Edward Weston: Winter Idyll. 1945

In college, a few of us played, sporadically, at being
nudists, casual sophisticates who feigned indifference
to the body, until one late-summer’s deluge when we danced
and washed each others’ hair all over the rooftops.

But it was mostly a pose, lacking conviction, lacking
the exuberance of, say, junior high, where nudity was more
of a dare, a giddiness resolved by leaping from midnight
railroad trestles and running through graveyards, convulsed with laughter.

I often omit the next part, a prolonged, disturbed post-graduate
phase fueled by loneliness and bourbon, but as long as
I am exposing myself I do recall tracking something,
naked, through acre after acre of dark forest, and daring myself

to risk the ultimate road rash on a motorcycle trip
across state lines. Then there was the unforgettable night
I floated nude for hours down a heron-strewn river and
had to hike back for my clothes along a busy stretch of road.

Nowadays, home is where I let my Buddha’s stomach
tumble out of its belt, and feel my slack skin sag,
while my baby girl turns somersaults and pirouettes proudly
in the altogether, and my wife rubs her pregnant belly and

beams in the here and now, as we settle in for the evening,
at home at last in our skins.

By Tim Hawkins, courtesy of Shit Creek Review.

I ran and ran and ran and ran. I ran through long motorway tunnels without hard shoulders; belting down the inverse camber, strip lights blasting down on my head and trucks getting too close. It was a constant sprint and when I emerged into the starry night I only upped the pace.

Somewhere in the north of the city I ran out of puff, ploughing down residential streets god knows where; the underpass, the overpass, a tangle of highways and freeways and motorways, roaring and roaring and roaring on. I stood there amidst the tangle, heart pounding.

I wondered what you were doing and whether you wondered where I had gone. It was about 11.30 at night I think. Perhaps midnight. I’d run from my home at an Olympic pace in one direction, away, and not stopped till my digital bracelet said 10k.

I was forlorn and the city was an octopus of asphalt and grime. Grey apartments in the night mist, the smog and the sharp stars baying somewhere overhead. I caught a taxi home and realised I had no money. Light pockets to run unencumbered. Free as a bird amid the iron girders.

I made him wait in the car whilst I slipped into the house in search of cash. From the bedroom a quiet murmur. All the rooms empty and the children drifting off. I paid him and set him on his way, slipped inside again for a shower, coming out at midnight as she emerged from their room.

A disinterested face. The house full of steam from my ablutions. When was I going to bed? Oblivious to my adventure, my racing heart and heaving breath having soon subsided. The race well run, formidably run, the competitors left standing; the finishing line nowhere in sight.

the weather, the waving
sun, the clouds parking
parallel, polluting
blue with exhaust.
Blame the Rainbow
Club, the Silver Cloud,
the Star Bar—still open,
standing still like a snap
shot. Blame the corner
florist, the Humboldt Pie,
the Polish coffee shop—
vacant shells, waving
grave markers. Blame
memory for the crowd it keeps.
For not letting go. Blame
amnesia for never visiting.
Blame time
for slogging like quick
sand in the hour glass when
you need it light-speed. Blame
it for not healing fast enough.
Blame God for miracles—
Becky Reagan inviting you
to the ice rink in fourth grade.
Alicia calling from O’Hare instead
of Kenya after only six year-weeks.
Lauren inviting you for coffee
three months after she broke up.
Blame God for closing the tap
three years and counting.
Blame the tide
for always coming in.
Blame the ocean for the waves,
the crash, the calm, the crash,
the get back up.

By Peter Kahn, courtesy of Blood Orange Review.

North Korea's Taehung Mine.

“What is he thinking, standing there in his pear-shaped polyester pantsuit, pointy-toed elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses of malevolent tint, an arrogant curl to his feminine lip and a perpetual bad-hair day?”

He’s thinking: “Get me out of here!” Bruce Cumings concluded in his classic work on North Korea. And out of there Kim Jong-il he has now got; flying his totalitarian coop in one of the few ways you can: by dying abruptly.

The Dear Leader’s passing triggered paroxysms of grief in Pyongyang, but as the bouquets of Kimjongilia piled high and reporters rattled out stories on the countless lunacies of the strangest state on earth, adventurous investors will have been watching closely.

