Mile
Zero

I don't remember where I was, the first time I heard the name Malcolm X. I remember that I was maybe 8 years old, growing up in Lexington, Kentucky. It was a mostly African-American neighborhood, so it could have been anywhere, really. I think I remember being confused by the 'X'--how could that be a last name? How did he sign forms or documents? And as someone who fumed at the end of every class roll call and official ceremony, I wondered: why didn't he pick a letter closer to the start of the alphabet?

At that age, of course, history is a pretty boring topic, but I don't remember learning about Malcolm X in class. I don't think I ever really discussed him with my parents, either. He was a cipher, a vaguely sinister one for some reason (maybe the name, maybe not). It wasn't until college, when I took a class on social movements and persuasion, that I learned more about the man: his militance within the Nation of Islam, his pilgrimage to Mecca, and the change in his thinking as a result. It was a revelation, a whole part of the civil rights story that I'd never learned about--and I was simultaneously shamed that I'd never bothered to find out about it on my own.

A couple of years ago, I finally got around to reading his autobiography, and was struck all over again. It's a fascinating story: told to Alex Haley during a time when Malcolm X was himself undergoing a serious self-examination, it's a chronicle of transformation on both explicit and implicit levels. He was an extraordinarily complicated person, undoubtably flawed but capable of tremendous insight and intelligence. It makes clear that his assassination was truly one of the great tragedies of the civil rights movement.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, and of course February is Black History Month, so I've found myself thinking about this a lot lately. The thing about Black History Month is that it's a misnomer: as US citizens, Black history is our history. The fallout from slavery, segregation, and the struggle for civil rights still echo through our society in ways that we still stumble to articulate. Nobody, to my mind, represents that complex truth more than Malcolm X.

The view from the hot tub on the roof of the Boston bed and breakfast where we're currently holed up. Not that we were actually in the hot tub. More beside it, really.

I haven't been in Boston in a very long time, and everything I know about it I learned from Good Will Hunting--it basically amounts to a bunch of shouting about "southies" or something. Suggestions, therefore, are welcomed.

A few of my favorite pictures from our trip:

Welcome to the Portland area, where you can get your hair done, buy yourself a high-powered assault weapon, and then have yourself some fresh, raw fish for lunch--all without leaving the strip mall.

This raccoon, and a couple of others, were just hanging out in Vancouver's Stanley Park while tourists took pictures of them. Belle is terrified of raccoons. It was awesome.

It was kind of funny running into the EA Vancouver headquarters by random. But even better was the Mounted Police souvenir store located in the same building, shown here in the lower right. Want a mountie apron and grill set? Or a copy of Need for Speed? Now you know where to go.

True fact: Belle grew up just down the street from the Billy Goat Gruff family. She has nothing to fear from Seattle's bridge troll.

Near the troll, there's the country's largest statue of Lenin, which prominently features this disclaimer. What does it mean that the photo opportunity is (c) Getty? What about the disclaimer itself, is that also under copyright? Suddenly I feel like a character from a Cory Doctorow novel.

How, exactly, do you put a wax statue of Gene Simmons in a museum and not have his tongue sticking out? Luckily, Belle has it covered.

This boutique in Seattle had elephant and donkey masks on the mannequins for the political season. It did not really heighten my patriotic spirit so much as give me the creeps.

In Portland, we visited the Japanese garden, where the two forms of life thriving most were the moss and amateur photographers. We interrupted one on the way up these beautiful stairs, and I got a shot myself.

Belle says: "I didn't know what this was at first. I was all like, look, lots of rocks."

In a real earthquake, as opposed to this simulator at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, one assumes that she would not look so thrilled about it.

Completely by chance, Belle pulled me into a music shop near Voodoo Donuts, and they turned out to have a huge collection of pedals, including a whole bunch from Z. Vex. This is me trying out a Wooly Mammoth, which is one of the baddest bass distortions I've ever heard. It was very, very tempting.

Instead of the Mammoth, I pulled the trigger on the Lo-Fi Loop Junky. I dig the blue monster.

Excuse me! You there! Do you have a minute? I want to speak to you about something truly important to me--something that has changed my life in a deep and meaningful way, and I want to share it with you. I speak, of course, of the bacon pancake.

Why? What did you think I was going to say?

These Louis Theroux documentaries from the BBC are fascinating.

The Most Hated Family in America

Louis and the Nazis

It's like a video version of Jon Ronson's Them. Theroux visits fringe groups in the US (in these cases, the Phelps family and a community of skinheads) and lives with them for a short time. The contrast between the domesticity of these families and the extremism of their beliefs is something he highlights, and it is a little bit unnerving--obviously, nazis have to make sandwiches for their kids too, but it's not usually what comes to mind.

Well, here we are in Chicago.

We've here through Friday. Suggestions welcomed.

Had an Ugly American Moment the other day.

You know what I'm talking about. One of those experiences where you find yourself fitting the American stereotype, that of the insensitive boor. My favorite example comes from a visit to Mexico when I was in high school. I was on a bus in Cancun with my girlfriend of the time, trying to be unobtrusive, when a southern couple got on the bus and rode for a few blocks. They were loud and obnoxious. Soon enough, they had to get off, and pushed the button by the door to signal the driver, at which point he (like every other bus driver anywhere in the world) took note but did not immediately screech to a halt.

"Push it agin," the woman said to her husband, at a volume that carried through the entire bus. "I don' think tha little guy heard you tha first time." That was my cue to try to look as not-American as possible. Which for me is a range that starts at Kentucky and ends at about Ohio, if we're generous, so I wasn't very successful.

