Iquitos, Peru: Exilic Art Between the Selva and the Plant

A problem one finds traveling is that the first and sometimes only people one meets in a new city are those who prey on tourists, the disoriented and lonely and sometimes enthusiastic wannabes who have no one they know and can trust for information about just about everything a local takes for granted. Thus, one finds many people either using Lonely Planet Guides to anywhere, or one finds the more affluent relying on tour guides booked through reputable travel agencies. The so-called independent traveler, men such as me, go with native cunning, as a rule, having been around much and long, instinct honed by years of dealing with the local lowlifes who hustle the bewildered out of change and gifts. The more or less affluent backpacking tourist often meets and is instantly befriended by a person back home the traveler would avoid at all costs; but being on the road and alone, being indoctrinated into thinking all things foreign are all things superior to all things back home, and that even the slightest hint of dislike of locals is racism par excellence, one finds some travelers putting up with the most egregious near-criminal bullshit imaginable, and finds the basically angry tourist smiling and wondering what went wrong, why the lovable natives aren't adding up to the stories one hears tell about back in Anthropology 101. Welcome to the world. Often it sucketh. Sometimes it's even fatal. I live because I know who to avoid, and I live because if I can't avoid trouble I know how to deal with it. I run away, I think. Whatever, I survive. But sometimes I find myself too suspicious of lowlifes, and I miss out on people whose bullshit is sometimes not so bad once I get to know them.

There's a crowd at the Plaza de Armas in Iquitos I generally avoid, though I come into contact with them often enough because I live in a hostel where others are befriended by this group, and the group members show up at my residence as guests of my fellows. That's how I met the very pretty but otherwise revolting Caroline, tattoo pimp and general lowlife scum bitch I wrote about earlier and in a fit of good taste withdrew so far from publication. The street hustler crowd are almost harmless when one compares them to genuine and serious bad people, such as the psychopathic school teachers who became the leadership of the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path terrorists who murdered their way across Peru for 20 years as political killers before giving that up to turn to trafficking in drugs now. I'm more likely to meet those psychos than I am to meet street level criminals. And because I am fearless about barging into offices and demanding interviews with "important" people, I am also likely to meet other psychopaths like the corrupt politician who actually works the system successfully and makes himself loved by the very folks he screws, sometimes to death. No names. I intend to survive a lot longer yet. Street hustlers, I avoid them. Except when one of them turns into my buddy's boyfriend and I can't.

Lambda, which the educated among us know as Λ or λ (Λάμβδα) is one of those who has much ability as an artist, a natural, one who gets it and does it well. He uses cans of spray paint and paper and a lighter and scraps of cardboard to make scenes that make me cringe, high-school science fiction graphics of swirling stars and double moons above a desolate planet with stones that look like skulls, and so on. But, if one doesn't look closely, it is beautiful in a cheap kind of way. It's literally lifeless and cliched and boring and embarrassing, but it works at its own level very well because the artist is highly talented. He is also a clever salesman, auctioning off a piece by (and this is too clever to ignore,) passing out for two soles [about a dollar,] ten tickets to each buyer till he's made 20 soles for whatever painting he has on offer if he hasn't interested anyone during the course of his performance as creator. And he is a performer. That, more than the painting, is what he sells. That, more than the paintings, is what pisses me off about what he sells. I hate the hustle. I hate the cheap manipulation of the gullible. I would avoid this guy at all times were it not that he's my buddy's boyfriend now.

Λ hustles tourists by doing portraits on the sidewalk.

Getting one picture taken is nothing much interesting now, though when my great grandparents posed for the rare shots I have of them it was a moment, and a long one of stand still or else, importance for eternity, a portrait of the living that would never be again, a miracle of technology and a gift from Modernity to the poor who had at last a chance to attain to the glories of the rich: portraits of themselves as portraits done of kings and the haut bourgeois. I could weep for joy when I hold the tin plate pictures of my great grandparents standing rigid and dignified for that once in a lifetime pose in front of a camera that would capture their images forever, giving them something like eternity on earth that previously was unattainable to such poor as they. Now any idiot can post his image on the Internet and look as good as Brad Pitt-- or even me in an ugly hat. So, vanity being what it is, a photo has now lost its value, and a portrait done by a human hand, a man who actually has to look at one to see the real person to render a good likeness, good or not, is an occasion of wonder, and worth paying for. To make ones portrait, Λ puts on his glasses and looks deeply at the person sitting in front of him. It makes the sitter feel like a king, a crowd gathered to watch in wonder as the portrait develops by the hand of the artist, the crowd in awe, the sitter exalted.

I wouldn't want such a picture of myself, frankly, but for many it is as great an occasion as was standing for a photo over 100 years ago for my great grandparents. Λ has more talent than many artists I know and have known over the years, and those are many; but he's not someone I would want to do my face forever. Yes, I'm a snob, but I've earned that over decades of careful study. It's not the medium and it's not the class, it's the end product. Spray painters of this sort do shit work, even though it's light years ahead of most art school MFAs. It's a step up from tattoos, which says little. It's somewhat better than cartoons, though often not better or as good as comic book art. It's mindless, soulless, and cheap in all senses.

I was walking down the street a while back with a fellow, and he wanted to turn the corner. I said, "No, let's follow this lady for a while." He said "She's not worth looking at; she's not pretty." I said, "I don't care. She's attractive." Somehow that had never occurred to the guy. Never mind that I struck out with the lady. She was attractive, and I tried to meet her up, as it were. Attractive.

