mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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“Quoting Ferdowsi, the epic poet, he said, “If there is no Iran, let me be not.” Poets are the refuge of every wounded nation — just ask the Poles — and nowhere more so than here in this hour.”

Roger Cohen, whose column from Tehran is very moving. My father sent it to me, noting Cohen’s comment that he had previously “argued that, although repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by regional standards. I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.”

It is well to remember when contemplating the stability, prosperity, and cultural opening of authoritarian states like China that the arbitrary and ultimate power of the government means just that: we err if we relativize their freedom, as their freedom is contingent, illusory, unreliable. If threatened, such governments will do whatever they must to control their own people.

Cohen continues:

“Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his back. “They beat me like a pig,” he said, breathless. “They beat me as I tried to help a woman in tears. I don’t care about the physical pain. It’s the pain in my heart that hurts.”
He looked at me and the rage in his eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.

The column is worth reading, particularly for its scale and concerns: in the midst of it are individual, powerless people; in the face of it, journalism and poetry are at once essential and irrelevant. Power decimates their value, but crushed by power they are all we have left.

Tags: poetry politics art literature
I am extremely pleased to announce that the long-awaited D. Mills Baker International Lawn Refuge has finally been completed and was dedicated today in a very moving ceremony attended by dignitaries from across Ills Manor. Originally conceived as a place where citizens of Gaia could witness beautiful, undisturbed, uncut, natural lawn, replete with all the fauna and flora that live there, the project -modestly named after one half of the heteroduplex pair who rule Ills Manor and its environs- took on additional urgency when I learned recently that there are some who do not even have lawns. In a moving letter, the always-wonderful Little Potato lamented that all she has to compensate her for her lack of lawn in the poor district of the United States where she lives, a barrio called “California,” are trifling trees too old to be in style and the occasional small lake. Moved, I decided to rush the project ahead and finalized the barriers protecting the region from the surrounding land, which continues to be logged and mined to the benefit of Ills Manor’s many citizens. It is now open to visitors from around the world, and admission is completely free. You’re welcome, Earth.

I am extremely pleased to announce that the long-awaited D. Mills Baker International Lawn Refuge has finally been completed and was dedicated today in a very moving ceremony attended by dignitaries from across Ills Manor.

Originally conceived as a place where citizens of Gaia could witness beautiful, undisturbed, uncut, natural lawn, replete with all the fauna and flora that live there, the project -modestly named after one half of the heteroduplex pair who rule Ills Manor and its environs- took on additional urgency when I learned recently that there are some who do not even have lawns.

In a moving letter, the always-wonderful Little Potato lamented that all she has to compensate her for her lack of lawn in the poor district of the United States where she lives, a barrio called “California,” are trifling trees too old to be in style and the occasional small lake.

Moved, I decided to rush the project ahead and finalized the barriers protecting the region from the surrounding land, which continues to be logged and mined to the benefit of Ills Manor’s many citizens. It is now open to visitors from around the world, and admission is completely free.

You’re welcome, Earth.

Tags: project abby lawn
“We could tolerate their odd sexual behavior, but they were also sentimental and cruel -or rather sentimental, therefore cruel. One goes with the other. They are mainly interested in self-esteem… They do not know themselves or what to do with themselves.”

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, in which he proposes a thought experiment involving aliens interacting with humans from which the above comes: an alien’s description of human consciousness.

I adore Lost in the Cosmos, but what struck me about this passage was that it echoes something Hemingway wrote in a Nick Adams short story called “Fathers and Sons,” which I posted some time ago:

“…he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused.”

This consensus association of sentimentality and cruelty is precisely the sort of insight for which one must rely on literature, and it reminds me of many in my life, and indeed of myself, and I wonder: why should this be so? What determines this connection? Of what coin are sentimentality and cruelty the two sides? Excessive regard for the feelings of the self? Is it that both reflect the abandonment of social protocols in favor of the freely-expressed emotions of the petulant, volatile inner self, now fawning and now frothing, now extolling and now excoriating, now sweet and now savage?

Our society tends towards easy sentimentality; does it also tend towards emotional cruelty?

Tags: walker percy psychology literature ernest hemingway

Overtone singing.

Mongolians at a bar in Beijing perform overtone singing, in which one person sings two notes simultaneously; I remember hearing it done by monks visiting my elementary school years ago. It’s almost trance-inducing, and for reasons I can’t explain the song above -better in person, of course- caused me to tear up.

Regarding this form of singing among the Tuvans: “[It] seems to have arisen as a result of geographic location and culture. The open landscape of Tuva allows for the sounds to carry a great distance. Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing in these areas mark khoomei as an integral part in the ancient pastoral animism that is still practiced today.”

Isn’t it beautiful to imagine “the open landscape” allowing such sounds to “carry a great distance,” part of an “ancient pastoral animism”?