North Korea is best known for its sprawling gulags, sporadic missile tests, rococo rhetoric and goose-stepping gunmen. Less well known is that it is home to one of the world’s biggest gold mines and has mineral reserves estimated by experts in the South Korean capital to be worth over $5,000bn.

Largely seen as a closed shop, the country has in fact participated with China, Egypt, South Korea and several other countries in joint cement, coal, copper, gold, graphite, iron ore, lead and zinc,magnesite, and molybdenum production facility ventures, with minerals and mining products making up more than half of its total exports.

So amid the hand-wringing – by pundits alarmed at the Swiss-educated cipher that is Kim Jong-un taking the reins of a “rogue state” in his pudgy hands and grief-stricken North Koreans no doubt wondering how much worse things can get – investors, from neighbouring nations to British hedge funds, will be watching closely.

Shortly before Kim Jong-il’s death, London-based Toscafund chief economist Savvas Savouri flagged up the attractiveness of Pyongyang as an investment opportunity. In a research note for investors he claimed: “North Korea’s status quo is not sustainable. It is inevitable it will be broken… A Beijing-inspired Palace coup in North Korea is a near certainty.

“If regime-change is initiated by China using elements within the North Korean leadership, change can be achieved relatively swiftly and without the threat of some nuclear or other WMD (weapons of mass destruction) reaction.”

Quite what sort of regime-change Kim the Third — surrounded by his octogenarian advisors – represents emains deeply unclear. What is clear is that increasing numbers of Chinese firms are investing in North Korea, gaining preferable trading terms, taking over port operations and developing mineral resources.*

But former head of the International Crisis Group’s East Asia office, Peter Beck, says he sees little hope of any pending glasnost. “Elites will be too focused on completing the succession process to be able to respond to any new investment initiatives.”

But writing earlier in Foreign Policy, he said: “Beijing has stepped up efforts to make North Korea — in the words of the South Korean media — the “fourth northeast province” to meet China’s insatiable demand for natural resources… And even at the official level, the regime readily acknowledges the necessity of change.

“Since the younger Kim’s debut, half of his public appearances (always with his father) have been economic-related, ranging from newly automated factories (Kim Jong-Un has long been touted as an expert in a 1970s technology called “computer numeric control”) to power plants under construction.

“The government’s mouthpiece, the Worker’s Newspaper, refers frequently to the need for “reform,” “technology,” and “expanding the production of consumer goods.” One frequently seen billboard shows a mother and child standing in front of a department store and declares, “We have reached a turning point.”

But with the most obsolescent of infrastructure, roads of which only 10% are estimated to be paved and challenges which Swiss firm Quintermina AG, which set about marketing dead-burned North Korean magnesia to European customers in 2009, described as “a lack of fuel and power supplies, inadequate transportation, and a lack of modern technology” it is clear that the cash-strapped compatriots of Pyongyang have some way to go before the most forlorn of command economies becomes a hive of exporting activity.

"So long and thanks for all the fish..."

The Dear Leader had one last message for his people before he died though and it was a simple one: So long, and thanks for all the fish. As the regime’s mouthpiece the KCNA reported, grief is best met by a slap round the face with a wet kipper. Via NK Economy Watch:

Surreal does it no justice.

Pyongyang, December 23 (KCNA) — Fresh fish associated with leader Kim Jong Il’s deep concern began to be supplied to the Pyongyang citizens seized with grief at his demise.
Great Comrade Kim Jong Un took a special measure to transport fresh fish to Pyongyang in time and supply them to the citizens.

Both salespersons and inhabitants were deeply moved by Kim Jong Il’s deep care for the citizens. Ku Ok Sun, a 62-year-old woman, told KCNA: “I did not know that leader Kim Jong Il had paid deep concern to the fish supply to the Pyongyang citizens until his last days when he was staying in train. This fish makes me sorely miss him. I will get over the grief at his demise and do something to relieve respected Comrade Kim Jong Un of his heavy burdens.”

A saleswoman, Kim Ran Hui (32), said, “I am deeply moved by leader Kim Jong Il’s deep concern for the fish supply to Pyongyang citizens.” An inhabitant, Kim Suk Yong (32), said: “When receiving these pollacks and herrings, I was sorely missing leader Kim Jong Il. I feel my heart rent because he passed away during his uninterrupted field guidance tour for the happiness of our people. I will not give way simply to sorrow. I will never forget his deep care for our people. I will try to contribute to the building of a thriving nation, remaining faithful to respected Comrade Kim Jong Un.”