Λ is not someone I find an attractive person, he being a lowlife street hustler who cons people out of money by trickery and manipulation, though of a cheap but sort of honest way. He draws, he paints, he fakes his art. I'm sure that prisons in America are filled with men with as much or more talent than he has. But Λ isn't in prison and isn't likely to go. He's just a lowlife hustler. I'm a snob. We don't have much in common.

Well, we have in common my buddy Paula. And we have in common our friend Yvonne. So, we have a lot in common; and in common we have some important common concerns. Specifically, I find Yvonne very attractive, and I can hardly keep my hands off her when I see her. This is a problem because Yvonne lives in the jungle by herself, a Prussian girl who brings Bismarck to the wilds of the Amazon and tames it. What does she need me for? Nothing, as it turns out. Λ is as close to this girl as I am. We are both as close as the other guy who hung out with her when they and Paula spent a week at Yvonne's house in the jungle. Yvonne doesn't need anyone. But we have her aloofness that passes for friendship in common, Λ and I.  They three stayed with her for a week in the jungle while I stayed in town and sulked. Yvonne is a girl I find highly attractive. Seems that, in his own way, Λ found something about Yvonne attractive, too, and it makes me rethink my feelings toward him.

Λ is a man barely out of the jungle, a man living on the margins of Modernity in a jungle city that caters to tourists. He's figured it out in a cunning kind of way, and he uses his talent to survive at a marginal level in what most would consider genuine poverty. He does better than most people just out of the wilds and now bewildered by the new life they find they don't get and are lonely within, alienated, as lost as the tourist backpacker kids longing for friendship and the authenticity of the primitive that they are promised in Sociology classes. There is a tentative meeting of aliens here, and one must admire the attempt to like each other, even if some on both sides are scum, the disgusting hustler Caroline not coming close to the creepy child molester who flits around the park hustling little girls with promises of ice cream cones and ribbons and bows. Λ's meeting in the jungle with the Prussian loner Yvonne is some kind of turning point for him, if not for her. I think it's Yvonne, rather than the selva of his youth and heritage, that makes this journey so... something... for Λ and me. We are now closer by far, and it is the melding of the Modern with Λ's abilities to grasp at least some of both, whether it develops or not into anything greater.

Λ returned to the city from Yvonne's house in the jungle with a new vision of art for the masses on the sidewalk. There is the same cartoonish and teenage machismo of earlier work, but this time the theme is of the selva, the gratuitous anaconda thrown in to hook the unwary with excess for the money. What catches my eye is the detail in the middle ground tree trunks. There is a concern there for attraction at the expense of prettiness. Λ could have, and in most cases does, added more snakes. In this instance he opted for something like feeling, capturing Yvonne's jungle landscape with a feeling all of his own.

Λ studies the selva under the influence of the Prussian loner Yvonne.

Λ is an alien in this city as much as I. I have been on the road many decades now, but I too am from a forested wilderness still, and I am in many ways as attached to my past as Λ is to his wild-land past.

On a bridge between Modernity and home long lost.

It is natural that an expat Pied Noir would find solace of a sort in the Peruvian jungle with an expat. American and a solitary Prussian and a city dwelling Amazonian street painter. It's not so natural to see the Amazonian turning to European still life paintings from the 17th century to find solace in the strange land of his birth. Here we see what the ideologically indoctrinated idiots of Modernity would dismiss as cultural imperialism in art, a derivative piece by an
Amazonian they would prefer to have making pictographs on rocks in the jungle, no doubt. But Lambda gets it. He sees the unity of colour and creation in the mind and hand of the individual as he reifies the order of synthesis of our exilic time together. I come to like him. We meet half way; and in time we might become friends, he growing into his own expression of the land we left, our rugged homes, our poverty and ignorance of the world outside, of our loss.

The melding of Modern industrial capitalism, the selva, and the classical expression of man-made beauty as earth is turned to world by exile from all. 

That damned candle ruins this otherwise beautiful attempt, in my humble but educated opinion. The medium argues against quality. The whole effort is probably a grotesque failure in terms of lasting art for the ages.

But now I know a man who is not the man who used to be the lowlife street hustler he was a few months ago, though the change is slow and maybe will never be full enough to satisfy me. An exile among exiles has come to know something important about others and the world. It's tentative, and it might not last long. Maybe, though, if we come to know each other better and our world, we will come to know our own lives better and deeper to the point we can see clearly who we are aside from our assumptions of what we think others want us to be. Maybe we can someday be the exiles we are and we can be true exiles together.

To update a bit, I hear that Lambda had a fall from a second story and landed on his head, being in a coma for 15 days and then was pronounced dead. The doctor refused to sign off on that, even though the heart monitor was flat-lining, because Lambda's body was still 98.6 degrees. Now, the story goes, Lambda is blind in one eye and colour blind in the other, creating pictures by intuitive mathematical calculation.  I've read some books by Oliver Sachs, so I don't discount even the most outrageous bullshit about people anymore. Who knows what people can do. They often surprise me, sometimes frighten me. Mostly I'm simply amazed.

Because people are so strange and unpredictable, in spite of leftard determinist pseudo-thought, I got a copy of Lambda's Still Life with Candle to present to the German girl I like. I told her I would bring her flowers and chocolate, and she didn't barf, so I thought about what kind of flowers one gives a woman who lives alone in the Amazon jungle. I think a painting of flowers will do as well as anything that would wilt to death long before I got through with the four hour bus ride and hour long walk to her house to present them to her. If we were in a city and I were meeting her at a restaurant, then cut flowers it would be. For now, it's a painting. If I strike out here I'm blaming Lambda for being a hack, and I'll take consolation by eating the chocolate I intend to give her otherwise.