On the same day as our experience in Tiananmen, where Mao is insultingly preserved like some pharaoh buried with his slaves, we watched a teen at Mao nightclub plugged into a Marshall stack tuning as he glanced at the parodic, iconographic reduction of that dictator’s hair -as though Hitler’s mustache were used to market cola. Such recontextualization is powerful to see in a land where the dictator’s portrait still hangs, the reclamation of his name and image a proof of the inevitability of change.

On the same day as our experience in Tiananmen, where Mao is insultingly preserved like some pharaoh buried with his slaves, we watched a teen at Mao nightclub plugged into a Marshall stack tuning as he glanced at the parodic, iconographic reduction of that dictator’s hair -as though Hitler’s mustache were used to market cola. Such recontextualization is powerful to see in a land where the dictator’s portrait still hangs, the reclamation of his name and image a proof of the inevitability of change.

“The roar of traffic… Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights. For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.”

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. There is a life that we have been destroying: the slowness of the past, the monuments and movements of which seem to have taken an incomprehensible amount of time to unfold, is ontologically unintelligible to us; scale of sufficient magnitude begins to be a difference not of degree but of kind.

We are a life being destroyed: already the teenagers stacked on motorbikes in Beijing, texting as they weave through traffic while chatting and listening to music, cannot understand how it takes us so long to say anything or why we should want a bit of quiet while writing out our over-long notes, some more than 140 characters, to one another.

Tags: wg sebald literature history
This gratuitous photo of me and Adam, taken by Jack July during a three-hour train ride from Shijiazhuang to Beijing for which we had no seats, documents one of the happier times in my life -seriously, this is the best way to ride a train- and therefore was preferable to this one, which merely confirms that I resumed smoking when we landed in China and didn’t stop until we left. (And yes, Elle: I am shoeless). The enormous, mostly mediocre photoset from China is now up; many of the shots are likely only interesting to the people who were there. It can be hard for me to take decent shots in a place I don’t know, and this time, overwhelmed and overjoyed most of the time, I didn’t work too diligently at it. What a wonderful place it was. (GPOYW).

This gratuitous photo of me and Adam, taken by Jack July during a three-hour train ride from Shijiazhuang to Beijing for which we had no seats, documents one of the happier times in my life -seriously, this is the best way to ride a train- and therefore was preferable to this one, which merely confirms that I resumed smoking when we landed in China and didn’t stop until we left. (And yes, Elle: I am shoeless).

The enormous, mostly mediocre photoset from China is now up; many of the shots are likely only interesting to the people who were there. It can be hard for me to take decent shots in a place I don’t know, and this time, overwhelmed and overjoyed most of the time, I didn’t work too diligently at it.

What a wonderful place it was.

(GPOYW).

Tags: gpoyw
A Preponderance of Umbrellas: the Limits of Control in Tiananmen. On June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen, we made our way through heavy security, bag searches, and questions about whether we were journalists to see the square. Around it, along each side, are arranged the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party, the National Museum of China, the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, and the Forbidden City, on whose walls Mao’s portrait -his gaze open, vacuous- hangs between words exhorting the “people of the world,” meaning only the right sort of people, to unite. The weather was dark, and -as happens in countries whose governments operate in secrecy and with impunity- everyone seemed sure that some conspiracy was afoot; a Marine guard at the American Embassy echoed the common belief that the government seeded clouds to control the rain. But their meteorological efforts, whatever they are, have no effect on the flowers, poisoned by pollution, which even in this epicenter of propaganda are as dead as 1989’s dissidents. The highway in which the famous, anonymous man endeavored to appeal to the humanity of the soldiers driving their tanks over their fellow citizens was arresting to see, but most notable was the strange preponderance of umbrellas: the undercover police presence in the square was matched only by the number of uniformed officers and guards; in total, they outnumbered ordinary citizens by a wide margin. The undercover officers, tall young men barely disguising their purpose, all spoke into their umbrellas periodically and never opened them, even in the short shower: whether they were batons or radios or both is hard to say. The atmosphere was incredible: tense, expectant, electric, paranoid. It was also sad. Many in the West believe that democracy is a meaningless abstraction, that freedoms of association and the press are made irrelevant by market forces, that our values are sham narratives which serve to support insidious forms of class power. Such absurdities seem worse than silly when in a place where so many died hoping for the rights we mock as inconsequential. The students were not dissimilar from those of the White Rose, although they were probably more surprised by their own martyrdom since many in the Party supported them. Officially, China maintains that few were killed and that the demonstrations had to be quashed to maintain civil order; that crushing demonstrations is a violation of civil order does not occur to them. The presence of all those armed and disguised enforcers of state policy in that peaceful square show how little they still understand, despite their opening, about what real civil order is. I have no doubt that time will teach them, and when it does the students of Tiananmen will be celebrated as “People’s Heroes” like those in the official monuments now wreathed in Party red. That is how time works, in China as elsewhere. (Update: thanks to Sazerac for the link explaining the umbrellas).

