In Which We Get Colonized All Over Again

We wish our delightful contributing editor Molly Young a happy birthday, and bring you her collected essay on her time in Israel.

The American Colony

by MOLLY YOUNG

We get on our flight from Newark, an eleven-hour trip to Tel Aviv. You can pay for the onboard cocktails in shekels. PA announcements are made in English and Hebrew, and the cabin is polka-dotted with yarmulkes. I am still thinking about the hotel in Tel Aviv, and whether it will have a pool, and whether there will be cute boys.

These things repeat on a loop with the quote from David Copperfield that "trifles make the sum of life."

We get to Tel Aviv and the first thing we see is a sunset that looks like a painting. Our hotel on the beach is glossy and normal, except that you flash your passport to enter and a loud alarm goes off sporadically in the lobby.

I sit in a recessed lounge area drinking tasteless Maccabee beer and eating pretzels. It is the Sabbath and everything is closed; I can’t put on my swimsuit and explore the pool.

Our travel group is my father, my stepmother, and my stepmother's mother. I am assigned to share a room with Lois, the step-grandmother. She has traveled everywhere at least twice (I remember a large map riddled with thumbtacks on the wall of her condominium) and is sharp for her age. I like her: she has clear blue eyes, a wary look and the posture of a turtle.

At 6 a.m. the sky lightens over the Mediterranean, which looks like Cape Cod. Planes fly low over the water. There are a few guests in the lobby reading The Jerusalem Post. It is beginning to smell like breakfast rolls. I bet the rolls will be hard and tasteless in the way that many things in travel are worse than expected yet (because of their novelty) are not disappointing.

Another example of this is the marble-floored lobby bathroom that smells overpoweringly of human shit. Or the difficult European showers. Or the plentiful but wilting flowers in the lobby.

A pianist at night plays Phantom of the Opera on a nougat-colored instrument. I am eating candy bars for dinner and watching him play, this old man who looks unhappy and checks his cellphone between songs.

We visit the spot where the Israeli Declaration of Independence was signed.

"How does statehood feel?" I ask my dad as we step back into the sunlight amid fluttering stars of David. Later we have salads at a corner café, containing what Lois determines the finest feta cheese she has ever eaten.

That night I wake at 1 a.m. to Lois' snoring. Take a sleeping pill and when that doesn't work, I get up. The air in our room smells of old people - that mixture of BO and sour breath and something sweet. I wish for mini-marshmallows to plug in my nose and ears.

People keep asking me for my impressions of Tel Aviv. Mostly I think it is a funny intersection of familiar and unfamiliar cultures: surfers and soldiers. Surfers, I notice when I walk down the beach, look the same everywhere. Blonde hair and skin the color of beef jerky. The soldiers wear green uniforms and carry M-16s; they are younger than me and it is true that a man looks more virile in uniform.

The hotel breakfast buffet is heaven for a culinary anthropologist.

The meal takes place in a large room that overlooks the Mediterranean. The buffet, like any display of American-style abundance (Manhattan delis, Super Safeways) is remarkable only for its variation, not its quality.

There is a bar of smoked fish next to a cheese spread with butter and "margarina." Canned fruit cocktail, coffee cake, chopped cucumbers, cocoa pops and stuffed grape leaves. The Asian tourists eat plates of canned peaches and tea. The Germans marshal every pastry in sight (and confirm every undistinguished stereotype associated with them.) I look around the room and imagine that I can spot the predictable markers of every nationality: the Americans acting cheery but provincial; the Germans eager but piggish, and the Asians methodical but withdrawn.

The next morning I wake up even earlier. 2 a.m.. I take a sleeping pill and slither back into bed, but am up and dressed five minutes later, heading down to the lobby to read and write. Can never resist snatching a few hours of insulation from everyone else.

At 5 a.m. the air smells again like rolls, and I look for something to eat. There's a tray of chocolate croissants left over from a banquet, so I take one and eat it with orange juice. This reminds me that I've just woken up from a dream in which I was eating melted butter. Whole sickening cups of it. I was glad when I got up to find my stomach empty instead, though I felt greenish, still; the color of the Israeli militant's jacket.

Soldiers walk along the streets with their guns and I do not know whether it is the gun itself or the gait necessitated by the gun (loping, territorial) that is so glamorous. Any man carrying a large object provokes similar response: surfers with their boards, musicians wielding guitars and workmen hauling 2 x 4s.

Do women find it attractive because they identify with the object being manipulated? I don’t. I'm just envious of the skill. The independence of ability.

Then we fly from Tel Aviv to Eilat, and from Eilat we cross the border to Jordan and drive to Petra. Our check-in girl at the tiny airport in Tel Aviv is named Inbar and she looks like a luscious rodent. My dad buys a bottle of soda from the snack counter. What is it? I ask. I don't know, he says, I just asked for something orange. I take the bottle and read the label. "500 ML Orange Drink."

We are asked a series of questions by an Israeli security guard, and though I have no bomb or liquid explosives, it is unnerving. Have you been here before? Yes. Have you learned Hebrew? No. Never? Never. Why are you here? To see relatives. What are their names? Menachem and Aya. And have you been here before? Yes. And have you learned Hebrew?

Then we sit at a table in the airport and the elders begin talking about feet. "I remember you used to visit a chiropodist to get your corns removed," I hear my stepmom saying before I tune out. And then, "They were a really nice group, the podiatrists. They loved to dance. Do you remember Ira? Ira Bobkiss? He's from Slovenia or one of those countries. He married Carol."

We fly to Eilat, at the southern tip of Israel, and cross the border to Aqaba in Jordan. The desert beneath us is a flat plane, like cheese pizza, with mountainous crust. The sand is marked with patterns that look like bird claws or capillaries or crystals. I think for a second about organic forms, and then I think about what a nice tan I could get here.

The next day we hike at Petra. It is grand but wearying. Monuments, like movie stars, are either exhausting or bereft in person. There are sheep and crags and cliffs, caves dotting the mountainside like butterscotch chips in a blondie. The caves are perplexing.

Families lived in small rooms attached to tombs containing the bodies of their relatives. It would be like sleeping and eating in a studio apartment with six to ten corpses in the closet. Wood-colored men in keffiyehs – red for Jordan and black for Palestine – kick donkeys and sell postcards along the way. I think about how the men live in government apartments and I wonder how they keep clean. The logistics of hygiene.

All the things that you forget about and rediscover in every poor country are here: pregnant dogs, squashed roaches, sour Coca-Cola.

Cleanliness is a luxury again, and even the highest standard in Jordan is miles below the average dorm room at school. “Under no circumstance should you drink tap water in Jordan,” warns the guidebook. When I accidentally swallow a pill with tap water, I spit out the pill, scour my mouth and drink a glass of whiskey to kill bacteria.

After Petra I come home alone, order room service and leave a tip so extravagant (on my dad’s bill) that the waiter comes back to make sure I have calculated correctly.

Dusty from the caves, I strip and condense my clothes into a watermelon-sized ball, eat half a dozen rolls from the service cart and a king’s ransom of Danish butter, then fell into bed in a digestive haze.

At night it takes two washcloths, five Kleenex and the sleeve of my robe to remove all the black eyeliner around my eyes. The Jordanian women wear a ton of makeup – to compensate for head-to-toe shrouding? – and it looks so good that I’ve culturally immersed myself through imitation.

Sleep is still difficult, and I’ve begun to use the old trick of scattering things across the bed (books and scarves and camera) so that when I lie down, it feels not so much like rest as pause. From which point I fall asleep, if I am lucky. Sometimes I go to bed in my jeans for the same purpose.

To get to Petra you first walk through a broad valley for twenty minutes. Then you enter the Siq, a mile of gorge that narrows until you come upon the façade of the Treasury.

+++

In school my professors are always harping on the postmodern irony of observing something in real life and then being vividly reminded of seeing it first on TV or in a movie. I wonder where my reaction to the Treasury might be theoretically classified.