If I survive the anacondas and don't eat the chocolate, I'll be sure to let the world know.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru: Eat 'em Obama's mama's chocolate cookies

Now that I've seen Mrs. Obama up close and semipersonal I have a whole nother idea of what our president is all about. It took time for me to have a second look at him as a man married to a lovely lady who makes cookies and complains about fat people. But now that I see how pretty she is, how genuine is her compassion and shit, I feel that I owe it to Obama himself to see if I can find the man beneath the psycho persona he shows the public. Maybe-- and I'm just sayin'-- maybe he's a human being like the rest of us, like his lovely wife; and maybe I should vote for him even though he decided to get some sleep before flying off to Las Vegas to raise money for his reelection campaign, leaving American men to die at the hands of jihadis in Libya. Hey, he married a babe. If she were a dog, I'd give her a 'dog whistle' as she waddles past the construction site. But she's hot, so I give her a Dag whistle. "Hey, mama, I like your chocolate cookies!"

I mean, any man married to such a lovely lady as this can't be all psychopathic, can he? And even if he is the psychopath I think he is, how could any man resist eating his wife's chocolate cookies? Not me. I say, "Yummers."

That's about the worst I can do. I'm faking it. For some real hatred, see the Democrats on Palin. I should take lessons if I want to be a total scum bag, and Democrats are the ones I'd turn to first.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru; Roman Holiday: Snakes

Those ladies was nervous in the snake pit getting eaten.

From a distance, without knowing what was taking place inside the compound, all of it looks pretty tranquil. We, of course, know better. The chickens found out too, to their dismay.

To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-Peru-D-W-Walker/dp/098776151X

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

U.S. Election, 2012: Men Who Would Shoot Liberty Valance (Part Three)

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Our nation would seriously suffer from leaders such as Oedipus or Macbeth, and we can be thankful that even in this period of low character in our political leaders we do not have to endure the tragic figures of men who are in their own ways great. The deep pettiness of our current leadership is almost a relief in comparison to what we might have in higher figures, even such heroic men such as those who would shoot Liberty Valance.

As our election approaches rapidly we can hope to lose the disturbing and vile character now sitting as our president, the repulsive sociopath, Barak Obama. Clearly there has not been in our history a president as amoral and weak as this man who is driven by the spirits of the age of Post Modernist idiocy posing as intellectual sophistication. Our intellectual elite, a failed herd of mindless conformists to the utopian day dreams of the German Revolution and the eternal longing for fascism, are at this time emoting in frenzies over his disintegration as a public intellectual at their head. The so-called Left intellectuals are imploding emotionally and personally in public due to their lack of individual character, their entire world-view of political nature being based on a dead construct from the 19th century that is still a major element of the common mind, i.e. that man is a farm animal that must be herded by the wise master to doom. The intellectual Left is imploding simply because they lack individual character, having given up all pretense of self and concern for a magical remedy to fill the vacuum of their inferior vision of life. In short, the intellectual Left have found themselves personally incapable of forming positive character and of achieving intellectual mastery of the polis they seek to rule as Philosopher Kings. Our intelligentsia is one mass of second rate minds who have substituted intellectual rigour for cheap and easy ideology to make up plastic world-views that have no success in the world. Because the intelligentsia of our time comprises fools who would rule the world according to pre-made ideas, and that those ideas have no success in the world, we find ourselves with the greatest fool among them as our leader at this time, Barak Obama, President of the United States of America. This particular fool, mindless and filled with second-rate ideology, filled with vanity and petty hatreds of his intellectual superiors, this cheap loser in a nice suit, is the best the Left can do. Proof of the general failure and pathetic foundation of the Left is that Obama, their leader, would not shoot Liberty Valance. As a man, Obama is a failure. As an individual, Obama is a failure. As a person, Obama is a failure. Obama is a failure. Our nation fails because we have elected a townsman coward who would not, and who does not, shoot Liberty Valance. Obama cannot shoot Liberty Valance. He doesn't have the character to do so. He cannot rise to tragedy. He diminishes our nation and our people. We suffer.

In the gunfight between Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin on the dusty street of a western town in the night, Jimmy Stewart knowingly faces death by murder at the hand of Liberty Valance. Stewart has lost all things of the world that are to him meaningful, his wife, for example, and must then proceed to lose his life in a duel he knows he cannot win. His commitment to the right and the good drive him, if because of pride, to accept death over disgrace in his own mind. Such acceptance of death is heroic to some great degree. It is tragic in that he has no compelling need to sacrifice his life for others, they being cowards and fools, and he could easily justify leaving them to suffer tyranny at the gunpoint of Liberty Valance eternally. The towns folk do not deserve the sacrifice of a heroic man. Nor will his sacrifice improve the lot of the unworthy. Life will be as terrible as before, perhaps worse in that Liberty Valance will prove himself stronger than the one man willing to stand against his evil. Jimmy Stewart's death will prove to the cowardly masses that resistance is futile. Thus, Jimmy Stewart is more destructive of the public good as a hero than he would be as a coward who runs away from death, leaving at least some hope in the public sphere that another man could win the battle against evil. On 9-11-2012 Obama proved to the world and history that he has not even the egotisical drive of Jimmy Stewart.