True story.

* A November report by Seoul’s Yonhap News Agency showed that North Korea’s mineral exports to China tripled year-on-year in 2011. The joint study of Chinese data by Yonhap News Agency and IBK Economic Research Institute showed that China imported 8.42 million tons of minerals from North Korea from January to September 2011.

By Arturo Donate @ Flickr. Creative Commons.

Ridges of bone, moulded, you’d think, by awkward thumbs,
freckles, red stubble and the large pale astigmatic eyes;
the voice hoarse, fluent, not deep.
Well. People come, like you, he says, looking for secrets.
What we learned from Pythagoras. For a consoling echo
of your sweet doctrine from the untouched caves
of us poor primitives. (Leaning to me.) Do you like
what I’ve to show you? On his open
a knife, bone-handled, stained and smooth.
Your logos is a child, he says, chattering to itself
while it plays on the sand. I am a swimmer.
I am a salmon and a seal. My streams
are made of many fluids, dark swaying planes
on which I travel still as sleep; or where
I leap like silver. The sea. Rain on the skin,
and sweat. Tears and the river over stones.
My blood and yours: the tide that beats below the skin
or in the pulsing of the severed vein,
or from my organ, or from yours, or else the urine
from the hanged man, jerking among the leaves,
whose motions speak to me. Over these waves
I learn to skim my hands, and in these wells
my tongue explores, drinks words.

I take the knife;
like rubbing fingers on a worn inscription,
read it. In my mind, briefly: flat plains,
a straight road running to the edge of things, drab
unfamiliar carts packed close with silent people,
knowing and not knowing what this journey is
on which they’ve been sent by blood and wisdom and
dark quiet waters, and I reach out breathless for the shore,
children and the sand, the noise and the unsafety,
drift, spars and groundlessness, but still the anchorage
proper to talking beings.

By Rowan Williams. From the strangely fascinating Collected Poems.

"We are the Dead/ Short days ago/ We lived/ Felt dawn/ Saw sunset glow."

It’s getting more pronounced every year, isn’t it? The annual ritual of poppy-wearing and not-poppy-wearing; the same old stories in the papers about this shop banning its staff from wearing the paper papaver rhoeas, that person on television flagrantly flaunting his absence of floral respect.

Is it just me or is there a growing sense of compulsion to wear one? A faint wrinkling of the nose by those who do, at those who don’t; a starker divide between those announcing their patriotism* in petal form and those either ignoring or abstaining from the public memento mori?

Every day on the way to work this year I have passed a large poster, eye-catching and hosting a simple message in bold black type: “We should be talking more about the courage of our forces fighting overseas.” (I paraphrase as the exact wording eludes me, but it’s close enough…)

Every time I pass it I’m tempted to add my own addendum. Yes, perhaps we should. But we should also be talking about the sickening effect war has on the combatants – the dehumanising, brutalising consequences of causing a death; the obscene expense of tax-payers money on illegal wars of aggression; the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq that we, with our seeming dismissal of all qualms about war, have allowed to happen.

A mountain of blameless dead; the bodies of women and children disfigured and families tearing out their hair. This is what war looks like: Lest We Forget.

Her parents were shot in their car by soldiers at a checkpoint in Iraq.

Last week I interviewed a veteran of the Normandy landings. A twinky-eyed loquacious old soldier with a firm handshake and tales to tell of D-Day. “I’m lucky to be alive: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!” He said.

As I photographed him, he clutched an 80-year-old German camera (still working) that he had “liberated” from a bunker he’d cleared, after eluding the rake of enemy machine guns. “I feel sorry for those old boys fighting out there, in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan…” he said, unasked.

“Barmy, lying politicians sending young lads to fight in countries where they’d rather blow you up than shake your hand? It makes me sick. Never stay where you’re not welcome!”

Tomorrow I will stand next to him at a Remembrance Day service in Herne Bay, as I cover the event for the town’s local newspaper. He will be wearing a poppy, with pride. I will not. And I know for a fact that this proud, tough old soldier would never think less of me for not doing so, for I am remembering the dead (the living too) in my own way; with more than a little anger but no less respect.

That is the kind of mutual understanding, the absence of browbeating I would like to see stay intact, not a growingly sycophantic tendency — evidenced by Facebook feeds, newspaper leads and supermarket frowns at the unadorned chest — to wrap ourselves in the second-hand pride of the “boys” who are “keeping us safe” at such a high price to both themselves and the families of those they are complicit in killing, because one too many politicians told one too many lies that stuck in one too many heads and one too few craws.