It looked, I thought, just like Indiana Jones, a movie which I have not even seen. Milling outside the Treasury were tourists and a duo of sickly camels. Later I found out that all camels are sick-looking. This dampened, though did not extinguish, my desire to eat some camel meat. (In the way that some people collect Lladro figurines or pursue the goal of seeing every Douglas Sirk film, my organizing principle of spare time is to find and eat exotic meats.) Camel, I know, is not too difficult to find. The loin is the choicest cut, and the hump is all bone and fat.

+++

All along the way, as I walk with my father, the local boys stare. “How many camels?” they shout, mock-bargaining for my hand in marriage. One man offers only a donkey. “That’s not so bad,” my dad considers. “I wonder if I could get him up to two.”

Later I walk home alone, knowing that I am asking for unwanted attention. And it comes. I wrap the scarf around my head, prop up the collar of my coat, cover my eyes with sunglasses. But this is no less a provocation. “Would you like to ride a donkey? For free? To my cave?” someone asks me, and I think how all boys are exactly the same.

+++

I like going to the hotel bar because it feels like something Joan Didion would do. Her hand would be trembling on the highball glass and she’d have a nervous headache where I am robust and refreshed, but the referent is a useful one. I think of Didion when I drink alone and of M.F.K. Fisher when I eat alone (“There are few people alive with whom I care to pray, sleep, dance, sing or share my bread and wine.”)

Breakfast at the hotel is bad and I learn to just drink the coffee and wait for lunch. Dishes are set out on marble tables–– carafes of low fat milk and “long life milk”, suspect meats and overboiled eggs.

Joan

The hotel is Swiss, and everywhere you look there is evidence of perplexing Swiss tastes. At breakfast, for instance, alongside the fruit cocktails are platters of elaborate pastries shaped like violins or mountain tops with sugary snow.

The sundaes I order from room service are topped with whipped cream thicker than Brie, and the generic Ottoman art on the walls hangs next to surrealist interpretations of the Mona Lisa. There are Toblerone bars in every room, a clothesline in the bathroom, and the nicest imaginable gym.

After coffee I shower and put on a robe. When I see my face and wet hair in the mirror, I ache for him. The feeling is unexpected and it is poignant for just that reason. I am not usually hit with emotions; I conjure them myself with prompts. Here is sadness that could be longing.

I dress and go downstairs to the internet console to write what I feel before it can be romanticized or obfuscated in the impenetrable eloquence that makes most of my correspondence a muddle.

(This is always the danger for one who likes language for its own sake. I used to invent words and chant them to myself. A lot of the things I’ve said and written–– even accusations, apologies, exonerations–– have been like these invented words. I realized this last year upon reading a snippet of Virginia Woolf that included the advice to “write exactly what you feel." I had never done this, and I tried to start. The language habit, rather than disappearing, just started to manifest itself more innocently. It sparks up when I see certain phrases – this morning it was ‘English cake’ on a card at the buffet table – and they spin around in my head like a gyroscope until they run themselves out.)

Virginia Woolf

+++

I go to the hotel library, an empty room where I can read uninterrupted. From the window I watch men trailing donkeys and soldiers smoking cigarettes. I note without guilt that I'd rather sit indoors with a book all day rather than go out sightseeing and collecting memories. I think again about Ruth when she wet herself the other day. It happened in the taxi on the long drive to the hotel, I guess, and she was without complaint in the hotel lobby while we waited for our room assignments. I wonder if the indignities of old age cease to be jarring and simply become hassles after a point. If I were her I would probably observe my body with a sort of rational detachment, as though it were failing and not I.

But speculation is one thing and experience another. Perhaps she was mortified. It is not something I can easily imagine other than by comparison to the times when I've gotten my period unexpectedly and bled through my pants. This has happened at school, at movie theaters, at restaurants. It still happens. When it does, a sort of clinical voice in my head assumes the mental reins. "It's OK," the voice says, "Go to the bathroom. Now tie your sweater around your waist." And step by step the voice leads me to calm down until a change of pants can be found.

This is what empathy is made of, these imperfect comparisons. And yet there are other experiences I've never had - not even close - but which I can also invoke. Everyone has these. The most vivid is that of getting hit by a car. It is a sensation so lucid that I almost expect, crossing the street, that it will happen. I know the sound of impact, the thump of my body and breaking of glass.

What makes me wonder whether it is more than a morbid imagining is the fact that I can hear and feel the car crash without seeing it. This is how I know it isn't a holdover image from a movie or a dream, but instead maybe a kind of fate. It is like arriving in Los Angeles for the first time and finding out that the city fulfills its stereotypes precisely - you feel like something of a prophet, and what should have been a grave disappointment turns out (perversely) to gratify you instead. So I am always prepared to be hit by something.

The second day I go to Petra it smells overwhelmingly of horseshit. This is because it is 3 p.m., and the shit has been accumulating all day. At the entrance the guard inspects my ticket and asks if I am alone. Yes. ‘Good luck,’ he says, and I wonder if this is the standard greeting or if it is tailored to my circumstance.

When I reach the Treasury I sit down on a bench and rest. In front of the carved sandstone is an arena for camels, tourists, toilets and a snack shop. Looking around I see that no one is alone but me. I invent a story and imagine revealing it to the man sitting next to me on the bench.

‘You here all alone?’ he asks with a friendly Texas accent (I imagine.) ‘I am,’ I say with a civic smile that recognizes our shared nationality.

‘Family back at the hotel?’

‘Oh no. I’m traveling alone. I work for the government,’ I say, with the modest smile of someone who has repeated an interesting fact numerous times.

‘You do? Now, how old are you?’ he asks with pleased surprise.

‘Twenty-three,’ I say, adding a few years to my age. ‘They get us right out of college. It’s the Department for Cultural Observation, they call it, sort of like the friendlier face of foreign policy. We collect informal data on daily life in areas of interest, like the Middle East.’ Sensing his interest, I continue. ‘They train us in a sort of boot camp, like the CIA, only it’s not as cool as it sounds. It’s only cool because I can’t tell you what goes on there. After that – and they weed out the kids who just want a vacation on the government’s dime – we get our assignments and go. And here I am, observing.’

‘Well that’s something. That’s really something. Sue, did you hear that? This young lady works for the government. She’s an undercover tourist.’

This is how I imagine the conversation. But the man next to me doesn’t strike up conversation, and when he gets up to talk to Sue he speaks in Russian.

+++

That night in the hotel bar I eat salty nuts and whiskey for dinner. It feels like Casablanca, and I think about affecting a husky voice and brusque manner. Of course I identify with the male character of the film.

An incongruous mosaic of a tiger on the wall reminds me of a tiger attack reported in the news shortly before I left. A tiger leaped over an empty moat and scaled a wall to escape her enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo. The victim, specified in the papers as a seventeen-year-old-male from San Jose, may or may not have been teasing the tiger. It did not specify whether the tiger ate the boy. She was gunned down near the concession stand where I used to eat French fries as a kid. Near the food stand was a monkey habitat, and a smell of piss was always mingled with the fries and corn dogs. Seagulls gawked about there too, their beaks tipped in red, and I thought it was ketchup until I realized that it was an indigenous mark.

When Dad, my stepmother and Ida appear in the bar to see if I want dinner I am drunk enough to go to the buffet with them. ‘What an expansive Jimmy Buffet,’ I say loopily as we fill our plates. There is Russian salad and other things pastel with mayonnaise, and a dish of boiled eggs latticed with ketchup. We all fork a portion of the eggs onto our plates, for novelty’s sake. Hotel food, inseparable from its context, is a group not without funny virtues.

+++

Over coffee the next morning Dad explains the history of the Jews to me. ‘The Jews fled Egypt and came to Canaan led by Moses.’ It is real basic stuff. Stuff I do not know. Afterward I go to the lobby restroom and when I come out, across from the service elevator, I see the door close on eight or nine hotel employees. All crowded in. I take the stairs back up to my room because the elevator seems indulgent.

In the library I take the tourist pamphlet out of my bag and read about Petra. I have not yet been to Ad-Deir, the Monastery, a structure that sits atop a flight of 800 rocky steps. Huge in size yet beautifully awesome, reads the pamphlet.

