Tis a chill wind

Thanks to OJS, I am now apprised of the worrying statistical correlation between global warming and the diminishing pirate population. I hereby pledge to pilfer more content from other people's blogs; to mutter and curse more frequently and less discriminately; to squint at horizons and wenches; to trade exclusively in rum and doubloons and to befriend me a parrot.

Double exposure

I’m sorry, I’ve got wireless and I’ve got cable and Tyra Banks features on both. I’ve been off the pop-culture radar for such a long time, I am sincerely and genuinely astonished by the Tyra Banks Show. It’s utterly compelling. I really have no idea: Is this the best thing ever or the worst thing ever? I honestly do not know. Is she on medication? Does she need medication?

I mean, I’m as committed to responsible skincare as the next supermodel.


‘I’m not a victim. I grow from it and I learn.’ Yeah. Me too.


I waste plenty of time on youtube but honestly, Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert and Chris Lilley and old Haile Selaisse speeches and clips from Bogart films I’ve already seen, they don’t compare. Perhaps my travels are agitating a deep internal need for network television and fly-by tabloid magazines.

What would Adorno say? This will be my Vespers meditation.

Media Scandal

Judy Horacek rocks.

Denied

A very small number of people will be as disappointed as I was that the Blue Mango has closed its doors in Kampala. Once, it was a thriving, budget-ish lodge and bar, highly recommended by all manner of pundits, a place which attracted once-fashionable adjectives like lush and succulent and sprawling. Now that I gather the vocabulary and see it before me, it strikes me that these were all euphemisms and that it was probably a brothel. At any rate, it's shut and the website, bizarrely, has been taken over by a bunch of health scientists.

Poems, anyone?

Sorry, this whole post was an in-joke.

Mea culpa, felix culpa

Not so long ago, I received an email from a correspondent unknown to me in which I was sternly taken to task for the cavalier title of this blog.

The gist?:

Unemployed at last? What kind of spoilt ninny would so blithely, so irresponsibly trumpet such a statement? Who seeks to be unemployed? And what gross insensitivity to the plight of those seeking employment and yet unable to find it! You should be ashamed of yourself, young lady, etc, etc.

Who and what indeed!

(Heaves a heaving sigh)

The words ‘Unemployed at last!’ open the novel Such is Life by Tom Collins (or Joseph Furphy, as you will). Over coffee in Darlinghurst in early 2007, the line ‘Unemployed at last!’ was, within my hearing, designated the greatest first line in Australian literature by a storied sage who travels as the Don. This not being the first time I had plundered the Don’s ample stores of wit and classificatory nous, I borrowed the line so stamped with the imprimatur of great authority with little compunction. The slightly obnoxious bent of the title is thus, I hope, utterly redeemed by its exemplary lineage: Ozlit, the Don, Daaaahlinghurst.

It must be added that my departure from the bonds of a career which was whittling my robust and merry spirit into something bitter and dusty is not so distant; the spry tone of the exclamation does capture, almost perfectly, my ongoing glee at finding myself unleashed from a lifetime of despair up there in the tower.

I am the Great Pretender

Q. Who is Zanzibar’s most famous glam-rockin’ son?
A. Freddie Mercury. Yep, it was news to me too. Throughout this very conservative town are scattered proud monuments to Freddie and to Queen, including a restaurant called Mercury’s. The house where Freddie grew up is now home to a souvenir shop which trumpets its Mercury lineage triumphantly.

Proof of a Protean Planet

1. White pants
There are certain things that certain types of people don’t do. One of the things that people like me – messy, grumpy, domestically deficient, clumsy, slouchy, would-be urbane and bohemian people – don’t do is wear white pants, let alone white linen pants, not even in the tropics. My injunction on pale clothing was only very recently and reluctantly released and, proof of the slippery slope theory if nothing else, I’m the Owner of a pair of WHITE PANTS.

Those are my legs, my feet, my balcony. Those are my white pants. Soon I take a walk along the beach. I might even dare to eat a peach.