*I know. Most people will say that is not what it means to them. And I have no objection whatsoever to anyone wearing a poppy. Should I repeat that? It’s laudable. But: Amid the milieu in which I find myself, it does not smack of either remembrance or lament; it reeks of unthinking support for soldiers fighting wars that I emphatically cannot support. And I would rather find myself lambasted as an ungrateful cad who deserves to live under Nazi rule (which I am not) than an uncritically acquiescing supporter of  ignoble war.

Crushed Cars. Credit: Chris Jordan.

Yesterday I drove into the back of a white van in a company car. It was his fault as much as mine, but that’s bye-the-bye. The bonnet of the new Fiesta concertinaed toward me in slow motion and the airbag punched me back in my seat, white dust exploding in happy release.

I sat there for a few seconds, stunned, then struggled to open the driver’s door as smoke filled the cabin. Crumpled panels croaked in protest as I forced the door open and contorted out onto the road. A melancholy policeman looked at me with knowing eyes.

“Are you okay?”

I patted myself gingerly, stepped off the road. Nodded my affirmation.

“Looks like it!” He said wryly. “And look on the bright side; rather the car look like that than your face. It’s only a lump of metal after all!” He stepped back into his waiting car, unconcerned about apportioning blame.

Insurance details swapped with the other party, much pacing and waiting and one portion of life-enhancing, steaming hot and vinegary fish and chips later, the pick-up van man arrived: Fat, twinkly-eyed and ready to tell me that this ain’t nothing, kid. His cheerfully morbid monologue seemed worth recording for posterity’s sake.

“Twenty-five years I’ve done in this job, I’ve seen it all. Car crashes, your standard keys breaking off in the ignition, people late for work, accident, injury, engines exploding, blood, death, destruction. You name it, I’ve seen it!

“Suicides are the worst. You wouldn’t believe all the ways people will kill themselves in their cars, or the different styles of gassing themselves. Did you know when you gas yourself in your car your stomach explodes? Yeah, bits go all over the place.

“I remember, must have been seven years back, one of those. The old Bill, they told me it would be a mess when I went to pick up the motor so at least I was warned. This bloke, he’d put a gas mask on, wired the exhaust pipe directly to it and closed the windows. His stomach exploded. What a mess. What a thing to do… He’d swallowed a bottle of pills and they’d bounced all out of his stomach.

“Another time this bloke drove his car into a lake. Yeah. He did. Nobody knew, then a few days later a lady walking her dog spotted the aerial sticking out. She called the police and they called us. So the lads, they put a ladder down across the water and onto its roof. I crawled over, smashed the front windows, hooked the straps round and was getting ready to winch it out when – fucking holy smoke – there he was, this white dead face lolling at me.

“This bloke, you know what he’d done? He’d handcuffed himself to the steering wheel, put his foot on the pedal and driven in. I didn’t expect that. A cold dead white face staring at me in the middle of this bloody lake!”

He scratched himself cheerfully on the belly and shifted up a gear, the trunk roaring as he flung it down the narrow back roads, branches reaching out to scratch the side of the great steel machine and its crumpled load.

“Are you looking for Ken?”

She’s sitting in the shadows of a front garden; crimson talons clutching a fag.

“Yeah…”

“Well you won’t find him, because he’s dead.”

I look at her, squinting in the afternoon sun. It’s said without malice.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re press?”

Again, neither the suspicion nor the hostility that often comes with it.

I nod. “I need to talk to his wife.”

She looks at me, benign.

“Well you won’t find her here. They moved out months back. It’s a terrible shame what happened to him, such a terrible shame. Five kids she has to look after – or is it six? He was a real hard worker; you wouldn’t meet a nicer family.”

The words are coming out deliberately; simple testaments to a dead father and blessed Manna for a reporter doing a death knock — the home visit that follows a car crash, an industrial accident; a murder.

“Can I ask your name?”

“Karen Smith.”

She says it with pride. Nothing to hide here. Her son has joined her in the front garden, tattooed, quizzical; calm:

“I knew them for years. They moved up to Reculver… I couldn’t say exactly where.”

“Would you be able to show me on a map?”

I fish an old A-Z out of the dusty car.