A small photograph shows the toast-colored Monastery surrounded in rubble. The sights of Petra are sublime in person but in photographs they remind me of many other exotic things that have depreciated in value over the centuries: tapestries, ivory, cinnamon.

It is the functional details that snag my attention when I am walking through the ruins. The design of a water filter, or a tiny channel used to drain the blood from animal sacrifices. The fact that people lived in the caves until just recently, when the government moved them into apartment blocks out of sight. From the valley you can still spot locals way up in the hills, moving like raisins from place to place.

I think again about the living spaces with their adjacent tombs. The graves are carved right into the floor, some full-sized and some very small, not for children but for the dead who have been dismembered. The tombs are right next to the beds. What would it be like to live with the dead? Were they really dead, then, if they were so near, or just more quietly alive? And the smells – they must have prepared the bodies somehow. Children sleeping next to their dead parents. Wives cooking dinner with their dead husbands, the food smells mixing with the body smells.

It is too dim inside the caves to take good pictures but my stepmother is snapping away in the darkness. She tells us about her brother Mark who takes digital photographs of his family on vacations and then photoshops the other tourists out of the picture. Fantastic! I think. Photoshopping his own memories, editing experience as though it were a piece of fiction that could be revised to perfection.

My dad wanders into the library where I am reading to tell me the Plan. Every day there is a Plan. While he is reciting it I cross my eyes gruesomely and interrupt, asking if he’d still love me if I looked like this. He makes ambivalent noises. One thing I love about dad is how uninhibited he is about making noises. Often I will hear him in the kitchen preparing a snack, beeping or imitating a car horn. Sometimes we do nonverbal call and response routines, trading sounds like cavemen.

After the noises and the Plan we sit silently for a moment. Dad examines his midsection, poking the flesh that billows slightly over the waistband of his jeans, palpating it disapprovingly. ‘Everyone has a muffin-top,’ I say, exhibiting my own. I am acting very daughterly, which is something I do too often for my age.

Even when I am not with Dad, I tend to act like Scout Finch. Boyish, loyal, charmingly impertinent. It is a good defense against sexual attention, albeit one not convincingly maintained past the age of sixteen. Yet I revert to it often because it is the only way for a pretty girl to be friendly but not inviting; generous but not suggestive.

If I looked anything but the way I do, the daughterly act would be a freakish one. Like Baby Jane with her strawberry ice cream cones. But it works because I am small and small-featured. So many of our habits and experiences are determined by these details of physiognomy.

At the hotel, this daughterly act also has the advantage of smoothing over the uncomfortable distance between the guests and employees. I have to pretend a child’s unawareness of the difference between rich and poor as I order room service sundaes. Otherwise I’d be too humiliated to sign the bill. If I clap my hands and giggle when the tray arrives, I can pretend that the waiter does not know that I perfectly understand the chasm between us. We can enact, instead, the universally delightful circumstance of a child receiving sweets. I know this is ridiculous for a 21-year old in eyeliner, but now it is instinctive.

I spend all day in the library again, looking through history books and maps. One book designates Muslims among the most photogenic and perplexing people in the world. I learn how to be a good Bedouin dinner guest, molding balls of rice, meat and bread like donut holes to pop into my mouth without touching fingers to lips. (Repeat until sated.) This is desert hospitality.

Another passage explores the drama of feminine aesthetic expression reflected in Jordanian dress. A lot of the women here, I notice – although shrouded head to toe – wear piles of makeup. The application reminds me of porn star makeup in America. Those striations of purple, silver and black eyeshadow, liner and mascara. Blush, gloss, all of it. There is a television program in Arabic that shows women undergoing makeovers. The cosmetic applications are like a millefeuille cake. So many thin sweet layers.

I flip through the book and eat chocolate bars that I have pocketed from the mini-bar. The Muslim costume is erotic, I am thinking, distractingly erotic when you start to dwell upon it. There is the stringent covering of the body and then the naked face with its cartoonishly inked womanly features.

The tension between exposed and hidden flesh leads my imagination in all sorts of wild directions. When I get to a chapter that covers Islamic hygiene, I am surprised to find that the prophet Muhammad recommends the shaving of female pubic hair (along with the cutting of nails, etc.) Even apart from contemporary pubic trends this detail strikes me as intensely provocative.

+++

We spend the day Jeeping through the desert of Wadi Rum, about which you can only say ‘Boy that is an amazing rock,’ over and over. The driver, Salem, pulls up next to a rock formation to show us ancient Nabatean carvings. The four of us––Dad, stepmother, Ida and me–– sit on a sunny ledge eating pizza-flavored chips while the guide builds a small fire and cooks tea.

I get my period at noon and have to curl up behind a rock to examine the situation. While I’m examining, I spot something crushed beneath a nearby rock. It is a pair of lady’s underpants with a bloodstain. Out here in the desert, someone else has her period. I do not have anything with which to dam the flood, so I take off one sock and line my underpants with it.

The tea is ready and the guide pours it into plastic cups that burn our palms. It is strong and sweet, so sweet that when I use my pen to stir it, the pen becomes sticky and covered in sand. I lie on a rock holding my stomach while the others read out loud from a guidebook. I feel like a piece of melting wax and I’m thinking about the fluid dynamics of period blood as it trickles down into my sock.

Peeing for the first time in the desert is a better experience, a little triumph like winning bingo or bowling a strike. The pee-stream mixes with the red sand on contact and froths up like a tomato-colored milkshake. I wonder if some sort of desert plant will blossom where I’ve sprinkled the ground. Part of the wonder of the experience comes from witnessing myself pee. In the normal toilet-bound posture, the whole process is invisible. But curled low, hugging my knees, I can watch and wait until the stream rushes forth, and feel an infant’s pride in my wastes. I drink and pee as often as possible.

That night we sleep at a Bedouin camp, which my stepmother has orchestrated along with a camel ride out of the desert. It is freezing when we sleep and when we wake up, and I cry with self-pity on my camel. The jouncing of the hump disturbs the most delicate area of my body, and the cold turns my lips to parchment.

Our camels eat twigs from the ground, making a platonic crunch with their wooden teeth and drooling green slime. They travel slowly, and when we move through the cold patches of shadow cast by the mountains, my fingers ossify and slip from the saddle. The grand necessity for our bodies is to keep warm, I remember from Walden, and I observe this again and again with every step.

A few hours later we are on the beach at Eilat, the Israeli beach town right across the border from where we left Jordan. Dance music is playing uncensored on a loudspeaker at the Zion Cafe. North African teenagers smoke cigarettes by the water and I am in a plastic chair, defrosting. The experience of intense discomfort from which we’ve all just emerged does not lend itself to writing, so I close my eyes and think that I am happy to be awake and no longer cold.

Won’tcha loosen up my buttons, babe, the music blares, and I am almost warm enough to laugh at the lyric. It is such a technical mandate. I order hot tea and a double espresso. Sitting outside I quickly sunburn and am happy to know that after the sand and wind of the desert, my skin is still tender enough to burn.

While we wait for our plane in the tiny Eilat airport, I buy a Magnum ice cream bar. It is my first meal of the day and it turns into a sojourn of taste one doesn't quickly forget. A column of pale ice cream, white chocolate shield cracking under my teeth like an ice pick on frozen water. Melting and coolness. I buy three more for the others and deliver them wordlessly. I could survive on these: one for lunch, one for dinner, one for snack, and the rest of the diet filled in with coffee and vodka.

My old history teacher, a booming fudge-colored man named Walter Turner, used to conclude every class with the same quote: It's a cold world, he'd say, quoting Redman. Better pack your own heat.

+++

If it nearly seems that I am traveling alone from all I've written about my three companions, this is almost true. Wherever we are, I go off alone. If we wait in a lobby, I read on a separate couch. If we go to a restaurant, I often sit at my own table with a book. It is the only way I know of to maintain my patience and clarity when I am with others, at least physically, at all times. They pardon it. My dad writes it off as eccentricity, my stepmom writes it off as oddness, and I have no idea whether Ida passes judgment.