To add that they’re actually cream shouldn’t destigmatise them or me. Yes, they’re airy and comfortable, no, they don’t offend the Muslim population on Zanzibar or the conservative Christians on the mainland, and hurrah, no one in their right mind will mistake me for a prostitute or loose woman wearing them. Whilst I’m still dubious, I’m also unconvinced that they will stay cream or white or whatever for too long.

2. John Malkovich no longer reigns
I’ve been captivated by John Malkovich for years and years. The sadistic, debonair, savvy charm that he brings to his roles, those long dismissive stares, that too-clipped enunciation and painfully slow physicality: long live the über-rational bald dandy! Valmont, Ripley, I’ve been utterly unable to resist John Malkovich’s screen personae. I watched Jane Campion’s Portrait of A Lady and the nasty schtick was exactly the same. His interpretation of Osborne adheres perfectly to the formula he established, being John Malkovich, if you will, and yet I found myself utterly horrified by the cruelty which inhabits this, and every one of his performances. That my shudders were shudders of repulsion might be a higher homage to the big M’s thesp prowess or, alternatively might testify to some worrying resistance to morally questionable characters. Funny though, I bought the white pants just before watching Portrait. Causal nexus?

‘Time passes.’ (V. Woolf.) Vide Thoreau (H.D.), things change. We do, semioticians, greenhorns and others alike, people a strange and fluxient universe, do we not? Am I going soft in the head? Is travel broadening my horizons? Is the heat poaching my good judgment? Are the anti-malarials that I’ve started to take again sending me bonkers? Do I have malaria?

Not all is awry. The beach, fortunately, is still quite appealing.

Name that film!

G’an!

In what film, banned for decades in the UK and elsewhere, do these steps feature?
They are in Odessa, there are 192 of them, and I walked up and down them all today.

You can do it!

Shackled

More padlocks d’amour, this time in Odessa, on the ‘Mother-in-law Bridge,’ apocryphally so named because it was built at the behest of a Communist official who wanted a quicker way for his mother-in-law to get home and outta his house. Romantic site to make a public assertion of true love, non?
Eavesdropping and deciphering the explanatory gestures exchanged by a group near me on the bridge, I deduce that the keys are turned up here on the bridge and then thrown into the wasteland fifty metres below. That’s commitment.

Liminal

This was stencilled on the ground near the university in Vienna. Damn students.
Did I cross the line? But of course. I’m still processing my feelings on pushing this particular boundary.

My idea of hell

The Pan-European Hostel Party Bus.

A double-decker tour bus rebuilt into a 17 bed hostel with a social lounge! It has curtains for privacy! It has a bar! Kill me! Pleeeeease! Anything but the hostel bus!

Two superstitions

In Cambodia, women who eat a bumblebee and the egg of a goose whilst pregnant will be blessed with a clever child.

In Italy, if you put a chestnut in your pocket or bag on the first day of autumn and leave it there until the end of winter, you won’t get the 'flu all winter.

Guess which one of these folk remedies I am putting to trial?

Hirsute appendages

I am not brave enough to take guerrilla photos of moustaches in Italian cafes but I have been pushing the boundaries of discretion in my admiring observation of the variety of mustachios on show since my arrival in the land of Verdi; bristling, razor-sharp, toothbrush, curlicue, drooperino, dashing, suave, waxed, prinked or uplifted, the moustaches of Italy are pleasing me no end.

It is now, however, clear to me that I have been checking out the B-listers: the 9th World Beard and Moustache Championships took place in Brighton last weekend. This event was organised by the Handlebar Club of Great Britain whose members must display ‘a hirsute appendage of the upper lip, with graspable extremities.’ It’s phrasing like that, particularly the locution ‘graspable extremities,’ that makes me grateful to providence for having deposited my protopersonage on the narrow land at the hour of my birth.

Casa nostra

I am indebted to the fair Lindsay and The New Yorker for the above. Double click on the pic if the caption is too small to read.

Sign up!

Want to run away and join the Foreign Legion?
There’s a recruitment point in St Charles Station, Marseilles.

