Guests
by Daniel Kalder, October 20, 2006 10:21 AM
I'm reading a biography of Jerzy Kosinski at the moment: he was a Holocaust survivor who wrote The Painted Bird, a best-selling autobiographical novel about his horrifying experiences as a child in occupied Poland. According to Kosinski he spent years wandering around on his own, abused by almost everyone he came into contact with. The only problem is that, according to his biographer, James Park Sloan, none of the sodomy and beatings he described in the book ever happened; rather, his resourceful father successfully concealed his family in a village of Catholic Poles, and afterwards, took a position of power in the new communist regime. Kosinski, meanwhile, received an excellent education, emigrated to the U.S. where he married a rich widow, became famous, appeared in a film with Warren Beatty, and was then exposed as a fraud in an article in the Village Voice. He wrote one more book, and killed himself. Shades of the fate of James Frey, whose readers acted like so many shocked virgins when they learned he had invented a lot of his bestselling memoir. (Though, happily, Mr. Frey is still alive and with us.) I love tall tales, and am fascinated by them, and those who tell them. What motivates people to tell such lies? How nervous do they feel as their profile rises and they receive more and more attention? Surely they realize they will be exposed one day? In the cases of Frey and Kosinski, ambition clearly has a lot to do with it, but the situation is not always that straightforward. For example, the greatest teller of tall tales I ever knew was an Englishman in Moscow, a fellow who was tall, bald and emaciated like Max Schreck's Nosferatu. If you were to believe him, Nosferatu had lived a most remarkable life. Though he was not yet thirty, he had at various times been: 1) A veteran of Gulf War I 2) A bodyguard for Mel Gibson 3) An Olympic fencing champion 4) A marine biologist 5) A security guard at Disneyland Paris. It was while he was engaged in this task that he had one of his most amazing adventures. A sultan's daughter lost a box of priceless jewels near one of the rides; fortunately our hero located them. As a reward, the sultan gave him an enormous ruby. Then there was the time his dad died and was resurrected ? but that story is too long and involved to tell here. Needless to say, Nosferatu's fantasy life eventually caught up with him. He was riding a tram out to his job (he was a 'security coordinator' at a nightclub popular with Moscow's expat crowd for its plentiful supply of cheap whores) wearing his favorite Russian paratrooper jacket. Unfortunately for him, a veteran from an actual unit of Russian paratroopers was riding on the tram at the same time, and started to make conversation. Russian paratroopers are notoriously tribal and violent: on the annual 'Paratrooper Day' police are instructed not to intervene if they see any of them smashing things or beating people up unless the situation is 'serious.' It's not surprising, then, that this one wasn't amused when he realized that his fellow vet was actually an Englishman who had never been near Chechnya or Afghanistan. Nosferatu had to leap off the tram while it was still moving to escape a beating. I think Nosferatu wasn't so much ambitious as lonely and desperate for approval. No doubt there was some other, private stuff involved also. What intrigued me about his lying was that while he was telling something obviously false he seemed to be inside the story absolutely, and he would become very upset if challenged. But later, at the drop of the hat, he could contradict one of his myths as though it had never happened. Every day he was reborn, with a new myth, a new legend of himself, and he would set forth boldly, expecting the rest of us to acquiesce in his acts of self-creation. But then there's another type of tall tale, ones told not for reasons of self-advancement or self-delusion, but purely for pleasure. For example, a friend of mine once persuaded a classroom of Russian teenagers that English schools were built next door to morgues, so biology students could practice on real subjects. The kids were horrified. When they realized they were being strung along they were angry, but only for a moment. They understood that he was just a man with an excess of imagination, weaving a dream to make their lives more interesting for a few minutes ? that he was embellishing reality to entertain them. And I am sure they will remember that lesson more than most of the others they sat through. I love to tell this kind of Tall Tale, or indeed to be told one. Tall Tales while away the hours, make life less boring, and can be very funny. I particularly like the moment when the falseness of the Tall Tale begins to show, when the teller pushes it too far and you begin to doubt him. The only thing to do then is to push the lie to even more outrageous heights, to take off on bat-wings of dark imagination. That can be a moment of the greatest pleasure. I will confess that I slipped a few Tall Tales into my book, Lost Cosmonaut. But should you have the good taste to read it, you will see that it is clear when I am making things up and when not. My Tall Tales do not undermine the factual elements of the book, any more than my friend's whoppers undermined the university prospects of the Russian teens. There were many deep and profound aesthetic reasons for doing this, of course, but I also did it for fun, plain and simple. After all, if you have been following these posts then you will see I spend a lot of my time wandering around in wastelands, staying in rotten hotels, exploring psychosis and meditating on symbolical cockroaches. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy all that, but nevertheless, every now and then... well, I think you understand me. Thanks for reading my dispatches over this last week. I hope we'll encounter one another again one day. For now, however ? Goodbye.