I read once that Sigmund Freud took all his meals alone as a child so that he could have more time to read, and this factoid makes me feel better about the urge to be alone. My reputation in my family has hardened into that of the studious and demanding member, but I always return from my solitary periods in a good mood, so nobody attempts to change me.

We are back in Tel Aviv for a few days. I spend time walking along the beach and streets observing Israeli women. They are bolt upright, beautiful, militant even when pouring a glass of Coca-Cola. Is it because they all served that they are so efficient and purposeful? The sense is that of a replicant from Blade Runner, only the women here are not subhuman but superhuman, seemingly weathered against everything and come out unruffled. Maybe that is why everyone pegs me at fifteen, sixteen years old. I'm transparently much, much less than my peers here.

+++

"Good morning," says Ida when she hears me get up. Her voice is very quiet, determinedly quiet, and one must listen carefully in conversation to net all her words. "Good morning, Ida." She is bundled in the hotel blankets, lying as straight and slim as a Moroccan cigar. Eighty-one years old. Ida rode the camel yesterday with fewer complaints than anyone else.

Mounting a camel is a treacherous process. You sit yourself in the saddle and hold on tight while the animal rouses itself up on its knees, then rears back and lurches to standing position. Ida got into the saddle and when the beast rose up, she careened forward, destined to fall but for the 11-year old boy guarding the camel, who stuck out his palm square against her chest and knocked her back into the saddle.

Ida's expression did not change throughout (nor did the boy's), and I watched with near horror at how the crisis had been averted by a little boy's instinctive motion, unacknowledged by Ida even as she might have broken her neck in the middle of the Bedouin desert. It was this that made me begin to take the measure of her, to add to the known unknowns of her past a whole battery of unknown unknowns.

I dress and go downstairs. The morning is difficult. I have finished my book and feel as though I've been ditched by a close friend. It was Philip Roth's The Human Stain, which title I kept misreading as The Hummus Stain. My stomach is knotted with cramps, my hair greasy and the day is to be filled with visits to infirm relatives whom I do not know. Despite all the draining - of energy, blood - I feel turgid.

+++

Today we'll drive to Jerusalem after breakfast. I go to the dining room alone, as usual, but this time one of the hostesses is very nice and gives me a window seat, even though I am "table for one" and the peripheral spots are designated for groups. It is forty degrees outside, cold enough for me to wear a Russian hat to breakfast and for the paddle ball players on the beach to bundle up in coats.

One old man is actually entering the water. He wears black briefs with a saggy waistband, his mating materials weakly encased, arms dangling aside as he wades in and wades out. In an old guy this swimming seems less an act of fortitude than of stubbornness; or that is what I tell myself to redeem the fact that I would never, ever do it?

We motor to Jerusalem in a taxi that smells of tooth decay and head for the Museum of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are displayed. Dad doles out historical quizzes as we trot through the sculpture garden. Who burned the Second Temple in 70 AD? The Romans. And why? Because the Jews were disobedient.

The museum has bits of scroll and old sandals, even a bowl of ancient charred dates. There are photographs of the Bedouins who found the scrolls in 1947, and of the archaeologists who subsequently discovered more of them. Archaeologists with dark tans and expressions of scholarly appraisal.

"The Qumran sectarians believed that God had granted them knowledge of profound cosmological secrets," reads a plaque. What confidence!

+++

According to a cookbook in the gift shop, Israelis eat small bowls of fruit jelly for dessert, as though toast were too much of an impediment to bother with. I walk back to the hotel through Me'a She'arim, the Orthodox Jewish section of town. It is an interesting place to visit but not a fun place to be. There are signs posted in the streets: "Please Do Not Pass Through Our Neighborhood in Immodest Clothes", and signs posted on the doors: "Please Enter My Store in Modest Clothing."

Religious solemnity feels a lot like hostility when it means that no one will look you in the eye except to glare. The men wear black hats, the women wear black stockings, and everyone is shaped like a matzoh ball, except for the skinny and hyperactive kids.

There must be a direct relationship between piety and sugar consumption, because I have never seen so much candy. Candy in the Jewish quarter of the old city, candy in the Muslim quarter, candy in the Christian quarter. Tourists are not allowed in the Armenian quarter but there is probably candy there too. Next to the yarmulkes are bins of liquid-filled grape suckers. Beside the keffiyehs are jelly blocks of Turkish Delight. Candy shops everywhere, selling long pipes of taffy and bulging sacks of complicated sugary wheels. There are bags of glace, apricots and blocks of halvah solid enough to built a temple out of.

One of the stranger sweets I taste is a pastry called knafeh. You can find knafeh in every bakery being pulled forth from the oven on hot round trays, doused in sugar syrup and sliced into squares. There is a layer of white cheese at the bottom; it is the texture of calamari and pistachios, syrup, and a mystery grain that feels like gravel. It is a specialty of the region, and it is very good.

In Me'a She'arim Orthodox Jews stand around in head-to-toe black filling plastic sacks with pizza-shaped gummies and chocolate stars. It appears as though these pious men have outsourced every speck of color from their lives into the candy stands only to buy it all back and fill themselves up with it. Perhaps the flame of religious conviction acts as an incinerator, burning thousands upon thousands of fudgy calories.

Lauren Bacall and Graham Greene stayed at our hotel (not together), and the bar this time is identical to Rick's Cafe. It will probably be decades before I get to stay in another place like this, I think. We go to the bar and Ida orders an Old Fashioned. The rest of us have champagne, and it tastes just like honey.

At breakfast the next day there is no one but me. "Excuse me, would you like to have more coffee, maybe?" asks the waiter. Yes. His name is Jihad. Gentle Jihad with a mustache like black toothpaste squeezed across his upper lip. I imagine if my name were Jihad Young, or the English equivalent, Holy War Young.

This reminds me that I dreamt, last night, of learning to fire a gun. It was so lucid a vision that I believe I could do it, in real life, if someone handed me a weapon. When my stepmother and Ida arrive and start fussing over the buffet I can't concentrate on my newspaper.

I explore the corridors after coffee, looking at displays of Islamic pots and old photographs. I pick two apples from a bowl of fruit. I am so lucky at this moment, I think. I'm warm, not hungry, I have no cramps or headaches, my clothes are clean, and best of all there are things to look forward to.

+++

The guide who takes us through the old city is a zealous Jew named Mark Sugarman. He repeats over and over again that he remembers the Holocaust every time he sees a beautiful Jewish child. My secular dad nods. Never forget, says Mark, for the fourteenth time. We spend hours twining through the different quarters of the Old City. African churches are built in the round, I learn, so that Satan can't hide in the corner. The logic is impeccable.

Israeli soldiers are lounging around in the sun. A Jordanian king sold one of his London apartments, Mark tells us, to purchase twelve million dollars worth of gold for the roof of the Temple Mount. We go to see it and are quickly ejected; it is Muslims-only for most hours of the day. There are stands and shops everywhere selling cheap clothing and confectionary.

Just as the mixture of old and new is surprising in Jerusalem, so is the neighboring of sacred and profane. The place where Jesus stopped to rest while dragging the cross to Golgotha is three feet from a kiosk selling Kodak film. I hate the way tourists are alternately disdained and coerced.

A few times a day there is a Muslim call to prayer. The sound system is dodgy and the prerecorded incantations sound like someone burbling through a tub of syrup.

After our tour I break off alone, charging up and out of the Old City through the Damascus gate and heading back to the hotel for coffee.

I sit down and think for a while. Jerusalem has struck me architecturally and historically, but not spiritually. I wonder if growing up without religion has made me less receptive to Big Ideas. I do not understand ideologies or movements. This may be the reason why my little appetites preoccupy me more than anything else. It isn't the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I dwell upon but the graffiti on the way back: AHMAD WAS HERE, in red paint on the wall. Beneath it is a crudely-drawn weenie.