On 9-11-2012 Obama had full knowledge that our nation was under murderous assault by the forces of evil, in this case, the rage of primitive Islam in Libya. Obama, seeing in real time via satellite our ambassador and other Americans being murdered watched for an hour before going to bed, and the next day flying to Las Vegas to raise money for his reelection campaign. Obama ran away from Liberty Valance. But, to make this disgrace all the worse, he returned and blamed his own cowardice on a man who had nothing to do with the attack in the first place, going so far as to imprison the man without hope of release. Such an act of cowardice will stain our nation's history for eternity. Such cowardice is the best one can expect from mindless conformist ideologues and self-satisfied fools as those who currently rule our nation from above, now they being in a state of emotional collapse in the bitter realisation that their theatrical performances of heroism are nothing impressive to the world of man. These cowardly fools do not even have the nerve to sacrifice their social standing, let alone their lives, to confront evil. They run from the struggle and they come back to blame an innocent man for the catastrophe of their cowardice.

At best America will replace the cowards and buffoons and mindless intelligentsia of our time with a man not much better, a man who might, if need be, stand up to be shot by Liberty Valance. This is not what our nation needs.

One must accept that the matrix of any nation is comprised of cowards and conformists who will submit to evil at any price rather than even so much as secretly support an honest man willing to sacrifice himself for the common good. The common man is despicable, indeed, in comparison to the heroic man who would shoot Liberty Valance. The common man is despicable even in comparison to the man who would vainly sacrifice his life for the common good of pride. But the common man is all we have, ultimately, the reason a nation exists, the matrix being the purpose the patrix exists for, the patrix being a bonus, as it were, a need one can live without, though poorly and eventually in a state of slavery and death. The town needs a man who will shoot Liberty Valance in the back in the dark. The townspeople will live without such a hero. But not well, and not for long.

As a murderous attack by the enemies of Modernity, i.e. our civilization, took place in Benghazi, Libya, against our embassy and our ambassador and his staff and as our president watched on satellite television, he got bored or discouraged or perhaps just plain sleepy, and he went to bed. Upon arising, he flew across the nation to raise money to finance his campaign to return to the job for another four years. What kind of man is this? This is not a man who would face the inevitable fate of an ordinary man facing a professional killer. Our president of this time is less than a coward. That he allowed our own ambassador to be raped and murdered as he watched, and then our president got tired of it and went to bed, this speaks of a nation that has collapsed and is sick to death from lack of character. That our people would even consider not imprisoning such a reckless and devious creature says more about our failure as a people than any of us should ever have to know about others, including our worst enemies with whom, ideally we should have some relationship of mutual respect for their courage if not their aims and goals. But our own people have brought to the pinnacle of power among us a vile little creature deserving of historical contempt eternally. There is a chance such a failing of the people will repeat itself in a matter of weeks. And even if such a travesty of life doesn't come about, i.e. if the heinous Obama is thrown from office if not from a high window, there will still be too many among us who would have him reign. The shame is ours that those among us would promote such an evil figure. But, we cannot rightly expel the cowardly from our nation, given that the cowardly have as legitimate a place as any good man among us. That all of us can be killed while the leader we chose chooses to sleep through it and that half the nation's people think this man is a sort of god is the pathetic nature of things that we must accept. There will always be cowards and fools among us, and they will likely always be the vast majority among us. That the lowest scum of our nation has a right to vote for their favourite scum leader and to foist such scum upon the rest of us is testament to our greatness as democrats and free men of worth. But we need not die passively while our president gets bored by it and sleeps it off. There are courageous men among us. Such men will never again be our presidents. But such men are among us, men we need, men who would shoot Liberty Valance.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru: Inca Cola Power to the People-babes!

I was at my office typing one afternoon in Iquitos, Peru when the cashier closed all the shutters and peaked out the crack in the door to see if the marchers were going to smash things. All the places around the area had been shuttered from early on, and I only got into my office because I go there every day to have a diet soda while I sit and type or sometimes just gaze into space wondering how to put into words my next masterpiece of prose about life and stuff. Others were shut out, including the protesters who might very much have enjoyed looting the ice cream palace I work inside of. And when I saw the girl peaking out the door I asked if she was expecting violence. She nervously said yes, which is why she and all the other folks in the area had locked up and turned out the lights. I took this as a sign from the gods that I should go out and take photos.

I had a handbill from the day before announcing the manifestation, but I forgot about it till I saw it happening. I had to chase after the crowd, all well-behaved folks from what I could see. I haven't got an stake in anything they do, so I simply took the best shots I could with my cheapy camera, hoping for some high drama. 

Clearly the demonstration is all about Inca Cola, which I can't really support, the general consensus, which I agree with, being that it tastes like bubble gum and too much sugar. But others like it enough to wave banners and tie up traffic in support. 

A demonstration here, usually, is a peaceful thing, fun for the whole family. Not always, as the history of the Sendero Luminoso will tell the careful reader or one with some memory of the time. This nation can be truly off the map when it comes to psycho violence. Today, Inca Cola for the masses. 

Or something. Maybe just laying back and enjoying a bit of festivity with ones mates. Serious yes, but social.Fun for the whole family.

Or something. The man with the best-looking flag kept getting it caught up in the breeze. I will keep guessing it's all about Inca Cola. 

As hyper-political as I can be about my own home, here in Iquitos and most other places in the world I really don't care so long as the soda keeps flowing. Thus, I notice the important things in life, like life.

The life of the living is so distracting from politics that I have to call this post to a close. It's time for a diet soda and some chat with the locals. Dos Inca Colas, por favor, girls!

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru: Golden Beach of a Blue Tattoo Pimpette

Again, Obama slides further and deeper daily and even by the hour into the slime of his cheap hustle. I can't keep up with him and his. For now, for a while, perhaps, I will have to sit and watch. Maybe I'll go out again and this time have spare batteries for my camera so I can photograph the anacondas swallowing whole those terrified chickens. I watch Obama. This is what I see.