A Preponderance of Umbrellas: the Limits of Control in Tiananmen.

On June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen, we made our way through heavy security, bag searches, and questions about whether we were journalists to see the square. Around it, along each side, are arranged the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party, the National Museum of China, the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, and the Forbidden City, on whose walls Mao’s portrait -his gaze open, vacuous- hangs between words exhorting the “people of the world,” meaning only the right sort of people, to unite.

The weather was dark, and -as happens in countries whose governments operate in secrecy and with impunity- everyone seemed sure that some conspiracy was afoot; a Marine guard at the American Embassy echoed the common belief that the government seeded clouds to control the rain. But their meteorological efforts, whatever they are, have no effect on the flowers, poisoned by pollution, which even in this epicenter of propaganda are as dead as 1989’s dissidents.

The highway in which the famous, anonymous man endeavored to appeal to the humanity of the soldiers driving their tanks over their fellow citizens was arresting to see, but most notable was the strange preponderance of umbrellas: the undercover police presence in the square was matched only by the number of uniformed officers and guards; in total, they outnumbered ordinary citizens by a wide margin. The undercover officers, tall young men barely disguising their purpose, all spoke into their umbrellas periodically and never opened them, even in the short shower: whether they were batons or radios or both is hard to say.

The atmosphere was incredible: tense, expectant, electric, paranoid. It was also sad. Many in the West believe that democracy is a meaningless abstraction, that freedoms of association and the press are made irrelevant by market forces, that our values are sham narratives which serve to support insidious forms of class power. Such absurdities seem worse than silly when in a place where so many died hoping for the rights we mock as inconsequential.

The students were not dissimilar from those of the White Rose, although they were probably more surprised by their own martyrdom since many in the Party supported them. Officially, China maintains that few were killed and that the demonstrations had to be quashed to maintain civil order; that crushing demonstrations is a violation of civil order does not occur to them. The presence of all those armed and disguised enforcers of state policy in that peaceful square show how little they still understand, despite their opening, about what real civil order is.

I have no doubt that time will teach them, and when it does the students of Tiananmen will be celebrated as “People’s Heroes” like those in the official monuments now wreathed in Party red. That is how time works, in China as elsewhere.

(Update: thanks to Sazerac for the link explaining the umbrellas).

Chuar in Beijing; Yumwatch asked that I post about the food in China, and I will -including my experience eating dog. Beijing has thousands of nooks like the one above, tiny, dirty rooms in which the most delicious food is prepared at all hours while people congregate on the sidewalk nearby.

Chuar in Beijing; Yumwatch asked that I post about the food in China, and I will -including my experience eating dog. Beijing has thousands of nooks like the one above, tiny, dirty rooms in which the most delicious food is prepared at all hours while people congregate on the sidewalk nearby.

China

Returning to the US from China feels like returning to sleep after waking from a dream, the mild consolation of normalcy dwarfed by the depressed sense one has that the dream, in its fecundity and dynamism, was preferable to the nullity into which one is descending. It is easy to say this, of course, as a Westerner, for whom the extraordinary adventure of life in China is a dream easily woken from; for those whose lives unfold under the arbitrariness of bureaucratic authoritarianism and in a nation that features incredible destitution in its very capital, it is something other than delighted dynamism, something far closer to a fight.

But it so happens that we were Westerners and that periods of change are more interesting to us than the draining stases from which we departed. Marx’s well-researched descriptive ideas have merit: there are phases of “world historical development” and there are vicissitudes to life under emerging capitalism which seem unavoidable, reflective of its “internal contradictions”; that his ideas about how to address this problem proved a revolting farce demonstrates how much easier observation is than direction, how much simpler history is than politics. Life in Beijing seemed at times like nothing so much as London during the Industrial Revolution, while our trip to Tiananmen Square on the anniversary of the massacre reminded us that the “class struggle” has been little more than an excuse for a different elite to make war on civil society.

We did the tourist things, of course, but seldom and quickly: Jack July was too good a guide to waste time on relics reconstructed after whatever paroxysm of revolution, ordinary or cultural. Instead, we spent most of our time walking the city, meeting locals whose friendliness and amusement was welcome, accompanying expats on ‘wanders’ of the hutongs, eating and drinking endlessly, and witnessing such a variety of sights, smells, and sounds that it felt as though many days were compressed into each 24-hour period.

Always, though, there was a peculiar mode of social existence: in several places we went the locals had not seen Westerners, and stares were ubiquitous, sometimes accompanied by greetings and on one occasion a hug and kiss on the cheek. But though we were always focal points of attention, I speak no Chinese and most Chinese speak no English, not even enough to tell it apart from Russian, so that I had a kind of anonymity of identity: although we were hyper-visible physically, my personality and self were not at all scrutinized. The feeling of being invisible yet not ignored was intoxicating.