It should be the other way around, I think. But I have no ethnic or group affiliations to speak of, no cause to further and nothing really to push against. Which is nice, of course, and I'm happy. But plucked out of the usual environment, I feel a bit like Tonio Kröger. Everyone dancing and I can't hear the music.

Molly Young is the contributing editor to This Recording. Her website is Magic Molly, and you can read her past work on TR here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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In Which We Are Always Traveling

Safari

by Camille Garcia

I’m stuck in rush-hour traffic on the 110 going north. It’s stop and go, as usual; I’m one of many in the sea of brake lights inching forward along the serpentine freeway.

For a minute, the crawling mass of the glowing lights reminds me of the stream of fire ants I nearly stepped on in a Ugandan jungle while tracking chimpanzees. I was looking up in the trees, hoping to be the first to spot a chimp, forgetting that the real danger was on the ground. My boyfriend Luke yanked me by the backpack—hard. God bless him and his absurdly cat-like reflexes. When I looked down, my foot was suspended an inch above a rushing river of the tiny beasts that could have eaten homegrown ants for breakfast.

A troop of fire ants similar to what we saw in the Ugandan jungle

“Do not anger the fire ants,” our guide had warned before our expedition. Well, leave it to me to come within an inch of getting killed, or at least close enough to incite an onslaught of stinging bites and an excruciating rash. Carefully, slowly, I tiptoed over the line of ants, wiped the sweat from my brow, and pressed on toward the thick of the jungle.

Exactly one year later, I’m stuck in the middle of an urban, concrete jungle, where prowling for a parking spot is as exhausting as prowling for apes, and, where memories of last summer’s journey in Uganda and Kenya have become utterly surreal. If it weren’t for the hundreds of photos I took, and the notes I scribbled on scraps of paper, every detail of those two weeks would have already vanished from memory. But even if names are forgotten and faces are obscured by time, what will endure—in absolute purity, unfettered from the stranglehold of the ticking clock —is the acute sense of freedom and joy that supplanted my fear and nervousness almost as soon as our plane touched down in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in the early morning.

Chimp tracking in Uganda.

The sun was rising above the grassy hills, glinting off the morning dew. The land, the earth, was stunning. Somehow, someway, this city-girl was walking on East African soil.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Our first stop out of Addis Ababa was Nairobi, Kenya where we met up with the rest of our tour group led by Carrie, a free-spirited white woman—who preferred to hike barefoot—who had grown up on a farm in Zimbabwe.

After spending one night in Nairobi, our group embarked on our two-week expedition across Kenya and Uganda. We boarded a chartered bus along with local travelers carrying fruits and wares headed to Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest port-city that sits right on the banks of Lake Victoria. We arrived in the evening, eager to get to our hotel rooms and shower after an 8-hour drive. Of course, once Luke and I got to our room, there was the matter of arranging the mosquito nets and spraying everything down with Deet.

Mosquitoes, bats, and ants, oh my!

We took a nap under the netting, woken up by an unusual squeaking noise we traced to one of the air vents. My boyfriend and I stared at each other perplexed. A trapped mouse? I suggested. A squirrel? he thought. Are there squirrels in Africa? I asked. Maybe it’s a bat. We shuddered at the possibility and decided to leave our room.

On the rooftop of our hotel, we watched the sun set over Lake Victoria.

Orange cocktails and an African sunset

We wanted to drink beers, but because a Muslim family owned the hotel, they only had a type of orange-soda/cocktail for us to drink, which was delicious. The bottle is pictured. That evening, we found a restaurant four blocks from the hotel and stuffed ourselves with American fries, curries, pasta, chicken, and rice. In the mornings, we ate at the hotel’s cafe and chat with the hotel owner, while sipping on tea and nibbling on our toast and jam.

Kisumu for the most part was a peaceful city. The hum of motorbikes and mutatus, the chattering of people lingering in doorways, and children laughing while scratching pictures in the dirt were silenced only by the mosque calls at dusk.

Who would’ve imagined that in less than six months Kisumu would’ve been the epicenter of violent mobs and civil unrest following a controversial presidential election? Who would’ve imagined that this picturesque scene would be torn to shreds—the friendly and curious voices I heard that very moment—would be extinguished and silenced forever by the hands of angry dissidents?

To me, in my memory, Kisumu will always be this: a sunset over one of the world’s largest fresh-water lakes while calls to mosque sliced the air.

Going for a ride a boda boda. Conquering a ride like this—helmet-free—was my first step toward freedom.

fishermen on Lake Victoria

Two days later, we whispered goodbye to our pet bat and to Kisumu and headed back on the road for another eight-hour ride. This time, instead of traveling on a chartered bus, Carrie, our guide, arranged for mutatus to take us into neighboring Uganda—to get the true African experience, no doubt. The mini-vans were packed to maximum capacity, not only with members of our tour, but also with locals our driver insisted on picking up along the way. At one point, 18 people were packed in this mutatu.

Mutatus. I’m not sure if there’s a legal limit to the number of people who can fit into one of these.

And so there we were, Luke and I pinned to our seats, bouncing up and down the unpaved roads. With so many bodies in the van, it was crucial to have the windows down, which meant that the earth from the roads—rich with iron and blood red—would blow into our faces.

We passed through numerous towns, greeted by smiling children. Often they would shout at us and beg for our attention, and when we waved, they would jump up and down and collapse onto the ground. During one of our pit stops, we went to play with children who showed off their perfect cartwheels.

A Ugandan town

A couple of times, we spotted roaming baboons. This was the first wild animal we saw and I took about a hundred pictures of these baboons alone.

Baboons in our path

By the time we arrived in Jinja—a one-night stop on our way to Murchison Falls—our faces were caked with soil. It was everywhere: under our fingernails, in our ears, in our hair. A shower never sounded so good. I assume several of the older members of our group complained about the mutatus because for the rest of the trip, Carrie had us ride in a private bus/Winnebago.

Five showers and one night later, we proceeded northbound to Murchison Falls where we would embark on our first safari. We didn’t have an exact idea of where we would be staying, but Carrie assured us it would be the most pleasant stay yet. Several hours into the trip, we went off road, heading deeper into open fields and toward the sun.

The sun was already beginning to set, as we pulled into the gravel driveway of the Nile Safari Lodge. Carrie hadn’t done the place justice. Each traveling pair had their own cabin overlooking the Nile River, and we had arrived just in time to watch the indigo light envelope the sun.

view of the Nile River from our cabin deck

The night of our arrival, our tour group ate a luxurious dinner outdoors beneath a canopy. Afterward, we took our beers to the campfire and continued to chat while Carrie played her guitar. I was mystified by the velvet black sky, glowing with a million stars. I knew it was the same sky as in Los Angeles, but in Africa, it was unlike any sky that I had ever seen.

One by one, everyone retreated to their cabins. A family of monkeys lived in the trees surrounding our cabin. At night we laid awake, listening to them scamper on the railings of the deck, along with the croaking of frogs and the grunting of hippos below us at the riverbank. This is what life sounded like away from the cities, in the pure heart of Mother Nature.

It occurred to me then that I hadn’t checked my e-mail in days. I shrugged, and wiggled further into my sleeping bag. Two weeks in the wilderness, two weeks spent reveling in the simplicity of the earth, was the remedy I had been seeking to ten years spent on the go. I moved slower. I breathed easier. I felt that I could take my time.

Everyone was bustling with excitement the next morning as we prepared to head out on our first safari. We drove into Uganda’s national park, where we picked up one of the park’s rangers who led us on the safari.

At first, we saw nothing but the usual antelopes and gazelles. But then…

This safari beat any old trip to the zoo; especially the Los Angeles Zoo, where most of the animals are either hidden from view, behind bars, or too lethargic to move or do anything interesting.

As I watched the giraffes saunter majestically from tree to tree, I couldn’t help but hum the theme song to The Lion King. Pretty soon, we were humming “Circle of Life.”

Most of us weren’t satisfied, however. We were still waiting to witness the great wildebeest migration and track lions in the Masai Mara. And for that, we’d have to wait a few more days.