For your average guy living a good and happy life there is little better than stripping off to lie down hard and heavy on a golden beach; but one must be careful laying oneself down, for the hotter the beach, the hotter the burn if one doesn't lift off in time to call it fun had and done. You come, you go; life is great. Why get burned?

Off the beach one might float on crisp dark waves, clinging to lingering memories of a golden beach, wondering, "Where's it all gone?" as if the whole box of a golden beach were a puff of thin grey smoke passing on the breeze of a hot tropical day in the evergreen jungle, little left but salty yellow sweat stains and maybe a gaudy blue tattoo fading as it sprawls over ever ageing skin that cracks and blemishes with the passing years.

Hey, I know this guy who knows this girl who says she's a friend of an acquaintance of mine. We ain't so close, the lot of us. Me, I'm just passing through, and some of the others are long gone even now. No, I won't be here long. And gone, the memories will fade, as too the meaning of the moment, the point, the needle-sharp point of pain that won't even leave a mark, memories blue of a golden, golden beach.

This guy I know who knows this girl who knows this girl I sort of know knows a girl I am sort of mad about who doesn't have a clue and wouldn't care. So I don't care, taking care to avoid her to avoid my temporary failings as a man. I'm hot for this girl who's got it all and doesn't want anything more that a man with almost nothing could give her. I have a backpack! It is not only red, it is also black. My pack is stuffed with untyped manuscripts  and brass knuckles, a leather whip and a steel spring-loaded baton. I have a razor garrote and a fine machete. I have some underwear and an extra pair of pants. I have a fancy dress-up shirt and a tie of lovely silk; it's crimson. I have a hunting knife and a sewing kit because violence and the ordinary brutalities of living require needlecraft of the man who must attend to blue, to red and yellow, to gangrene and black.

On the morning of 6 October 2012 the subject awoke at 6:00 after four hours of fitful sleep during which he repeatedly disturbed the sleep of other residents with a continuous outporing of moans and curses, particularly, "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ," till someone shook him and begged him to stop. The subject claims he is not religious. The subject does have a documented history of  moaning and cursing in his sleep. He claims to be troubled by this condition, but he makes no effort to deal with it. He dwells; and his dwelling place shall be, shall be.

Later, now that I have seen the girl with everything and I know she doesn't want anything even if I could give her everything else, I will have everything myself, and my dwelling place shall be.

I know this girl who know this guy I know. This girl is golden, and she is too hot not to notice. This guy I know, he notices. This girl I know, she makes temporary tattoos on traveling kids passing through. She makes a bit of cash at it, day by day at night in the park at the Plaza. She makes a bit, a tit, a bit from this guy I know who buys her ice cream, a soda, an hour at the cybercafe for Face Book, a pair of plastic sunglasses that caught her fancy, a meal at a sidewalk stand, a ribbon, a bow. Oh, she's poor. She has so little. And maybe her father raped her a lot. Really, poor girl, she's poor and maybe her father raped her an awful lot. Really, poor girl, she's poor, just an empty box of some golden beach.

"It'll only last a week or two." Your tattoo. It fades, it goes away. It's not like you have to live with it all the days of your life and you can never rid yourself of it no matter how much you dream of escaping it. It doesn't last, not even a memory of it lasting. A tick, a trick, a trickle, a prick. A little, a bit, a bite.

She's fat, this hot girl is, and she gets down on her knees in front of you and she grabs your legs and she goes to work on you and leaves her mark. It's only a couple of dollars and you look so pretty, and you're my real friend I like so much that I have to hug you every time we meet, and kiss each other's cheeks because we are love itself in a loveless world of cruel people who don't love us like we love each other. We are love.

Uh huh. But frankly, I got tired of it, and I got sick of her. I tired of making her come to me in the park and pretend she loves me like a long lost friend while I pinched her nipples and stuck my finger up her butt. She had to smile even then or come across as bitchy rather than the loving friend of all she has to pretend to be to make a living among the lonely. She's so phony she put up with it all to maintain the charade that she's anyone's friend. Even that was not enough because it didn't take long for others to sense her real self.

Now,  I admit that when I saw the crease in her suit pants it sent a tingle up my leg and I thought, this is a man I want to be our president, the smartest man since Thomas Jefferson. But I've seen it all before and all I really wanted to do was get her on the roof top to tie her up and photograph her with her panties in her mouth. I didn't do that. I didn't do that because I could have.

A large number of Americans are going to vote for Obama soon. They are the same people who would be taken in by the girl I know here. She'd hustle them for cheap shit, like Obama hustles now for more. But there is no qualitative difference between them. I am sick of them all. They aren't even worth humiliating. They like it when they meet a man like me. I get sick of them. I save my whip and chains for wild packs of dogs who seriously attack me. I'm not even going to piss on cheap shit hustlers like Obama. They ain't no friends of mine. I don't need a golden beach, don't need no blue tattoo, don't need no temporary low pimpette. I know what I need, and she's here right now, the girl who has everything and doesn't need me at all. That's just fine. She is absolutely real. My dwelling place shall be, shall be.