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Guests
by Daniel Kalder, October 19, 2006 9:25 AM
Yesterday I mentioned that I was at a wedding in Michigan recently. While I was there, I met a lot of new people and found myself telling many of the old stories again. That can get tiring, even when I'm talking to interesting characters. That's why, as a foreigner, I am always looking for something current to link me to a new place. You can coast on stories about where you've come from for only so long. You need some common, shared experience with the locals. In Russia I found that the cockroach was the main way in. Let me explain: in Scotland it is too cold for cockroaches to thrive, so it was quite a shock when I came home to my grubby flat in Moscow and found the things crawling all over my bread and sugar. Then I located a nest of them behind the fridge. Going into my workplace the next day I discovered that this worked a lot better as an ice-breaker than my naïve efforts to open up a conversation on all the literature I had been diligently reading. Most Russians don't want to discuss Dostoevsky any more than the average American wants to discuss Emily Dickinson. But I bonded with them over roaches. No sooner had I told the tale than a girl started talking about the day she awoke to find a horde of baby roaches dancing on the head of her toothbrush. And forever after that people were keen to hear the latest installment of my experiences with these dirty beasts. Friendships were formed that endure to this day. My favorite roach stories have an erotic element. One morning I awoke and a little rascal was jogging up the bed to kiss me. I wasn't in the mood for insect love, however, and tossed the cover back, sending the thing flying. The next day, however, I awoke to find one lying between my thighs, dead. Had it expired from an excess of passion? No, I had rolled over and crushed it in the night, before it could consummate its foul desire. After that, I knew it was time to move. I also got some mileage out of cockroaches when I lived in Kazakhstan. My digs there were cleaner, but every now and then something vile reared its antennae. One day I was stopped in my tracks by an albino roach that was crawling slowly across my carpet. I gazed at it, transfixed for a few moments, and then killed it, of course. It exploded in a puff of powder. I am mystified by this to this day, though it could be explained by the fact that Kazakhstan is a highly radioactive zone. In America my experience of cockroaches is growing deeper and broader. In Texas, where I am currently based, I recently had an encounter. It happened like this: I was watching a program on tattoos on TV and once it was over I commenced flicking idly through the channels. I reached PBS and lo! A helicopter was flying over the River Forth in Scotland, accompanied by wispy Celtic music and pish narration by a Scottish actor. Within seconds the camera was hovering over Dunfermline Abbey, the main religious building of my hometown, a dilapidated ruin from the Middle Ages. The narrator waffled on about centuries of turmoil leaving the 'essential spirituality' of the place 'undiminished.' I chuckled. But then, as if on cue, a giant cockroach appeared from behind the TV and scampered up the wall. It was the biggest bad boy I had ever seen, a real Texas-size specimen. I ran around with a shoe trying to crush it while the camera moved north to pan over Saint Andrews and Dundee. It was only while the narrator was dreamily reciting 'My hert's in the hielands' over imagery of stumpy green hill-mountains that I finally managed to flatten the bastard. This was a new kind of cockroach entirely ? a mystical-satirical-symbolic roach. And yet it was absolutely real. I am still digesting the full implications of its appearance at that moment. I told this tale at my friend's wedding. I was trying to avoid talking about books, as it bores me to do so. The story elicited an instant response ? he responded with an account of a roach that had tumbled from a lamp while he was watching a porno movie as a teenager. His parents were out for the night. This sudden visitor alarmed him so much that he gave up watching and went to bed. I suggested that it was a messenger from above, keeping him on the path of purity and righteousness. At the end of the night he gave me his card and invited me to visit him at his home in Alabama. The cockroach anecdote does it again.