Narcissism and negation

OK. So I googled myself for the first time in a while. Actually, I googled Catri. I have no explanation for this beyond run of the mill narcissism. Everybody does it and I'm not ashamed. There's even a Facebook group for people who google themselves. I'm not sure if there is one for people who google the vernacular abbreviation of their Christian names. That said, I'm delighted to report that no-one seems to be slandering me online. For now at least, phew! I do, however, want all false association to be stripped from my Catri avatar.

Let the following be said only once.

The Catri writing this is not:

a boat

a warcraft character

a town in Elba famous for its mineral deposits.

Should anyone else wish to pursue this utterly pointless and mostly fatuous searchline, I am neither the one posting advice about mixing anti-depressants and various herbal remedies nor am I the expert witness -- although I have performed both these rolls. I'm not Furio di Catri (although I do kind of wish I was an Italian bassist), I'm not San Catri the deathmetal head, and I'm not Dick Catri the pro-surfer. Got it?

I won't even get started on the trashglam alter-egos save to insist that I was there first. It was the nineties. Got it?

Is punk dead?

If punk is well punctuated, surely it is moribund?
Photo taken on the steps of St Charles Station, Marseilles.

Three men

If this blog is to document my activities with any accuracy, then the severe spike in internet use (wireless in the hotel room…) must be reflected.

Hence, three wise men online.

a) Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a book called The Man Who Ate Everything. He also wrote this article instructing the novice omnivore. He is greatly to be admired. I am lamentably bereft of a clear vision of desirable employment. I do, however, think I could manage being Jeffrey Steingarten’s witty and youthful offsider and platonic dinner companion. Who am I kidding? I don’t want to be Jeffrey Steingarten’s Girl Friday and I certainly don’t want to be his mistress. We are in All About Eve and Single White Female Territory here. I want to be Jeffrey Steingarten and usurp his life. Condé Nast, I'm waiting for your call.

b) This excellent article, which I first read in an anthology of travel writing abandoned in a guesthouse, is not normally the kind of thing I get excited about. It’s written by a professional hardcore-adventurer-dude, Mark Jenkins, who used to write a column on extreme outdoorsiness for Outside magazine – macho mountaineering, climbing, paddling, biking, preferably in unstable political environments. This article is about his efforts to trek the Stilwell Road, a road built by an American general to link strategically India and China via Burma. Military history, again, not often my first choice of subject matter. I read ‘Ghost Road’ in an anthology of travel writing and was absolutely engrossed Anyway, this is an extraordinarily interesting, well paced, and ethically engaged account of the author’s attempts to get off the beaten track in Burma. My own travels in Burma had little of this kind of hardcore about them – staring down armed officials was about as tough as it got – but his confrontation with his compromised, egotistical position, playing the role of a romantic vagabond against the backdrop of a scenic and brutal military dictatorship did make me squirm a little.

c) Cable television is the fragile strand which has kept me vaguely in touch with a select version of popular culture of late. Thanks to hotel cable, I know that there is another Harry Potter movie on the way. I have been utterly captivated by Who Wants to be a Millionaire in Russian and my resolve to get to Mother Russia and to trounce the language of Rasputin has thus been steeled. Who knows, maybe Wheel of Fortune à la Russe will be my ticket to greatness. I’ve watched many, many crap movies; I’ve been mesmerised by repeats; I’ve had ample opportunity to indulge my slightly shameful love of MTV; I have scoffed and snorted at CNN… Character building exercises all.

I have also discovered David Tutera’s Party Planner. This is sublime reality television, so far beyond awful, so many light years beyond irony that it is sublime, delirious, hypnotic, divine. I watched this man stage manage a lavender themed divorce party. Solid gold. And of course he has a website.

Gender specifics

The use of zebra crossings in Luang Prabang is apparently organised along gender lines.

It’s nice to see ladies light of foot and big of hair finally recognised as an important part of the pedestrian community.

Whilst I’m on municipal semiotics, I might as well post two more signs that pleased me.

I don’t need a warning sign to tell me to keep my distance from all things electrical and exposed in Laos. Nonetheless, I love the, shall we say, alarmist poetics of this figure’s descent.