I don't want my international readers to think they are getting off easy here. Other countries certainly have their own Ugly Stereotype moments. I'm just most conscious of the American variety. Surprisingly, considering the breadth of its workers, we have relatively few incidents at the World Bank, I think. Everyone is generally aware that A) at least one person in a given conversation does not natively speak English, B) it is much easier to extend the benefit of a doubt rather than take offense, and C) no-one wants to be that guy.

My transgression wasn't anything offensive, really. We were working on some documents for the conference in Belgium, including the commitment cards. See, one of the really cool things about this conference will be cards passed out to the participants, on which they'll write personal commitments to anti-corruption, ranging from the personal ("I will not buy gas from companies known to use bribery in their operations") to the organizational ("My company will not use bribery in our operations"). This is a brave move, all things considered, since we'll be collecting the cards and publishing selected commitments on the web site (that's part of my job there).

But the language that explains this was somewhat controversial--for example, the word "ambitious" was thought to have heavy overtones, and was cut. So while we're discussing the text, my manager commented on how this is really a way of making the political personal, as the saying goes. I suggested that we actually write that on the front. I think I said something along the lines of "We can get participants to realize how important this could be."

"Oh, that's very American," said another (American) colleague. "To the Europeans, it's going to sound like we're moralizing, and they'll just toss them." There were nods from a couple of people around the table.

I'm not going to say that I was hurt, really, but I guess I was surprised. While I know that Americans are considered "blunt" by many people, I had never really thought of this kind of assertiveness as being American. Or more precisely, it would have never occurred to me that such language was particularly assertive or self-righteous. I think for Americans, that kind of rhetoric is just considered a way to get the topic out for debate. In a way, maybe we automatically go for the hard sell. I had a similar experience with B-SPAN promotional cards that we placed in the cafeteria, one of which read (in reference to our mailing list): "18,000 NEW FRIENDS."

"But I won't actually get 18,000 new friends from B-SPAN," said one person.

"No," I admitted. "I guess you won't."

After we finished the conference card meeting, I mentioned this to a friend--the one with the interesting folk sayings. She compared my choice of language to her university professors in France. "They were very distant," she said. "We would never call them by their first name, or go to have a drink with them, the way that I can here. Americans were much more informal, and I kind of respected that. But it has its down sides, also."

Then the conversation turned to Walter Reed, and I guess we got off topic. The point for me is that, when we discussed this back in my college Communication classes, I had never really bought the idea that (interpersonally speaking) there are communal and individualistic cultures, but this event brought the lesson home for me. When I think about it, most of the writers and role models that I try to emulate share this kind of aggressive, almost hyperbolic use of words--and there's a real implication of individualism implicit in that. This is a new way to think about how I write professionally (or even casually).

Of course, being an American, I tend to agree with my coworker that I find these tendencies to be admirable. After all, isn't the problem with corruption too often that people tiptoe around it? Shouldn't our rhetoric be a little more aggressive?

Probably not, if it dissuades others from joining us. And in this case, that's what really counts.

Warren Ellis tells Newsarama why his novel is set in America (emphasis mine):

I've been to New York City a few times before, while I was in college. But visiting with Belle is different, because she packs our vacations full. Now, of course, it's all a blur. Good thing there are digital photographs, to preserve all my most embarrassing facial expressions!

Belle is a Sanrio fanatic. Total Hello Kitty overload. And ever since they closed the Potomac Mills store, I think she's been a bit in withdrawal. She claims that she was underwhelmed by the New York Sanrio Outlet, but I think she's just trying to make me feel better about it.

I, on the other hand, was definitely underwhelmed by the Nintendo World store in Times Square. Of course, I don't know what I was expecting: free Gamecubes at the door? Lots of white plastic and blue lights.

I think I'm scarier than the allosaurus, personally. But here's a funny story: neither of us had ever been to the Natural History museum before, and we started with the animals from Asia. We were looking at some kind of Indonesian deer when Belle turned to me and said something about how "lifelike" they were.

Well of course they're lifelike, I said. They used to be alive.

"What? No," said Belle. "You're pulling my leg."

Apparently she'd never really spent any time with taxidermy. We should all be so lucky. I think I like it better her way, though: I imagine teams of highly-trained artists carefully sculpting a life-scale model of incredibly banal wildlife, implanting each hair by hand.

I just liked this phone.

Before heading off to catch Almodovar's Volver (great flick, be sure to see it when it gets a wider release), we stopped off at this dessert restaurant, which we passed on our way to Lombardi's famous pizza. It's called Rice to Riches, and they only sell delicious rice pudding.

A lot of design went into it, obviously. You can't see them from this angle, but there were these elaborate Flash animations running on screens above the pudding bar, and all of the signs are a little sardonic. My favorite slogan hung over the bar was "Eat all you want--you're already fat." But this sign located outside was also a nice touch:

Shallow observation: New York is very different from DC or where I grew up in Lexington, KY. It always strikes me as three or four different cities that just happen to coexist over top of each other. There's the hipster New York where you can buy cupcakes at 11pm and then go eat at Moby's vegan restaurant. There's the grounded neighborhoods around the airport in Queens. And then there's the surreal sections of Manhattan like Times Square, where the city isn't just a hyperactive commercial parody of itself, but has actually become a parody of the parody of New York commercialism. The fact that all of these are only a few miles from each other is pretty amazing, as is the fact that they haven't declared war on each other yet.

One of the best reasons to travel is to eat new foods, including the foods that you thought you knew but turn out to be radically different (hint: there is no General Tso's Chicken in China. It's also really hard to find a root beer there). This Argentinian travelogue (via Making Light) is a brilliant description of the meat-loving country and makes my mouth water--although it does imply that any visit I make there will be sans my lovely and brilliant--but vegetarian--girlfriend.

They speak Spanish there, don't they? And I've got some vacation time coming up...