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Guests
by Daniel Kalder, October 18, 2006 10:44 AM
Last week I was in Dearborn, Michigan to attend the wedding of one of my best friends. I was glad to be present, but still, I was a bit disappointed that the ceremony was not being held in nearby Detroit, where I hear there's a lot of industrial decline and some really scary neighborhoods. But it was just a flying visit and there was no time to hit the town: I was reduced instead to gazing wistfully from my hotel window at the soot-black smokestacks in the distance, as if they were the towers of some remote city on the hill. As for the hotel, it was a Hyatt Regency. That was rather swanky for my tastes: there was a $5 penalty for cracking open the bottle of water in the room. I was only there for the wedding ? usually I stay in the cheapest places I can find. I can't see the point of spending money on a room I am only going to sleep in. If I'm not going to be conscious, then what's the point of having nice furnishings, etc? But there's more to it than that. The truth is: I love bad hotels. At first I stayed in them because I didn't have any money, or, as is frequently the case in Russia, because there were no good hotels. I remember fondly my "suite" in the Hotel Tsentralnaya in Izhevsk, where I went in order to interview Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the assault rifle bearing his name. The constant chatter from the wall radio I couldn't turn off, the stink of methane from the sink... that's what travel is all about. By the time I was traveling in Siberia for my second book I could have afforded better. But I wanted to probe further the rottenness. I asked the taxi driver to take me to the worst hotel in town. He was puzzled, but needed the fare. However, the receptionist turned me away. "You don't want to stay here," she said. "It's filthy and it stinks. There's a better hotel for the same price elsewhere in town." "Nahh... I think I'll stay here." "Trust me, you don't want to." "I do." "Look, please don't stay here. I'll even order a taxi for you, to take you to the other place, if you just agree not to stay here." In the end I agreed. I could tell it was going to cause her pain if I, a foreigner, were to see the state of the rooms she had on offer. But I do like fleabag hotels. Their walls breathe tragedy, loss, age, decline, good times long gone, male pattern baldness, bad sex, varicose veins, sad holidays, the inevitability of death and aging. Bad hotels remind us of our place in the cosmos. Therefore when I came to America I was delighted to find that the world's biggest economy and only superpower contained many, many fleabag hotels, some considerably worse than what I have seen in Russia. For a while, the worst hotel I stayed in stateside was in San Antonio. It was located across from a building covered in paintings of eyeballs and a 24 hour tarot reading place. Pieces of pipe and metal stuck out of the walls. There was a hole in the door big enough for a dog to walk through. And in fact, while I was sleeping a dog actually came in and pissed in my mouth. No it didn't. I just made that up. The view from the bathroom window at midnight however, was real, and really bizarre: a clown's face, illuminated by the moon, with a huge and sinister, gaping, grinning maw. I pulled back the frayed lace to see better and realized that I was looking at a sleeping children's fairground. But it wasn't until the morning that I could see clearly enough to realize that the clown was just a garbage can, with a gut full of sweet wrappers and Coke cans. In the night, however, it had been something truly mysterious. That was nothing compared to Huntsville, Texas. I was taking a British friend to see the five prisons and the museum dedicated to punishment they have there. I didn't want to spend money: it's wrong to live well when you're surrounded by so much human suffering. So we went to the cheapest hotel we could find, a link in a famous chain I shall not name. The first room was freezing, and there was a steady drip of icy water from an obscene, tumescent bulge in the ceiling. I didn't want to catch pneumonia, so we asked to change. The second room was humid and sweaty, and filled with a thick, acrid stench that clung to the nostrils and throat, as if there was a moist corpse rotting away beneath my bed. I figured I'd get used to it, and was lying on the stained mattress ready to doze off, when my friend saw a cockroach dive-bomb my hair. We got our money back and moved. Perhaps an American would see this place as a filthy shit-hole and nothing more. But the dark parts of America can be very poetic if you're a foreigner and you've watched too many films. Having grown up on David Lynch, I had a sense of deja vu, as if I had wandered into some dark dream I had already had, long