She stubs the fag out, standing up slowly.

“I’ll take you there. Talk to her; make her proud.”

They jump in a small family car, cigarettes burning and lead me to the widow.

“A combination of official torpor, detainee despair and the Kafkaesque nature of detention without trial has led in recent months to a growing number of deaths of individuals caught in what many say is the United Kingdom’s broken immigrant detention system.

… Little is known about the deaths: all that the Home Office will confirm is that on July 31, a 35-year-old male being held at Colnbrook Immigration Removal Center located outside London died. Neither his name, nationality nor the circumstances of his death were released.

Just days later, another unidentified man believed to have been facing imminent deportation was found hanged at Campsfield removal center near Oxford. Weeks earlier, a 47-year-old Pakistani migrant, Muhammed Shuket, died on his way to the hospital from the same immigration center, while a Jamaican immigrant who had overstayed his visa cut his own throat on a deportation flight from the UK to Jamaica in June (The man survived).

… Speaking on condition of anonymity, however, an official with the government’s internal legal department said that the United Kingdom’s immigration system is increasingly dysfunctional and the branches of the government dealing with it so moribund and riddled with low morale they are in near meltdown.

“There’s just a constant barrage of litigation from those either seeking redress for having been held illegally or separated from their children – and some people are held for years in legal limbo without knowing what’s going to happen to them,” he said. “I look at some of the cases that land on my table with growing regularity and am finding it disturbing.”

The UK is one of a mere handful of European countries that have not set a limit on how long they lock up immigrants scheduled for deportation – Ireland has one of 56 days; France a limit of 32.”

*

My newest freelance piece. Read the rest at the excellent New America Media.

There’s a Kawasaki 550 LTD lying on top of me and it weighs at least triple what I do. I can’t move and my stupidly contorted leg on which most of the bike lies is getting steadily more uncomfortable under the scratched metal and its scorching exhausts. It should be broken, but it’s not.

Pale faces gurn from static car windows and no one moves. The ones I can see are scared; it must have looked ugly — a skid six cars long as I tried to bring her under control and the machine bucking over, with the man once proudly on top now cowed and comatose underneath.

Someone appears. A man with a flabby face. He looks down at me and doesn’t know what to do. I look up at him and for some reason feel profoundly apologetic.

“I guess that’s what happens when you ride like a total twat.”

I’m gabbling more chirpily than the situation demands, eyes twisting upwards from the tarmac. He stands there, frozen, looking shocked down at me from the central strip as the cars clutch the road on both sides motionless and the drivers stare.

“Could you pull the bike off me please?” I ask politely, wondering if this is how things are normally done. The question seems to catapult him into action and his sudden, shufflingly indecisive movements inspire a flurry of car doors to open.

Three big men emerge and look at me for a moment, wondering if I’ve broken my leg or back and what to do. I’m lying crushed under a crashed motorbike in the middle of the road and time is standing still. Nobody has called an ambulance yet. Five seconds may have passed. It feels like an hour. I repeat my apology.

“Not your fault mate…” one of them says shakily and they continue to stare.

There is a python of concrete swept through the gravel, snaking along behind the beast of my bike; the slick swoosh of a machine coming to earth, a runway to the arrivals lounge, where sand fills your eyes and you wonder what has broken and whether you can stand up. I repeat my request again, as politely as I can.

They haul the machine off me. My calf is contorted, cramped and in pain but I can feel the leg’s neither critically cut nor broken. I’m not wearing gloves and miraculously there is not a scratch on my hands, which gripped on all the way down as the bike decided which side to fall. I gingerly stand up and put the seat back on. It’s flipped right off and cables emerge in a trellis of accident.

The three men are still holding my bike and looking at me and I climb on thanking them as they hold it, incredulous. It’s less than 500 yards to my destination of ASDA, where I have a mission to buy cornflakes, milk, chicken and bread. If there are four worldly items worth dying for it is probably not those.

The bike stutters back into life, my knee is dribbling blood and I’m moving; though time somehow still is not. I thank the faces again and ease down the side of the traffic – still stationary and staring and make my way to the supermarket. The cramp has gone by the wine aisle and the moment has become an anecdote rehearsed between the chicken and the crumpets.

I buy strawberries and cream and climb back on the bike. People are waiting for me at home. People are waiting and I’m meant to be cooking dinner.

The roads are a river again.