Meanderings

THE JOYS - NOT - OF AMERICAN PROVINCIALISM

2012-01-09T09:56:00.000-08:00

Last year I had a short story published in the anthology Bangkok Noir. I received my first royalty check for it today - 2,383.83 Thai Baht (US$74.97 as of this morning.) Not a big amount of money, but only the first check and certainly better than nothing.

When I lived in Asia from 1986 to 1997 checks in foreign currencies weren't a problem. I could even deposit them to my accounts with Citibank in Hong Kong or Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank through their ATMs and the money, in my choice of Hong Kong or U.S. dollars, would show up in my account within about 24 hours if they were for a freely traded currency like Thai Baht. Less freely traded currencies like Chinese Yuan might take an extra day. Sure, they'd make some money by giving me a lousier exchange rate than I might otherwise get, but it still wasn't a bad rate.

Coming to the U.S. could present problems, however. We may well be the world's largest and most globally influential economy, but just as fewer Americans speak languages other than English than people in other countries speak languages other than their native tongue, fewer American banks seem to know much about the rest of the world.

Once I was in New York city and I needed cash. I had a Hong Kong dollar one thousand dollar bill in my wallet. (US$128.20 - it's a fixed rate and has been for many years.) In Hong Kong there are three different types of banknotes, issued by three different banks: Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and Bank of China. I was in New York's Chinatown where there is a large branch of Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, so I went in there to change my Hong Kong money into U.S. dollars. (The HK thousand dollar bill had a big picture of Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank's headquarters on it. The same picture was on all the brochures in the bank and hanging on the walls of the bank branch in frames.)

The teller had no idea what I was talking about. She said, "But how will I know how much this is worth?" I suggested that it was probably in her computer system and pretty easy to access. She seemed quite flummoxed by that.

Finally, I asked to see a manager. A manager came over, looked at the bill and said, "How do I know this is really a Hong Kong dollar banknote?" I suggested that might be true of any banknote from anywhere, and that perhaps she ought to compare the picture on the banknote with identical pictures in their very own brochures.

In any event, after about a half hour of toing and froing I was turned away.

So, this morning when I received my royalty check I had a nagging suspicion that it wasn't going to be a simple matter to simply deposit it into my U.S. bank account. So I called. My bank branch sent me to some central bank phone line in North Carolina who sent me to BofA's foreign currency phone line. At least they knew what I was talking about and what Thai baht are.

If the check was worth US$200 or more, Bank of America could send it back to the bank in Thailand "for collection." That would cost US$40, plus whatever fees, commissions, postage, etc. were incurred along the way by either BofA or United Overseas Bank of Thailand. It would take four to eight weeks and maybe I'd then get what remained of the money in my U.S. account.

I suppose I can frame the check and hang it over my desk along with my Enron stock certificate. I did email the publisher and ask if there was some way they could reissue the check in U.S. dollars. If not, I think I will assign my royalties to Colin Cotterill, a good pal, a great writer, who lives in Thailand and runs charitable education programs in Laos. US$74.97 can probably do a lot more good in Laos than it can in my bank account.

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT XMAS - NO, REALLY

2011-12-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

Most of you reading this probably figure you know me well enough by now to know that I loathe Xmas. (See, I can't even bring myself to spell it out.) And you'd be right, mostly. But this year, rather than writing the usual screed about everything I find appalling about the season at hand, I'm going to write about the things I like this time of year. So much for predictability.

But that takes us to the first thing I like, which has to do with predictability - in this particular case the predictability of physics. Click on this paragraph to read one of the Leaders from this year's year-end double issue of The Economist. Then make sure to come back here to read the rest of my blog. (If you use Windows you can right click on the paragraph and open the article in another window. If you use a Mac there must be something you can do but I don't know what that is.)

I love the special year end double issue of The Economist. It is probably the one thing that I look most forward to reading every year. The Leader that you have just - hopefully - read, is a perfect example of why. It is beautifully written. It is clear and easy to understand. It is witty and entertaining and fascinating and makes plain some things that you have undoubtedly seen throughout the past year in headlines. The whole issue is full of articles like this, about a wide variety of subjects. I only wish it was bigger, or came out twice a year.

I love Xmas Day. Though truth be told I could do the same thing any day of the year. Which is - I get together with friends, we go eat dim sum in a gigantic noisy Chinese restaurant that is jam packed with people of a similar bent, then we go to a movie matinee - usually something blockbusterish - this year probably the new Mission Impossible movie. It's got the Burj Khalifa in it and the Kremlin blows up. What could be more festive than that?

Okay, so what else do I love about Xmas? I'm thinking, I'm thinking...

The best Xmas I ever spent was in Dakar, Senegal.

I spent December 24th wandering the town, admiring the occasional African Santa Claus I encountered and the rather odd mix of African and French decorations. I caught a pickpocket with his hand in my camera bag in the main street market. Though then I worried about him. He couldn't have been much more than 12 and when I grabbed his hand and held it in the air and yelled at him, I was joined by a bunch of angry market women who took over his chastisement from me. I don't know what happened to him after that. Maybe they just humiliated him and sent him home. Maybe they beat him to death.