ago. On the other hand scabies mites are very real, and now that I think of it, I have been itching a lot lately. The worst hotel I ever stayed in, however, was in central Asia. I won't name the country, because I was not really supposed to be there, but let's say for argument's sake that this was in an old soviet settlement called "Oil Factory." Whenever it rained it killed the electricity to the whole town, so if you were driving in darkness you would miss it absolutely. The hotel was a long shed with no locks on the doors, and one dim light bulb. It looked like a terrible murder had taken place in 1974 and no-one had slept there since. My bed was a wooden board, propped up on bricks. The mattress felt like a sack of wet sand. While I was eating my meager supplies a bat flew out from behind the torn- cloth curtain and shat on my sandwich. I found this pretty funny. Later, however, I gave a radioactive sausage I could not eat to the woman who ran the place. I had bought it at a market, but the thing was just wrong. She was supposed to feed it to her cat. But when I went out to look for her, I caught a glimpse through a door of her and her husband chowing down on that wicked cylinder of bloody decay. And that wasn't funny at all.
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Guests
by Daniel Kalder, October 17, 2006 9:12 AM
Frank Zappa once said that the most common element on the planet is stupidity. I suspect it's boredom. I got bored today myself. Maybe you did too. If so, we're not alone: last year some guy at the Vatican published a paper on the 'Empire of Boredom,' suggesting that ennui could be the major existential problem facing Western Youth today. This could be true, and yet it's not dealt with much in modern writing, which though frequently very boring, is not about boredom per se. Tales crammed full of drugs, sexual extremism, or literary drivel about middle-class familial dysfunction mask the essential ingredients of modern life: hours spent watching the manic blabber of TV, or consuming useless information on the Internet, or sitting in a cubicle, or shopping for food, or eating food. I have a long and rich acquaintance with boredom. I grew up in a small and exceedingly crap town, with no cinema, no bookshop, no nothing. For young folk this could be harsh, leading to experiments with bags of glue and violence. When I was young weapons were not yet commonplace in Scotland so it was possible to fight for pleasure. One of my brothers took a job as a doorman in a nightclub specifically so he could beat people up. A friend, intoxicated by boredom and no other substance, shaved off his pubic hair and sent it in an envelope to his brother who was studying in Cambridge: an act of psychological violence, perhaps. I myself was less confrontational. I expressed my boredom by drawing cartoon strips featuring a balding man with no eyes who lived in a white void. Nothing ever happened to him. I also started to hallucinate that I could make a business success of a circus which featured people with no talents whatsoever. They would just sit around doing nothing in front of spectators. Then I took a job in the Civil Service. My job was to mail packages to farmers instructing them how to kill their cows more efficiently, as Britain was in the grip of the Mad Cow crisis at the time. One day I felt something hot dripping out of my ears. It was my brains dissolving. I moved to Russia to get away from all this, and Moscow was a very interesting place to be in 1997: people were getting shot every day and there were 'no guns' signs posted at the entrances to nightclubs. But the more I started to travel outside of the capital, the more I became aware of a cosmic degree of boredom in the Russian provinces that was unlike anything I had seen in Scotland. First, the vast distances that isolated folk from the capital made a difference. Then there was the lack of money and opportunity. In Scotland you can always get out of your small dump ? the big cities are close together and London is never more than a day's journey away by bus, and much less by plane. In Russia you can't move around so easily, and unless you have a special permit you are not allowed to live in Moscow. As a consequence the country is full of intelligent, highly gifted people stranded in the middle of nowhere, without work or hope. The mind-numbing boredom of the Russian provinces is attested to in lots of Russian literature, from Gogol to Dostoyevsky to Sologub and many others besides. Indeed, I would say that if you read a book about Russia by a writer and he is blathering on about the essential spirituality of the provinces, he is selling you a fairy tale. The most extreme instance of boredom I ever saw was in a town called Uglich. Though it was only 100 miles or so from Moscow, it took 10 hours to get there by bus because