Unless my information is out of date, the cool kids are still getting very excited about stencils. In Vientiane, even the council is hip to the stencil game.

National Glory Sold Out

This man is called Mick. He is living in his own version of the fields of Elysium. I somewhat spontaneously accepted an invitation to play pool with a random chez Mick at the Kangaroo Sunset Bar in Vang Vieng.

I’d been on a bus for a number of hours trying to tune out of the clamour created by the proximity of a trio of nineteen year old lasses to a solo young male adventurer (not pictured) wearing a very impressive collection of plaited bands on his ankles and wrists.

Although this ragged young man was no doubt seeking to project the twenty first century sense of the term adventurer, overflowing with derring-do and swashbuckling devil-may-care-dom, I am deeply immersed in my nineteenth century reading program and so use the word adventurer in the derogatory manner that one of Trollope’s drawing room ladies might; that is, to denote a slightly opportunistic and unscrupulous player of scenes and people. The bus trip from Vientiane to Vang Vieng was not a long one, but listening to three scraggamuffins from the north of English squeal to gain their knight’s attention, giggle to retain it, and then simper on his every inane word took its toll on my patience. I may have huffed a little. I may have allowed my glasses to slip a little down my nose to as to facilitate a schoolmarmish glare over the top of the frames. In a moment of compassion, I wondered whether the kindest thing to do might not be to avail the young ladies of my worldly wisdom as to the evils of the patriarchal romance conspiracy. Cold detachment won out and I kept my own counsel.

I digress but only to demonstrate why I de-bussed in a mood of no small befrazzlement. Once my bed for the night was assured, I betook myself for a stroll in search of a meal with a view. Vang Vieng is famously viewy, being a small town perched on two rivers and surrounded by limestone cliffs and caves.
My book of travel guidance, as well as a couple of random articles I had read, told me that Vang Vieng is also famous for scores of bars and restaurants constantly screening reruns of Friends. I had dismissed this information as unreliable travel apocrypha. As I made my way through downtown Vang Vieng, I was dismayed to discover that there were in fact scores of bars and restaurants constantly screening reruns of Friends. Of all idiotic TV shows of the last decade to have on perpetual show, why Friends, the most idiotic of them all, the one responsible for the fame of Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer? Why not vary the pain and screen a selection of late-nineties mediocrities? A bit of Dawson’s Creek, a bit of Party of Five (hisssss), a bit of Gilmore Girls? There is much in this world which I do not understand.

It was not without difficulty that I found a lunch venue with a view and without Friends. I made several circuits of the town before I settled down and I couldn’t help but clock the league paraphernalia outside Mick’s bar. Finding a Rabbitohs supporter in the middle of Laos provoked a little twinge of wistful homesickness, I suppose, and my eyes rested on the exterior of the bar for just a few moments longer than they should. As is reasonably well known, I do not follow any code of football so this vaguely emotional response to the green and red of the South Sydney Bunnies can be taken as a sign of vulnerability.

My defences were clearly down and before I knew it, I found myself playing pool with a shell-shocked ex-army dude from Brisbane via Kabul, drinking beer, listening to the Divinyls and Australian Crawl with footy reruns screening in the background, shooting the breeze with Mick, and feeling considerably bemused. Under other circumstances, it is possible that I might have had troubles finding common ground with Mick – a man who left Mt Druitt a few years ago to marry a Lao woman and set up a bar for tourists, a man whose bar, biceps, and chest were covered in the various insignia of the Australian state – and Charles – a man devoted to all things military, passionate about the security business, and unconvincingly owning to a great regard for the teaching profession. Anyway, Mick and Charles behaved very graciously towards this refugee from the Friends crowd with no pool-playing skills and we all managed to get along quite nicely. For such, thankibus muchibus. There did, however, come a time when I thought it prudent to leave and I was only able to do so upon pledging that I would return expeditiously. I am sorry to say that I made this pledge with no intention of keeping it and thus sacrificed both personal and national honour. Had I returned, I might have been inducted an honorary Hero of the Sunset Bar, a Deadset Aussie (Expat) Legend.