The sex, drugs, and amateur anthropology of travel writing
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In this episode we have the politics of foreign aid as it relates to the KONY 2012 campaign told through a story about an aid worker kicking painkillers in the Central African Republic. We have crocodile men, a cameo by Celine Dion, and we turn the narrative of Central Africa as a warzone full of witch hunts on its head.
Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Christopher Mathis
Herbert Marcuse's book "Eros and Civilization" proposes a non-repressive society by attempting a synthesis of the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. He describes a utopia based on aesthetics, sensuality and play, as opposed to our current construction of civilization based on reason, production and repression. When I was a horny twenty-year-old living on a friend's couch, reading Marcuse was the closest thing I had to erotic fiction.
Marcuse outlines the relationship between erotic fulfillment and the cause of productivity, saying that instructing someone to become productive depends on the redirection of their sexual energy—so they can't be allowed sexual release, or else their drive for progress is diminished.
Which came first, my libido then a justification of free love informed by Marcuse's theory. Or the theory of sexual liberation that I then practiced by being horny, who knows? In this story, once upon a gangbang, both theory and praxis chase each like two star-crossed fuckers.
Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Christopher Mathis
In this episode, we have a crash course in clanic values in Palestine when yours truly is robbed and the question of justice—formal justice or informal justice—is forced upon me, the wayward traveler.
Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Bull of Heaven, He is Not Dead, but Sleepeth
When I was living in West Africa, I learned the hard way why people are poor. And why, during the International Year of Microcredit, why the clients of the microfinance institution where I interned failed to reimburse their loans, and why that was a good thing.
Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Christopher Mathis
(A blow-by-blow of a humanitarian aid distribution in eastern DR Congo)
The aid industry is selling you a lie but it’s necessary.
The poignant photos on aid organization websites showing beneficiaries in Africa and Asia as grateful recipients of aid are misleading.
The lie is necessary because you, the viewer, might not know that Giving Things Away for Free Ain’t Easy and that fieldwork is full of sabotage, ingratitude, and treachery which doesn’t make for good public relations.
It took me years to understand why fieldwork is full of sabotage, ingratitude, and treachery. I had to learn the hard way.
A lie becomes necessary--although a photo is worth a thousand words, they wouldn’t be enough to correct the assumption that poor people, because they are often portrayed as powerless, live in a world without power structures. They don’t.
Intro Music by The South Hill Experiment, Baird, Goldwash—Chameleons, episode music by Thor, drowning into forever
Travel writing is always going on about place. And travelers are forever comparing and positioning themselves between home and away. But if you travel long enough, the home you think you know will vanish in time and as you touch down in your home country or hometown, you’ll suddenly realize there's often nowhere to return to.
Intro music the South Hill Experiment, Baird, Goldwash, Chameleons. Episode music 1) Dudley, Flower That Eats the Moon 2) Cosmic Cycler, Gorgeous Lights, Cosmic Cycler, Relax 3) Sam Widaman, the Mountain in the Cloud
Multiple times a day, on a whim or by demand, I sing my son the song The Wheels on the Bus. He's just turned two and loves repetition. He watches my lips as I describe the movements of wheels, wipers, and the driver as the driver says move on back. All over an idealized town, this bus drives over a dozen times a day.
At any time of the day, I can receive, via a social media group chat, stories from a good friend, a public bus driver in San Diego, California.
Albert was precocious. His taste in punk, at the age of 16, was more studied. He smoked cigarettes like a veteran, while my head spun.
He got a degree in history, later lived in a Civil-War-era cottage in rural Missouri, and then moved to southern California.
When you’re in your teens you make friends that last a lifetime, and within those groups there is usually one legend. Albert is that legend, the sincerest, he's never not been himself.
Slow-moving, he has learned to accept the world.
Which makes him an ideal bus driver. He drives through a country in decline, turns in his daily logs, and then sends a message to a group chat, to our group of friends, five guys from Midwestern America.
Here are the stories, they are diametrically opposed to the songs I sing to my son, and it makes me think about how great we were told things were as a child, and then how we spend the rest of our adult lives driving through the absurdity, never to reconcile the two, other than in hope, fantasy, or delusion.
Like Joan Didion once wrote, we all tell ourselves stories in order to live. And this is his story.
All music by Sam Widaman
I once thought each culture had its neuroses, I now think each culture is a neurosis.
Neurosis is defined as a particular atrophied behavior, the expression of which results from some sort of malady. Mental conditions that are not caused by organic disease, but involve symptoms of stress, such as obsessive behavior, but not a radical loss of touch with reality. You could easily replace the word neurosis in this definition with culture.
The malady would be, for example, the orderliness of German society. The French taste for luxury. Or the American drive to be exceptional. There’s that tweet that made its rounds on the internet that captures it well "Every French beach town has a little café called like the Nautilus and every American beach town has a little café called Scratchy Dick’s Big Slut Crab Fuck Shack". Or the meme of a map of Europe divided north and south that names the upper half as potato Europe and the bottom half as tomato Europe. These stereotypes are just that, generalizations and tendencies that become apparent when placed in opposition to one another. International travel allows for this juxtaposition.
I grew up in middle America, in the Northeast, lived in California, and was born in the South. I've traveled and lived in Europe off and on for twenty years. What I’ve seen from the vantage point of international travel is that the view from the Tower of Babel is at best comedic.
French gangsters wearing jogging suits deal grams out of fanny packs at the Barbès Metro Station. Overweight Germans drive high-performance cars in a hurry so as to respect the Prussian value of punctuality. And it took me years to realize I am incredibly American. I will tell you why I am American.
Intro music by Sam Widaman, episode music by Steve Hiett Down On The Road By The Beach and Sam Widaman
I’m calling as I drive through Saxony Anhalt, in eastern Germany, because I’ve drank more coffee than water and need to talk.
We've talked a lot about travel in the past, you know, in our 20s, always writing to one another with the question of where to live. From ever-changing locations, we would hand in our trip reports via email. I would attach crappy poems from Mexico, and you would send photos from a punk house in Florida, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Pacific Northwest. There was you in Asia fighting windmills. Pity we never hopped freight together.
Then in our 30s, it was not where to go, but how to live. The questions about travel had answered themselves. But we never asked why we write, why we tell stories. Since I'm plowing the highway under a lead heavy sky and the cup of coffee is overflowing, why don't we start a conversation about why we write.
And if I told you a random story, say about Haiti, Palestine, California, or France then maybe we could find an answer at the end.
Intro and outro music the South Hill Experiment, Baird, Goldwash, Chameleons. Episode music Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus and Tastes Good by Paco Moreno