the main roads and train stations had passed it by. And once you arrived there was nothing to see except a church, some water, and one or two old factories. The government had never got round to paving the streets so people stood around ankle-deep in mud, gazing into space. The cinema had shut down; the only shop I could find sold rubber balls and a metal bucket. Wait ? I tell a lie ? there was also a sex shop selling dildos and butt plugs. I was there to visit a secret history museum. I had heard that a family had turned their living room into a weird expo on the history of the town. After wandering around in the mud for a few hours I found it ? and sure enough, it was full of life-size papier-mâché dummies representing mad Tsars and Tsarinas, as well as other junk they had found lying in the mud. There was also an original edition of Diderot's dictionary. The father delivered a strange lecture explaining how Uglich was the centre of the cosmos. Then he and his children dressed up in costumes and enacted scenes from the history of the town. I was there with a friend. After the performance he was depressed; he thought the family was deranged. I agreed, but thought it was probably a good thing. Their madness had filled the world that surrounded them with meaning and symbolism. It gave them satisfaction. Instead of feeling hopelessly stranded like many Russians do, they felt absolutely central. Madness was the best and most rational response to their situation. I haven't been in America long, so it's difficult for me to say very much about American boredom. However, I did spend a couple of months in a small, wealthy town outside Austin, Texas, and can only observe that its silence and cleanliness were unlike anything I had ever seen before. This was a vacuum-packed, shrink-wrapped boredom. It was dry and it did not spurt. And whereas in Scotland and Russia people just find themselves surrounded by boredom, here it was something the people had opted into: the houses were big, the streets quiet and peaceful, the cars were shiny and new. I was in the midst of something considered by many to be the 'good life.' For some, perhaps, it was the ultimate fruition of the American dream, the terminus point of Western Civilization. This was a place where you could live surrounded by like-minded fellow citizens, with all your possessions around you, in perfect stability, where nothing dramatic happened, ever. It was very, very, very boring.
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Guests
by Daniel Kalder, October 16, 2006 10:25 AM
Hello. My name's Daniel Kalder. I am the author of Lost Cosmonaut, a blackly humorous 'anti-travel' book about my wanderings in four surreal (but real) wastelands. It also contains a manifesto for Anti-tourism, which you can read at my website www.danielkalder.com. Over the next five days I'll be contributing daily dispatches to Powell's about Russia, Scotland, Central Asia, and America, where I am currently residing after 10 years in Moscow. First, however, I want to discuss the joy of the wasteland, which is a major theme in everything I do. Today I'm going to talk about three formative wastelands I have encountered; those that opened up the possibilities of the white zones on the map to me. So, without further ado: 1) The Necropolis (Glasgow, Scotland) I was born and grew up in Scotland during a period of sustained industrial decline. This has since turned into sustained population decline, as each passing year more people die than are born in my homeland. Immigration from Eastern Europe can massage the figures only so far: soon the Scots will be extinct, living on as a legend of a mountain people whose men wore skirts. But I don't mind. We will be more interesting that way ? as a beautiful, half-remembered myth. My favorite wasteland in Scotland is probably the Necropolis in Glasgow. This is a quite remarkable place ? as the name suggests, it is an enormous graveyard, built on a hill practically in the centre of town. Everything in the former second city of the British Empire radiates outwards from this locus of death. At the top there is a monument to the Scottish protestant reformer John Knox, a great enemy of 'Popery' who was delighted to see the Catholic Cathedrals of Scotland razed to the ground and/or stripped of their gold and jewels and other finery. When I was a student, I would take my dates to the Necropolis. This was quite a trek, as I lived fifty miles away and couldn't drive. So we had to ride the bus with the football hooligans and pensioners from the local villages. But I didn't care. What could be more romantic than traipsing through the crumbling Victorian mausoleums, peering in through the iron gates at the discarded needles and blankets of the junkies who inhabited the Necropolis at night? And then afterwards, what would be more conducive to the blossoming of young love than a stroll around one of Glasgow's many impoverished residential districts, where the locals staggered around, bombed out of their skulls on 'jellies'*, chibs** at the ready to slash the face of anyone who might insult their honor by, for example, looking at them? Rather a lot, actually. This approach never got me to the second date. I had to change tactics, and conceal my love of decay and social disintegration for several years. * Narcotic substance extracted from sleeping pills. ** A Stanley knife. 