U.S. Election, 2012. Men Who Would Shoot Liberty Valance

In my life as a traveler I have over many decades on the road encountered any number and many kinds of cheap hustlers who prey on those people who are lost and confused in unfamiliar surroundings, i.e. travelers on the road. The cheap hustlers I refer to are those who offer this or that great deal to the naive and often confused person in need of a friend. I'm wary of such people because they offer little but manipulations to carry on another day. The street hustler offers to hail a taxi and to recommend a cheap hotel or to set one up with a local prostitute or to take one to a nice cafe and so on. Always helpful and concerned and friendly, these hustlers always hustle a little bit, not much, just a little. And that is what I saw in Obama the first time he came to my attention, a cheap street hustler in a sharp suit, but a street hustler nonetheless. My opinion of him lessens by the day. He's still a cheap hustler, but now he's worse than that. Now he is genuinely evil because he's in a position to be cheap on a larger scale. He's still a low rent, back alley pimp, but now he's a big deal on Main Street. Now he's dangerous.

There's no way I can keep ahead of this story of Obama and his administration seeming to have left our Libyan ambassador and others to die at the hands of jihadis in Benghazi. The story develops by the hour. Here, then, is what is available at this hour in brief:

What we already know about Benghazi is a scandal of the highest order: the ambassador asked for more security after a series of terrorist threats and attacks, but didn’t get it, even on the anniversary of September 11. The administration knew that four Americans had been killed in a successful terrorist attack by an al Qaeda affiliate, but lied about the event for weeks in hopes of minimizing political fallout. Extraordinarily courageous Americans fought a seven-hour gun battle against well-armed and well-organized terrorists who vastly outnumbered them before finally succumbing, during which time the Obama administration did nothing. And when the bodies of the dead Americans were returned to the United States, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton misappropriated the occasion to deliver politically-motivated lies, both to the victims’ survivors and to the American people. All of that we now know for sure. If, in addition, there is credible evidence that American soldiers, fighting desperately for their lives against our country’s most bitter enemies, called for help but were cynically left to perish in order to protect Barack Obama’s petty re-election campaign, Obama will not only lose the election but will be turned out of office in disgust by a clear majority of voters.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/10/will-obamas-benghazi-cover-up-succeed.php

Obama might well have gotten through life quite nicely as a hustler had he stayed off the main stage. If he's remained small, some community organiser in Chicago hustling giggling white girls and their butt-suck boyfriends out of money and maybe a b.j. on the side, then he could have been a shadow of a man and unnoticed and relatively successful in life. But this cheap hustler is our president, and he is plain for all to see, whether they like looking at him as he is or not. I see him for what he is because my life often depends on knowing how to use such creatures for my own ends. If I don't get it, I end up dead. But here I am. Obama is a cheap piece of shit, and anyone who's spent any time on the road can see him for what he is. But travelers aren't the only ones who see him as he is. Sometimes some very clever folks with scams of their own can see him for what he is and can use him, as I use those like him, for their own ends, too.

I don't know Ayers and Dohrn, but we have mutual friends over the years. I know the "type" inside out. I stay alive because I know these people and how they think.

Thank the gods, too, I also know decent people, even if I can make no claim to being one myself. I haven't lived so long at this kind of life by being stupid and misjudging people. Obama is a cheap hustler. He is hardly interesting.

Hilton Kramer, "Who was Josephine Herbst?" The New Criterion. Sept. 1984.

It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying - and not only to others, but first of all to themselves - a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don't know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically. For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the 'ideals' that govern the true Stalinist mind which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Who-was-Josephine-Herbst--6735
Thanks to Richard Fernandez, Belmont Club.

I hate Islam, which is clear to any long term reader at this blog. I know Islam better than most Muslims. I certainly know it better than the fools I meet who echo George W. Bush's idiocy that Islam is a religion of peace. I know Islam. I know it is mostly powerless in the world today. I know that Islam and the Muslim lunatics who terrorise the world at large can only do so because of our own master sadists like Ayers and Dohrn manipulating buffoonish street hustlers like Obama who in turn thrills the legs of masochist butt-boys in the white suburbs. I know the snakes well enough to move among them without being killed. I even make a living. These slick manipulators don't impress me and they don't frighten me. They do make me sick; and they make me more than sick when I see them killing decent people.

I've been trying to write this post for a week now, and it changes by the hour because of the low-life scum we have leading our nation today. They keep getting worse by the hour. In the time since I began this post I have been trying to explain to myself, and the world, what kind of man would shoot Liberty Valance. He could not be more different from Obama and the evil bastards who use him. I want to make it clear that the man who would shoot Liberty Valance is the man we need to lead our nation today. We ain't gonna get such a man in office. We need such a man in our own minds. We have to shoot Liberty Valance ourselves. As alway, such a man is rare.

I wrote last week on our up-coming presidential election and pondered the nature of our current president in light of the terrible sacrifice some men make on behalf of the good, knowing they must damn themselves eternally to do right. I ask if our current president has even the slightest inkling of such a problem.

Some hours later I received a note from a young man from Idaho, the first fellow Idahoan I have met on the road in my near 40 years of aimless wandering in the greater world. The lad I met makes me proud, and he gives me hope for the future of our nation. In part, this is what he wrote:

Idahoans have a unique and rugged heritage and we are just about as far away from the rest of the United States as we are from Peru. Most Americans I've met around the U.S. have never met an Idahoan before (and often they don't even know where Idaho is.)

Idaho has a reputation for being a racist and ignorant region, but on the flip-side all of the so-called experts running our country and the countries of the world are, more often than not, complete idiots who would make just as much of a difference in the world if they were just dumb hillbillies from Idaho. In fact they would probably do less harm.

I'm traveling the world and the experiences are life-changing, but above all I know and hold close to my awareness that I truly know nothing.