After two days on safari in Murchison Falls, we braced ourselves for city life. Destination: Kampala, Uganda’s capital where plainclothes officers carry AK-47’s like they were briefcases.

Driving into Kampala, Uganda.

Kampala is a buzzing city. There are tons of outdoor markets where people sell fresh meat and poultry, vegetables, and grains; mutatus hastily weave around each other on the roads; boda bodas speed by pedestrians without any discretion; and at night, American hip-hop (and if you’re lucky, Reggaeton) can be heard streaming outside hidden nightclubs.

Most of the people kept to themselves, save for the few we met while walking around the souvenir markets who were eager to hear about where we came from and how we liked Kampala. The best part of Kampala, we had to admit, was finding a fast food joint where Luke and I indulged in fried chicken. We ate everything we were given. Fried chicken just sounded so good by then.

We made out like bandits at the local souvenir shops, trying to pick out stuff that looked the least mass-produced. Probably made in China, someone suggested. I’d spent the entire summer in Asia, studying China’s history, politics, and economy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had found a market in Africa for souvenirs.

After Kampala, it was back to Jinja, where our tour group would go white-water rafting on the Nile River. At this announcement, I looked over at my boyfriend, my face contorted with the urge to cry.

I consider myself adventurous up to a certain point: I like to keep my feet on stable ground. Where was my say? I’d sooner go horseback riding, or visit an orphanage. Luke reassured me that we’d be going on the Level 3 rapids. Then he kissed my forehead. I reluctantly agreed.

On the day of the big excursion, not only did I find out that we’d be rafting along 26km of the Nile River, but that we weren’t talking about Level 3 baby waves. Somehow, I got sucked into the Level 5 group—one step below Level 6, which only kayaks can maneuver. My boyfriend knew this all along. I didn’t talk to him for about twenty minutes until our rafting guides played a video for us. The pounding water, the soundtrack of heavy metal, the whole badass-ness of it all got me pumped. My heart was racing with anticipation. Flipping over was not a question. I wanted to flip over into the roaring waves.

“If I die, you can have my iPod, honey.”

Twelve rapids (including one waterfall), five flips, one near-death experience, one excruciating sunburn, and 26km later, I was back on solid land and already making plans to go again and try skydiving when I got back home.

The seven of us couldn’t stay still. To celebrate our safe return, we drank more than enough beers to ease our sore muscles while being jostled about in the bed of a truck. We headed back to the launch site where other tourists were hanging out, eating dinner, and waiting for nightfall. When the DJ blasted “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, we couldn’t help but dance and sing our hearts out.

We had already spent a week and a half in Africa at this point, and our trip was winding down. The day after we conquered the Nile River, our group headed back to Kenya for our final safari.

Yes, we followed those arrows right upstairs into a room that looked like it belong in Aladdin’s palace.

We spent 11 hours on the road this time, spending one night in Narok. Luckily, rooms were available right above this butchery. Meat hooks and beef hanging in the windows, the stench of blood, and flies is all I have to say about Narok.

Finally, we made it to the border of the Masai Mara where we spotted Masai warriors on patrol along with children herding cows.

Our camping site was a ways in. Naturally, baboon and wild boar loitered around our tents. We unloaded our gear before catching a ride in the safari vehicles to track lions. This safari was unlike our first safari…

I felt my own insignificance beneath this sky. I felt an air of purity. I let my fingers sink into the soft, undefiled earth.

We found our lions. This one is resting on a full stomach of wildebeest, the remains of which we spotted a few feet away.

Graceful and proud.

It takes extreme experiences to reawaken our wonder of this place we call Earth, and it’s important that we don’t lose that sense of intrigue. Without it we cease to be human.

We met with the Masai warriors the following day. The chief’s son, a boy of about 17 years, explained their customs and showed us around his village. This would be our last day in the Masai Mara before we headed back to Nairobi for our last night in Africa. We made sure to buy those colorful blankets before we left.

Exactly one year later, I am here now, stuck in traffic. Africa seems like such a faraway place now.

It’s difficult to fight the city and the way it sucks you into its cold grasp. I’ve resumed my daily rituals and bad habits: checking email every minute or two, browsing Facebook, making plans, spending too much time tethered to my computer desk, and driving—confined in my capsule—to and fro, back and forth, here and there.

I adjust my rearview mirror, the cluster of skyscrapers come into view. There isn’t a hint of mystery to enthrall me, only the superficial beauty of the iconic Los Angeles skyline, shimmering in the orange glow of the setting sun. It sparkles. It dazzles. The phone rings. Cars honk. Hip-hop thumps out of rolled down car windows. The memory of Africa fades for the time being.

But if I can help it, I try to retain that sense of freedom, balance, and peace I experienced for two weeks in Africa. I roll down all the windows, open the sunroof, blast my music as loud as I can stand, and sing until all the city noise fades away and there’s only me—a speck beneath the sky, heading home.

Camille Garcia is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. Camille is a writer living in Los Angeles. She spends her free time reading travel magazines and discussing choices for their next destination with Luke.

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In Which It Begins And Ends With The Fish

Tsukiji

by Brian DeLeeuw

The tuna auctions at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market start around 5:30AM, but the market’s already been active for hours. The bluefin carcasses are displayed on raised pallets, six or seven to a pallet, about thirty pallets lined up across the frigid hall’s concrete floor. And these are inarguably carcasses, dead animals not yet refigured as food, their bellies slit, their tails chopped off and stuffed into their open mouths. Licensed buyers stroll through the rows in the hour before the auction starts, prying open the bellies with long-shafted hooks and peering inside with industrial flashlights. An especially thorough buyer swabs at a severed tail with his forefinger and samples the goods, chewing thoughtfully, and then, just as at the NYSE or any other heavyweight site of exchange, the opening bell rings and it begins.

Auctioneers lead their customers from fish to fish, business conducted through rapid-fire yelling and coded hand-signals, the buyer’s ID slapped up on each tuna’s flank with blood-red ink.

Workers cart purchases out to the labyrinthine city of stalls sprawling beyond the auction hall, where – amongst sea slugs, tiger prawns, giant scallops, fugu (blowfish), and hundreds of other species – they will be dismantled with three-foot long magurobocho knives or, for the frozen torsos, massive band saws.

The tuna have arrived from as close as Hokkaido and as far as Boston; they could be headed to a sushi bar on the other side of the parking lot or back across two oceans to New York City. Over fifty tons of tuna have changed hands. The whole process takes less than half an hour.

There is no one way of looking at Tsukiji; even familiar binaries – tradition vs. modernization, overt chaos vs. hidden order, the local vs. the global, the grotesque vs. the beautiful – oversimplify despite their modicum of truth.

Also a simplification, but one I will stand by, is that Tsukiji is a triumph of the visceral and the immediate over the denatured and the vague. Its panoply of sea creatures – circling in fish tanks, flopping in sawdust, or diced and filleted on steel platters – annihilate our often abstracted relationship to what we eat.

The original meaning of the word “market” – an actual physical place for the exchange of goods, rather than a vast and nebulous system of pricing – declares itself in every puddle of brine, every mouthful of diesel fuel and secondhand smoke.

But before we go any further, the facts. (All statistics taken from Theodore C. Bestor’s excellent Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (University of California Press, 2004).) About $19.4 million worth of seafood is traded here every day, adding up to a yearly total that’s usually around $5 billion.

Each working day sees well over two million kilograms (almost five million pounds) of goods change hands – that’s roughly 600 kilograms per year. This is more than seven times the volume and five times the value of trade at New York’s Fulton Fish Market, the world’s second largest seafood market. (At least in the one year in recent times – 1996 – that Fulton’s normally closed books were opened, due to Mob-related federal racketeering charges.)

Seven large auction houses employing approximately 700 auctioneers sell 450 “major” species and varieties of seafood – over 2,000 if you count sub-varieties – to about 900 licensed wholesalers and 375 authorized traders.

The traders buy in bulk for outside customers like restaurant chains and supermarkets, while the wholesalers operate 1,667 stalls lined up cheek-to-jowl along narrow, manically-trafficked alleys, selling on the spot to sushi chefs, restaurateurs, fishmongers, and assorted other regulars.

