we can talk again. He seems surprised that I'd taken such an interest in local issues, that I know the names of politicians, including Kenya's Finance Minister (Amos Kimunya, boo-ya!), and I assure him that the conversation wouldn't end there. I look forward to more evenings of relaxation and storytelling, I tell him. It's the truth.

It would seem that a bit of the old man has rubbed off on me and I’ve abused your poor blog-weary eyes for too long. You know it’s time to sign off when you’ve descended from MJ to the MDGs in a single post. Talk about going from Bad to worse. Ouch. I’ll be going now.