Now I'm not condoning ignorance or racism and I'm not saying that because you're from Idaho you will walk around with some kinda Socratic humility. No. Idahoans are normal people too with normal problems. I am only emphasizing the point: "I dunno cus I'm from Idaho," and there's nothing wrong with that because that is the key to being young again, to becoming impressionable, and always learning and growing (and in old age dribbling a bit in the pants, of course.)

Sincerely,
A fellow Idaho man

I look above at the mind of a 20ish lad from Idaho, and I see that I would prefer his common decency in the presidency to our current president. I want, and we need, a common man to lead our exceptional nation. Yes, I want John Wayne in the flesh.

Such a man, and they are few, would shoot Liberty Valance. What I mean by that, for those who missed it first time round, is that a man would sacrifice his soul for the sake of doing the right thing. Dying is easy, and Jimmy Stewart was willing to go for it. The tragic and heroic man is the one who would condemn himself to living after he had violated his own principles for the good. That kind of sacrifice is meaningful. In Obama et al we get a cheap hustler looking for a cheap score for the day. To battle the truly evil people in this world we have to have John Waynes willing to take on the evil even if in doing so the good lose their souls. Obama is a cheap piece of shit barely worthy of our contempt. It is the real demons that real men must confront; and victory won't be won cheap. 



A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Iquitos, Peru: San Juan Market Artisania

People can live without art. Those who do often live like dogs, as one sees in a visit to the average trailer court where the resident might have a twisted beer can sculpture of an aeroplane or something of the like. And one can see the same lack of interest in the world and life and fineness in the home of a multimillionaire who spends all his time making money and has no time for or interest in anything else, he perhaps spending a few million dollars on something abstract that he doesn't like that decorates a back wall in his office. Trailer trash or nouveau riche, it hardly matters, they are often philistines without the slightest concern for their lack of fineness. Taste, whether it comes to a random selection of cheap shit from flea markets and yard sales, or whether it comes from pissing away the residue of the trust fund, is still a matter of limits imposed by aesthetic realities even the goofiest philistine in a corporate trailer house can intuitively grasp. It's a spiritual matter. The philistine has no religion. He has no spirit. He has no art. He is despicable. He is an atheist, and he is a rebel against the communion of souls.

Ones own home can be a bare place of rocks and weeds and dirt, but one can be filled with art otherwise, and thus the average starving peasant who is truly filled with love and soul will invest his lifetime in creating a special piece of something to add to a church, for example. Or maybe, like me, he is so bereft of talent that all he can do is appreciate the work of others. It's not about ones talent or special soul that makes one artistic. It's not even about the level of sophisticated taste one brings to art and aesthetics. It's about real, as opposed to sentimental, experience of art. One doesn't have to own any of it. Art can be the king's palace, for all it matters, that one will never be allowed to set foot in. Or it can be an Amazon River lacquered fish on stick. It can be simply decorative, or it can be spirit itself. It depends to some degree on the communion of souls of which the art is part. The crudest petroglyph can be art, and the most sophisticated acrylic painting can be plain and philistine trash costing multi-millions. If I had the cash I might well donate El Grecos to a public museum, and for myself I might continue mailing to my very patient friend weird stuff to store in his closet for me in the hopes that I return to his place some day to cart it all off to a place of my own. I don't have low taste: I have private taste. I can indulge myself for a hundred bucks very nicely at the San Juan Artisan's Market in Iquitos, Peru, and I can come away feeling quite pleased with three oil painting of dubious painterly talent that fit within my backpacker's budget.

The beauty of art is not that one piece itself is art. David's "Tennis Court Oath" is not art if it hangs at the pro shop in the lobby of the local athletic centre. Same painting. Not art. Art is context and communion. The piece below is art in that it comes as a piece of experience of it's maker and its viewers and eventual owner as someone buys it after talking to the man who made it along with numerous other complementary objects. In a bare room, it's not art. In a room of Romantic oil paintings it's not art. In a bank lobby it's not art. Art is art when it's in a room full of like objects, in my place, for example, filled with inexpensive art stuff. a roomful of baseball cards pasted on the walls, or Jackson Pollock drips, or Muslim doodles do not attain to art, even if such crap fills a room or a museum or is a whole building. Art has to be a whole experience, meaning it has to be with other art, like a person has to be with people to be human. And like people, there are qualities to be admired or despised in the individuals. There can be flaws and the art still be art. Perfection can be ugliness and philistine horror. There can be failure, likable even, sort of. But art is art. It is a communion of the high aesthetic. It's not just what ya likes.

I think all people should have their homes filled with art. I can't begin to dictate what that art would be. I might in grumpier moods say this or that is definitely not art, and withing the bounds of aesthetic sense I will more or less be right. My neighbour who was arrested for collecting ladies shoes in his apartment might claim he had an art collection, but not so much, really, as a collection of a thief with a foot fetish, though I'm sure his shoes looked good from a distance.

Art needs be real, a genuine accomplishment of manual skill and emotional expression manifest in the world, and a collection of stolen shoes can't cut it. It's not communal in the spiritual sense, even if one has a lot of weirdo friends over. It can't be a mere matter of feeling. Art has to work just as much as a football player has to score or a businessman has to make a profit. It can't be a simple matter of false emotion in stuff.

Giant chess pieces, or whatever, might be cool for a day, but art has a longer life, static on its surface though it is.

Art isn't just cute: it has eternal value that increases eternally.

The wood cutter above gave visitors from Idaho each a picture of a local "Indian type." Damned nice of him.

The girl got one in colour. Very damned nice of him.

But none of it will ever be art any more than a collection of stolen shoes will be.