The market occupies over two-million square feet of mostly landfill (Tsukiji literally means “built land”) on the banks of the Sumida River in central Tokyo. About 50,000 people come to the market six mornings a week, and nobody there cares if you are number 50,001.

The basic indifference to your presence as an interloper feels both polite and remarkable. The obvious reason is that people are too busy to be either solicitous or hostile; there is much to do and very little time in which to do it. I was only spoken to when a workman accidentally knocked a twenty-foot tower of thankfully empty Styrofoam containers onto my head.

He gave a brief bark of a laugh, then said something probably along the lines of “That’s not a good place to stand.” But there is no good place to stand because everywhere, no matter how narrow the passageway or remote the corner, is fair game for the “turrets,” three-wheeled motorized carts with a vertical, cylindrical steering column (hence the name) at which drivers stand, squinting through cigarette smoke as they execute NASCAR-caliber maneuvers in the clotted cobblestone alleys.

The clearances between carts and stalls, carts and pedestrians, and, especially, carts and other carts are rarely more than a few inches. The visitor’s primary responsibility is to eschew unpredictable swerves and pauses; travel straight lines or just stand stock-still as the turrets zip pass, and you’ll be fine.

What you’ll survive to see among Tsukiji’s 1,667 stalls is the mind of an ichthyologist (or malacologist – look it up, I had to) turned inside out, flaunting its wild knowledge to the world. Clutches of boiled octopi float in bins like red, angry brains in formaldehyde. Dried squids are stacked like dirty laundry. Sardines shimmer in tightly-packed cartons, and lobsters squirm around in sawdust like toddlers in a sandpit. At one of the countless eel stalls, a wholesaler slaps each writhing specimen onto the cutting board, impales it through the eye with a hook, and deposits it into a bin to rest with its brethren in a soup of their own blood.

But the most impressive sight must be the slicing up of the bluefin tuna fresh from auction. The wholesalers wielding their magurobocho – knives in name only, these look more like samurai swords – are highly trained, and how could they not be? One false cut could ruin the fish, and this is expensive shit, sometimes reaching up to $52 per pound for a particularly excellent bluefin. The knives glide through the thick flesh as though it were tofu, and in a few strokes dead fish are transformed into slabs and strips of ruby-red food, priced and displayed under glass like precious jewels.

It’s a brutal scene, but the careful ritual of this transformation from animal to food complicates any ethically-minded vegetarian crusade, a cause for which the mantras of disrespect for animals and environmental degradation are often invoked. It is easy to say we are behaving callously, perhaps even immorally, towards chickens forced to live out their short lives in cramped cages full of their own shit or dolphins drowned for having the nerve to get caught up in albacore tuna nets.

(Although any Japanese whaler would argue that the moral difference between the West’s aggressively anthropomorphic dolphin and our dull lump of a tuna is largely a culturally constructed one.)

It is less easy to accuse a free-range pig farmer or a devoted elk hunter of animal abuse or ignorance, and it is less easy still to direct these charges at Tsukiji’s tuna wholesalers, who describe the very act of cutting the flesh as maguro no kaiwa (“the conversation of the tuna”), or at the auction buyers, who can assess a bluefin’s health and much of its history with a few glances and gentle palpations.

In short, no one loves fish more than a fisherman. One reason for this is the daily intimacy that leads, in most cases, not to contempt but to appreciation. Another reason, of course, is that everyone in the business depends upon the continuing sustainability of seafood for their livelihoods, which is the impetus for a kind of pragmatic environmentalism.

Two years ago, while doing research for a magazine article, I interviewed the head chefs of a few of Manhattan’s priciest seafood-centric restaurants. (No one fetishizes fish more than a French chef.) The ostensible purpose of the interviews was to identify the factors that produce the “trendy” fish of a given moment – the Chilean sea bass of the 90s or the miso-glazed black cod of the early 2000s – but all they wanted to talk about was preservation and responsible fishing. Most thought mandated fishing bans were often too little, too late, and instead they opted to self-police.

As one put it, we can have unlimited red snapper now and none at all very soon, or we can fish it responsibly now and eat it sparingly forever.

To argue that all fishermen or restaurateurs are as committed to the long-term good would be naïve, but here at Tsukiji a recognition of at least the karmic cost of fishing is evident in the six stone monuments at the Nami-yoke Shrine, just outside the marketplace’s Kaiko Bridge entrance. These monuments honor the sacrifice of fish in the service of human cuisine. (Well, five do; the last is for the eggs that are also used in some sushi preparations).

As Bestor writes of the memorials in his authoritative study of the market: “People in the seafood trade know full well that fish die so that humans may eat, and Japanese Buddhism and folk belief not only posit a consequence of this (that the innocent dead may harm the living) but also provide a means to atone and avoid retribution.”

It’s doubtful that a carved slab of stone and a pragmatic – some would say selfish – interest in seafood sustainability is enough for the hard-line vegetarian or environmentalist. But such gestures at least indicate an awareness of the source and, for lack of a less squishy term, spirit of our food, something citizens of the post-industrial world often lack.

I, however, am not one of those hard-line vegetarians, and so it would have been madness to have left Tsukiji without sampling the product of all this complicated interplay between cultural traditions, economic imperatives, and environmental concerns.

In other words, I wanted to eat sushi for breakfast. This wasn’t a problem: a narrow street on the far side of an endless, buzzing parking lot houses at least half a dozen tiny sushi bars, all already packed and some with two-hour waits at 7:30 a.m.

It was also Saturday, which meant that many of the patrons were young and either still drunk or newly hungover, here direct from the glitzy nightspots of the neighboring Ginza district. The bitter February cold quickly drove me and my girlfriend into one of the less trafficked establishments offering only a fifteen minute wait for seats at the ten-person bar.

Freezing and shipping technologies have discredited the seafood maxim that freshness requires proximity to the catch, as the globalized selection at Tsukiji itself demonstrates. However, doing your daily sushi business in the market’s shadow does ensure quality connections, as well as the necessity of pleasing a demanding clientele.

Our breakfast proved it: the omakase of toro (tuna belly), tuna, salmon, octopus, squid, tamago (sweet egg omelet), sweet shrimp, “normal” shrimp, salmon roe, scallop, mackerel, and an unidentifiable white fish that sounded like hake but wasn’t, all washed down with miso soup and green tea, was truly excellent and, at ¥2,800, less than half of what it would cost in New York.

Authenticity is a concept almost always invoked by an outsider, an inauthentic person. So for me to expound upon the virtues of eating sushi at the world’s biggest fish market surrounded by happy drunks, sushi snobs, and Korean tourists, with those crazy turret carts whizzing by and the early-morning sun shining through the window, and to frame the event as some sort of authentic echt-Japanese experience: this would be naïve, probably a bit patronizing, and definitely the sentiments of a typical golly-gee gaijin. Well, fuck it. The market was singular and astonishing. The sushi breakfast was delicious. I loved every minute of that morning, and, like any good tourist, I have the digital photos to prove it.

Brian DeLeeuw is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his previous work here, here, here, here, and here. He writes frequently on travel and food for CITY magazine. His writing has also appeared in New York, Tin House, and New York Press. His novel In This Way I Was Saved is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in the spring of next year.

All original photography by Brian DeLeeuw and Alex Cooley.

YOUR FISH MARKET SOUNDTRACK

"Mer Du Japon (Teenagers remix)" - Air (mp3)

"Fisherman" - The Congos (mp3)

"Girl and the Sea (Cut Copy remix)" - The Presets (mp3)

"Girl and the Sea" - The Presets (mp3)

"Please" - Ikonika (mp3)

"Life's a Beach! (Todd Terje remix)" - Studio (mp3)

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We're in business. It's a business.

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In Which Stalin Is The Biggest Goy We Can Think Of

Some Out of The Way Corner of the Universe

by Alex Carnevale

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Times standards editor (you wouldn't even know they had one) wrote an e-mail to Times staffers requesting reporters not display the paraphernalia of any candidate in this November's election.

