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“Which side are you on boy, which side are you on?” — Billy Bragg from Back to Basics |
Strip Club
Dear Ola,
Last night we took a friend out for his 25th birthday and we went to a strip club. There were lots of naked women dancing on the tables. I understand now why you don’t want to go to the club in your home town in Croatia. It would not be nice to see someone you know dancing with their pussy in your face.
We learned lots of things during the evening. We learned that Indians and Chinese come on Wednesday because they are cheap and the entry is only $5. We learned that most of the waitresses are colored and they say life is shit but you grab onto a little bits of hope. We learned that that lots of the white girls don’t want to go upstairs with black guys, and even if they do, they don’t give extras.
We learned all of this from the black lady with long braids who was sitting talking to us for a long time. My friend finally picked her and he fucked her upstairs. During that time we went outside and took a walk in the parking lot. When he came down he was very sweaty and smiling big. He said it was the best birthday he had ever had and he can’t wait for 2015.
Alex
25 January, 2014
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“I asked him to marry me, once. He told me he couldn’t because this would be all that their was.” — Patty Larkin from “I Told Him my Dog Wouldn’t Run” |
19 January, 2014
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“I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers”
— Tennessee Williams from A Streetcar Named Desire
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Sign of the Times: South Africa
Monday I start my new life – no job, just writing, art, friends, meditation, exploring, resting, recuperating. I read the signs as I move through Joburg:
Father Death Blues
1988. My sister Rachael and I drove north to Lowell, Massachusetts for a tribute to the late Jack Kerouac. That night Ginsberg sang this song, and twenty five years later we still remember: the old mill town, Ginsberg’s broken voice filling the hall, the power of poetry to awaken . . .
Rachael singing Allen Ginsberg’s “Father Death Blues” (it takes a minute to start)
Demonic Children on the Run
We adopted three children who now it appears may be demonic.
Their other dad is gone for a couple days and they keep acting up. Today I caught them trying to run away.
Our ghosts
Gone with a friend to find his father he has never met. Instead we find a gravesite and ghosts of the past.
FESPACO
3 glorious, and somewhat disorienting days in the 115 degree heat in Ouagadougou, watching film after film at Africa’s largest film festival — FESPACO. I saw films on forced marriage in Mali, men who flee from Senegal towards Spain in giant canoes, prostitutes being “rehabilitated” in post-independent Mozambique, some strange homo-erotic ode to Marlon Brando in Tunisia (actually I walked out of this one.) It was inspiring, kind of lonely (I felt out of place in this new film world), and mind opening to see these stories. I’ll go back . . . hopefully with my own film.
Family Song: On the Occasion of my Grandma’s 90th Birthday
A full family chorus on the occasion of my Grandmother Burger’s 90th birthday (written by my sister Rachael and I, annotated by my cousin Laurel). Performed here by Rachael, but eventually by all 50+ of us. Some artistic differences in the making – I wanted more “drunken Irish pub song” and Rachael more “Indian classical music fused with 1950’s melodicism” but I think we got it.