Primitive masks come close sometimes to being folk art, and rarely, but potentially are genuine high art. It's about soul and spirit. It's about manual skill and intelligence combined with the objects in a communion of souls in context. 

Hand made? I couldn't care less. The man above takes single seeds and one by one drills holes in them to fill his bowl; and then he makes necklaces and bracelets. The art? It's the drill he's using. It's the market he works at. It's the collection of stuff all around him and them and us as people collect material and make a communion of some beauty from the elements combined. The art is the walking around and chatting as people work and make stuff that fits together to make a market of junk that sort of looks cool in toto. The art is in the Amazonness of it's being. Some is better quality than some other. In communion, it is, some parts together, art itself. Personally, I love that lacquered art fish. gonna get me one of them.

After our lives are given, what compels us to to more than survive? It might be that as intelligent creatures we want to successfully reproduce, and success is more likely if we have more power than our natural bodies can provide, e.g. we might create weapons and tools otherwise to help assist our survival. But why? Clearly monkeys survive without more than nature gives, and man could live a monkey life without the power added by tools. Why push? What is the point of power in the world beyond the power the average naked human has in the wild? Man survives well enough like a monkey, so why does he struggle for more? If it's a matter of protein, then man could remain a cannibal and raise people as cattle. No need for weapons or tools. But man does strive to create, and thus he creates power supplements, i.e. tools and weapons. There's no need. Man can live like a slug or a cockroach and it would make no difference to life in nature. But man does create, and therefore man must create, it being an obvious part of the being of man, an appetite he must satisfy. It's not optional. Creation is necessary. Creation is an end, and tools are a means to it. If man had the means to think a thing into existence he would not use tools. The end is the created. That is the goal of living, not living longer or living better, but living in a world of creation. The reason man lives is not merely to live but to live in a world of beauty. For that, man creates art. Sometimes it's small art. Sometimes, life is good with just a few cool things around the place to make it all worth while.

Iquitos, Peru: Rat Laden

At Belen Market, Iquitos, Peru, reputedly a bad place for tourists getting robbed, once again I seem-- so far-- to be off limits to thieves, the closest I have come to being robbed being the guy who ran past and grabbed from my bag the first thing he could get his hands on, which he returned shortly thereafter in disgust. He said, "Senor, I do not want a copy of Sophocles, Oedipus Rex. If my colleagues found me with this I would lose my standing in the community and be shamed for life. Please take it back. And please, sir," he said very quietly, "do not inform my friends I stole this." So, yes, I can be robbed. The question is how seriously I want to retaliate against someone who would steal from me? Today I got another pack of rat poison, no particular reason for it other than for the love of clever marketing as I bought the pack and laughed over it.

To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-Peru-D-W-Walker/dp/098776151X

Iquitos, Peru: Rain at Belen Falls Mainly on the Dramatic Side

I often take a walk in the afternoon up to Belen Market if only to stand in the rambling lanes with their shady shelters of overhanging plastic roofs that keep the sun off me as I putter around with things to buy that I probably don't actually need, like insecticide, [see next post] and jungle potions in jars with exotic labels of I know not what. Sometimes I stand and chat up folks I've come to know, and sometimes I sit and chat. Mostly I walk around saying hello to folks, sometimes stopping to buy a particularly strange looking edible thing I haven't encountered previously, like alligator meat or giant, as opposed to tiny, maggots, which one traveler likened to "crunchy on the outside, watery peanut butter on the inside." Whatever my day is at the market, it's usually pleasant to pass the time with people there, regardless of the heat and the smells of urine, garbage, rotting meat and vegetables, oil, motorcar exhaust, choking charcoal smoke, dead semi-fresh fish, semi-not-so-fresh, and burnt or just plain spoiled, and the slime and the dogs, flies, and buzzards everywhere. I like it. It's a people place. It's a refuge from the hectic pace of the inner city. My retreat.

The sun was somewhat blistering in the afternoon, and that, as much as anything, prompted me to walk up to the market to look over some yellow, waxy chicken for the evening meal.Sometimes I find vegetables, though rarely, and thus I wonder if the place is genuinely healthy. I have friends who say it ain't. Medical types who work there with the residents. But what do they know?

Inside the market at my leisure I noticed the sky turning grey and felt a few drops of rain on my arm as the overheated day became suddenly milder. After me came the deluge. It was almost instant. [Click on photos to enlarge.]

Vendors scrambled to save their wares from the water, and others hid under every available cover as the rain came. 

To me, after having suffered from the worst climate known to man, i.e. the perpetual rainforest of Vancouver, Canada, an outdoors kind of guy as a rule who now hates the very thought of rain, the sudden downpour was pretty. Or at least highly dramatic. But pretty.

 I could almost call it fun, the water being warm and clean, the relief from the heat welcome enough.

Rivers of water poured from tarps and sheets of plastic over wooden stalls.

People pulled in their goods and wrapped them to save them from the rain.We huddled together and waited and chatted, there being no fire to flee, the rain coming and going as naturally as breathing.

It's the kind of rain one can like, clean and clear and warm.

 It comes down hard.

It washes away some of the filth. As the garbage washes down the lanes the vendors and tienda owners, a couple very pretty and happy and talkative, put out poles to push the debris farther along so it doesn't stop and create a dam that would flood everyone and destroy things.

The ladies above picked at rubbish and sent it flowing downstream to the next stall where a man has lost his pole and had to borrow one or face flooding, as would all around him, the water already well above a man's ankles.

the rain stopped after an hour or so, and life carries on, accumulating and dissolving, growing and decaying, another day on the Amazon at Belen.