Since we cannot imagine any reason a conservative would work at the only newspaper more liberal than the Daily Worker, they meant Obama stickers.

Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous.

Instead of correcting the serious problem of total homogenity in their newsroom, they just fire more Dems and hire more Dems. "The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon," Stalin once said.

By keeping their affiliations private, reporters bring shameful cowardice to the fore instead of honesty and openness. The public should have the choice, not the paper.

For one of the most important newspapers in the world - a paper whose correction rate is slightly lower than Mad magazine - there is the shining monument to their newspeak: Pravda. The Times admires, wishes to be Pravda. It served the cause well, and that is the best that can be said about it. Howell Raines' description of the institution he led makes it sound even more repressive than Pravda in its heyday. (He fought for more Britney, if you were wondering.)

We should only wish the editors of the Times were as free-thinking as the editors of Pravda when Joseph Stalin led the editorial board.

On some topics in Wikipedia, our most important cultural newspaper, evil but powerful figures are given the sheen of achievement because of their place on the grand stage. The contribution to the Josef Stalin entry has the unknowing Times-ian polish - a glowing sense of admiration for the Georgian-born dictator comes through loud and clear.

Like Hitler, Stalin was a failed artist. The worst kind: a poet.

When I am gone, the capitalists will drown you like blind kittens.

The beauty of the democratic system is that is prizes popularity over deviousness. The Soviet system was like high school - the same basic message as a workshop from Mystery - he who was most charming and evil won the day.

The ascension of Lenin, the dictatorship of Stalin, the Second World War. He assembled a nation that would consume its people.

But what a life! Banging thirteen year olds, killing his wife. Killing millions of wives. He stole a nation; and he stole other nations. He coddled Germany, then promoted a patriotic war against it. This is what is so admiring in his wikipedia profile - the balls on this goy!

A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.

Our contemporary Stalinism exists in those who would willingly concede a right. Why must we contribute our earnings to the government, the Politburo, to Robin Hood? Stalin was unemployed. Constantly exiled. He was the benefactor of thousands giving up the right of what to do with the money they earn.

What shall we do? We shall envy!

When we play God, and appeal to a sense of cosmic justice, we abdicate the only responsibility a government has - to make its citizens free, not to make some freerer than others.

stalin's first wife

If the Soviet Union didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls hard for cash money here.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

ENJOY STALIN'S FAV

shostakovich and stalin

We think that powerful and lifeful movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery.

"Eyes Wide Shut" - Dmitri Shostakovich (mp3)

STAMP OUT THE REVOLUTION BEFORE IT STARTS

"Time To Send Someone Away" - Jose Gonzalez (mp3)

"Teardrop" - Jose Gonzalez (mp3)

"Cycling Trivialities" - Jose Gonzalez (mp3)

"How Low" - Jose Gonzalez (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Molly’s a mindfreak.

Why we are the way that we are.

Frank O’Hara was the man.

Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.

In Which Georgia Puts A Prayer In The Wailing Wall

This is our first entry in our series on parents. You can find the second entry here.

Look How Happy They Were

by GEORGIA HARDSTARK

For the first few years of my parents' marriage, from about 1970 until 1975, they lived in a small one-bedroom apartment off San Vicente Blvd. behind Pioneer Chicken, in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. My mother had grown up in a duplex a stones' throw from their new apartment, and my parents had met while attending Fairfax High, a mere five minutes drive. In case you were wondering, that Pioneer Chicken on Olympic Blvd. has been a Pioneer Chicken forever...at least for as long as my mother can remember.

When they were both 29 years old, they decided to move to Israel. I'm sure it was more than just deciding to up and move to Israel - but from my perspective, and from the stories I've heard since I was a small child, that's how I always envisioned it.

As it turns out, my father wanted to make an Aliyah, which is basically a return to the 'promised land'...a sort of pilgrimage.

As for my mother, when I asked her why she went, she shrugged and said "I wanted an adventure...and I believed in your father's dream." Did I detect a hint of bitterness in her voice? It's hard to say. While we were flipping through the photo albums last night, trying to find a few good pictures for this story, she was nothing but thoughtful sighs and "look at how happy we were"s.

From their home in Los Angeles, where both their families lived, where they had jobs and friends and lives and history, they moved to the Negev desert and onto a moshav (a cooperative agricultural community) called Sde Nitzan. There, they had a house, as well as their own glasshouse for growing tomatoes, which were combined with those grown by the other community members and sold in the city.

After two years of living in Israel, and a year and a half of trying but failing to get pregnant with their first child, my parents took two steps to increase their chances of reproducing.

The first logical thing was to go to a doctor that came highly recommended by a neighbor on the moshav. The doctor was an Australian woman practicing in Beersheba, and she prescribed them a series of “exercises” aimed at increasing fertility.

As their child, I am forced to conclude that those exercises weren’t anything other than push-ups and some light weight lifting, and not any kind of “exercises” that constituted being naked with each other…shudder.

In the three months between being prescribed these exercises, and becoming pregnant with my brother, my parents made an Aliyah to Jerusalem for Passover.

During the long drive, my mother tells me, my parents spotted a lone stork while driving through the desert. Once in Jerusalem, my father put a prayer in the Wailing Wall (a traditional practice among Jews who visit) asking God for a child.

Enter my brother, Asher (which means “blessing” in Hebrew).

We sat together in her living room last night, looking through old photo albums and periodically peeling a photograph from the pages with the intention of scanning it into the computer later. I had my shoes off with my legs tucked underneath me, and I would occasionally scribble furiously in my notebook when she answered a question that popped into my head. She absentmindedly flipped through an old album whose pictures were yellowing and stuck to the pages with glue that was older than I am.

I asked her if she thought moving to Israel had made her and my father closer. Having been divorced from my father since I was five years old, after 15 years of marriage, I don’t know how I expected her to answer.

Was that question asked by my five year old self, who still hoped her parents would realize how silly they were being, and get back together?

Or was it asked by the somewhat jaded girl I’ve become, who had returned from her own failed pilgrimage (albeit to a much less intimidating location than Israel) only a year before, and now knew that moving somewhere isolated with the man you love is more apt to put strain on the relationship than it is to bring you closer.

She was quiet for a long time. At first I thought she was contemplating the question. She’s always been the type of person to think before she speaks, but enough time had elapsed that I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me, and I was about to ask again when she let out one of her familiar sighs.

Having inherited this trait from her, I knew that she had just conjured up, from the very depths of her psyche, all that she felt those 30 years ago, and was now audibly releasing it before answering my question.

"There were angry moments…and there were especially endearing moments." She was crying just a little.

Her parents came to visit after Asher was born. My mother was the baby of the family, the youngest daughter out of four, and important enough that, although terrified, my grandparents took their first transatlantic flight to meet their new grandchild…the first time either had been overseas since escaping Eastern Europe as children.

What my mother couldn’t know was that this would be the last time she would see her father…my grandfather, the man I’m named after.

A little over two years after moving to living in Israel, my parents decided to go home. According to my mom, they preferred the 'American way of life', and that’s what they wanted to provide to their new son. My mother also missed her family, and after my grandparents' visit, she saw the benefits of having them close by.

So with a seven month old baby in tow, my parents took a 4 day ride on a Greek ferry from Haifa through the Mediterranean, ending in Venice.

From there they drove through Italy, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and finally flew to New York out of Belgium.

They stayed with one of my mother’s older sisters (my aunt Heb) in New York. When I was little, my mom told me that late one night, while getting into bed in the guest room of my aunt’s house, my mother heard her father yell out her name. She demonstrated how he sounded, and it gave me chills. This was impossible, of course, as my grandfather was at home in Los Angeles, but she ran to the window anyway and looked onto the street for him. She shrugged it off as her imagination, and went to bed.

My grandpa George died that night in Los Angeles. They returned to Los Angeles for good after that.

Georgia Hardstark is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find more of her accomplished musings at The State That I Am In. She also tumbls here.