Insofar as we travel both to encounter otherness and newness and to leave ourselves behind, it was an ideal state: selfless without feeling lonely, without attributes yet without feeling dull, I was able to wander as an eager, disembodied eye. What I saw was a dense and entrancing as any dream, and I hope to see far more of it soon enough.

Going to China

Jack, Will, and I will be in China for a while. I hope that whatever I return with is interesting for you. Please note that I will be out of touch rather completely while gone, although inquiries may be made at the United States’ embassy in Beijing.

If anything occurs of particular interest or you have something you think I’d do well to see and worry that in the avalanche of material to work though on my return it may be lost to me -a deprivation I can scarcely afford!- please let me know in a comment below. I would love to return to many such notices.

Last, there may be opportunities for mobile image uploads to Photophobia; if I can, I’ll post anything worthwhile.

“Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing left behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace we gain possession of the thing; in the aura it takes possession of us.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [M16a,4] in the section called The Flaneur, quoted by my friend E. at his new tumblelog: Corner Lot. There are perhaps ten posts on his front page alone that approach the value of my entire library.
GPOYW: I am not particularly good at photographing people, but Elle is: the photo above and this one are as about as good as it gets with an awkward subject who spits and scowls and shouts all the time. I’d be grateful if someone could explain why this scene immediately called to mind Stanley Kubrick. (Via Photophobia / Flickr / Larger).

GPOYW: I am not particularly good at photographing people, but Elle is: the photo above and this one are as about as good as it gets with an awkward subject who spits and scowls and shouts all the time. I’d be grateful if someone could explain why this scene immediately called to mind Stanley Kubrick.

(Via Photophobia / Flickr / Larger).

Tags: gpoyw
Making Elle laugh is like stealing fat-man’s candy from a baby: easy, since babies don’t care about money or cheese. Because it was her first time to New Orleans, we provided some obligatory good times; these naturally included a genuine “Big Easy” close-encounter with a dying vagrant’s vomited spume and some parked-car squatter napping. Beyond that, some of what we did is below and the rest is in this photoset. After breakfast at Cafe du Monde, we walked a bit in the French Quarter before lunch from Domilese’s at the Fly along the Mississippi. I got in the grass and Elle stood around in the sunshine laughing. We took the obligatory trip to Eric’s house, which all my visiting guests know well. It’s a remarkable place, probably the best single site for demonstrating how different New Orleans is. Afterward, we took a walk around the Lower Garden District. Then, Elle and Will ate at Ignatius while I slept in the car. Next we saw Kermit Ruffins at Rock ‘n’ Bowl; then, we went downtown so Elle could see Bourbon Street en route to meeting up with Mandalay. I stopped to get a Lucky Dog, and while Elle photographed me I saw a staggering man reach his hand towards her waist; this hilarious shot is documents my expression as I prepared to throw aside the insanely delicious hot dog and shove some lecher away. We eventually evacuated the Quarter in time to make her early flight the next morning. Both she and Mandalay were lots of fun, and the entire weekend was another reminder of how much I love being back in New Orleans.

Making Elle laugh is like stealing fat-man’s candy from a baby: easy, since babies don’t care about money or cheese. Because it was her first time to New Orleans, we provided some obligatory good times; these naturally included a genuine “Big Easy” close-encounter with a dying vagrant’s vomited spume and some parked-car squatter napping.

Beyond that, some of what we did is below and the rest is in this photoset.

After breakfast at Cafe du Monde, we walked a bit in the French Quarter before lunch from Domilese’s at the Fly along the Mississippi. I got in the grass and Elle stood around in the sunshine laughing.

We took the obligatory trip to Eric’s house, which all my visiting guests know well. It’s a remarkable place, probably the best single site for demonstrating how different New Orleans is.

Afterward, we took a walk around the Lower Garden District. Then, Elle and Will ate at Ignatius while I slept in the car.

Next we saw Kermit Ruffins at Rock ‘n’ Bowl; then, we went downtown so Elle could see Bourbon Street en route to meeting up with Mandalay. I stopped to get a Lucky Dog, and while Elle photographed me I saw a staggering man reach his hand towards her waist; this hilarious shot is documents my expression as I prepared to throw aside the insanely delicious hot dog and shove some lecher away.

We eventually evacuated the Quarter in time to make her early flight the next morning. Both she and Mandalay were lots of fun, and the entire weekend was another reminder of how much I love being back in New Orleans.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Allen Toussaint - Either.

See also: Toussaint’s Louie, What is Success, and Sweet Touch of Love, the latter two posted by The World Keeps Going Round.

Tags: music