2) Chess City (Kalmykia, Russia) Flash forward. I had been living in Moscow for a long time and with my friend Joe had done a lot of traveling in Russia. We had seen more onion domes than Michael Jackson has had pajama parties. We wanted to go further ? so we started picking places with weird names off the map at random, places that we couldn't picture in our imaginations ? then we'd buy train tickets out there and voyage into the void. That was how we wound up in Kalmykia, a semi-autonomous republic in Southern Russia. Kalmykia is fascinating for several reasons: not only does it contain the only desert in Europe, but it is also homeland to a group of stranded Mongols, ruled over by the eccentric Kirsan Iliumzhinov. Iliumzhinov is a businessman, author, and mystic: he claims to have been abducted by aliens. Fortunately, the aliens didn't probe him in any personal places; on the contrary, they treated him well, as befits a leader of his dignity and stature. He is also a chess fanatic, and is president of the World Chess Federation. Joe and I took a taxi from the capital, Elista, drove through some dust and concrete to the edge of the steppe, and went wandering in his 'Chess City,' a futuristic complex of buildings built to host the 1998 Chess Olympiad. The most impressive structure was the Palace of Chess, a gleaming pyramid of marble and glass. Inside, however, it was abandoned: chess tables were set up for games that would never be played. There was a Museum where the guide blabbered manically at us, so long had it been since she had had contact with any living thing. But the strangest and most mystical vision therein was the photograph of Walker, Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris himself, staring at the foundation pit of the Palace, next to Ilumzhinov. What was Chuck doing there? This question has haunted me for close on four years now... 3) Deadtown (Texas, USA) Did this town have a name? I cannot recall. But I am always looking for the shittiest town, the dirtiest hovel. Beautiful towns are all alike; a shit one is always shit in its own way. So, not long after I arrived in America, I was excited when I passed through this forgotten zone in the car (I wasn't driving, I still can't drive). Everything was devastated: from the broken-down Dr. Pepper sign at the entrance, to the collapsing wooden houses with 'Beware of the Dog' signs on them, to the general air of abandonment in the town centre. I saw humans on the street: broken, bowed humans, shuffling along, dragging their sadness behind them, or on their shoulders. Here they were, living in what is by far the richest country in the world, and yet they were sunk deep in poverty and despair. They were up to their waists in it, like a quicksand that took decades to swallow you. You don't get out of that kind of quicksand. You can just move slowly about in it, a couple of millimeters at a time, as you sink slowly ever downward. But the day I returned to walk around, there was nobody about. It was bizarre. Every shop was closed, barricaded, boarded up. There was a movie house, a restored Art Deco building from the earliest days of Silent Cinema, but it too was locked down that day. Nearby was a Church without worshippers. I walked south, to the Hotel Deadtown, but the windows were boarded over, the rooms full of silence. In the end I found a man living under a bridge. He wore jeans with stars on them. He spoke to me in the gibberish of a madman. The enigma of Deadtown continued to haunt me, and a few weeks later, I returned. This time some of the shops were unboarded. I went within. Of course, they were dismal. It was as if the city was cannibalizing itself, and having sold off everything that was of any value, only the junk that remains when all the desirable and collectable fragments have been spirited away was left. There was a plastic cup with 1973 written on it; a spider was shitting in it. Other than that, only dust, scraps of cloth, broken toys, and bits of dirty glass and metal were left. And yet there were humans walking about in there, rooting through the unreadable novels where the pages were glued together with human feces, trying on the clothes their neighbors had died in, clothes that still had the whiff of rotting flesh o
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