But I digress. My friend and traveling companion Ronna and I had dinner at one of the swankest French colonial restaurants in town. I had the very best steak frites (with a fresh green peppercorn sauce) that I have ever had, and we shared a bottle of excellent wine.

Then we wandered down to the wrong side of the tracks where all the tourist guides tell you not to go. Actually, it was under the tracks - a very sleazy, big nightclub that was mostly an enormous colorfully lighted patio with a band set up at one end of it. It was riotous with all the people that well-intentioned "experts" warn you against hanging out with: hookers, their pimps, their best customers, a variety of gangsters and assorted other crooks and junkies and drunks.

We had a blast. The Ventilateur was the dance craze of the moment (1984) - a dance in which one turns one's ass to the rest of the crowd and spins and jiggles it as best one can in emulation of a fan. Ronna proved to be particularly adept at this. I can't recall if she was the only white girl in the place, but she was certainly the only one who could hold her own dancing.

We drank. We smoked. There may have been some hash laced into some of those cigarettes. We chatted with everyone, in English when possible, in our tortured French when we needed to. We got lessons in Wolof - the primary local language from which jazz idioms such as "heebie jeebies" and "hepcat" derive.

At dawn Xmas morning the whole place emptied out and everybody walked through the deserted streets of town down to the beach where we scrounged coffee and breakfast from the few vendors who were around and a cafe that was open.

It was even better than dim sum and a movie matinee.

BRAVE AWFUL GREAT NEW WORLD - AMAZON, FRIEND OR FOE?

2011-12-10T08:27:00.000-08:00

Progress isn't always pretty. It's got victims. Even when it tries to accommodate the past, sooner or later it's just going to steamroll over it in many instances. Today might be one of those days.

Today Amazon is running a promotion. Take your smartphone to a shop, any shop that sells something Amazon also sells, let the Amazon app on your phone know what product you're considering buying and up will spring the - almost certainly cheaper - Amazon price. And to further encourage you to do this, today you get a five percent discount (up to $5) when you buy the product from Amazon rather than from the store where you're doing your browsing.

Retail stores are furious. And rightly so. Amazon is forcing them to become its storefront and not compensating them for that. It is taking sales directly away from them in the most crass possible way. Already, bookstore owners frequently see shoppers writing down titles, that they are certain - with good reason - those people will go home and order from Amazon instead.

Is this the future? Is this a case of technology being used to the benefit of consumers, even though it is hurting traditional, small businesses? Or is it just another typical instance of a huge corporation ruthlessly trying to stomp on its competition?

It's both, I suppose. Therein lies the dilemma.

As a consumer, I like to buy things as inexpensively as possible. If one place is selling a book I want for $24.95 and the other is selling it for $15.95, I'm not rich enough to ignore the difference.

As an author, wanting to sell books to readers, if I can sell more books at a lower price, while still getting the same - or even higher in the case of my ebooks - royalty as at the higher price, I'm also not successful enough to turn away those additional sales. As a matter of fact, it's in my interest to encourage them.

But I also like shopping in real, brick and mortar stores. I like browsing through books on tables and shelves. I like sifting through clothes on racks and trying them on before buying them. I like feeling the heft of cookware before making up my mind what pot, pan, knife or gizmo I want to bring home. I like the social aspect of it - chatting with fellow shoppers, with the people who work in the store. In a good store, the knowledge and opinions of the shopkeepers is an important and valuable part of the experience of shopping. I end up buying less stuff that I want to return in brick and mortar stores than I do online.

And Amazon is threatening all those things that I enjoy as a shopper. Too many bookstores are closing down. Record stores are mostly all gone. What sort of shops are next on the hit list?

Am I, as a consumer, as much to blame for this as Amazon? I'm certainly an enabler. Hell, there are even specialty food items I buy online rather than from shops, even some fresh ones, yet I love going to food markets. Is my economic self-interest worth giving up much of what I do enjoy about shopping?

The sad fact is that other than for the currently infamous "one percent," economic self-interest will always trump the niceties of the marketplace or the "joys" of shopping. And it is always going to be cheaper for an online retailer to sell its products than for a brick and mortar store to sell the same products, even if the online stores are forced to charge sales tax - which I think they should be.

Does this mean the end of shops as we know them? For stores that try to compete with companies like Amazon on Amazon's own terms, yep, they're going to get crushed.

In the future, the brick and mortar shops that will survive are those that play up and enhance the type of shopping experience that they can provide and an online retailer can't. They need to find ways to make the higher prices they have no choice but to charge, worth the premium. It's not unlike how TV commercials need to become more and more entertaining and/or informative in order to encourage viewers to not simply bypass them on their DVRs.

Here's a few things that shops can do that Amazon can't, that might help them keep my/your business:

Foster a community. Turn your shop into a gathering place for people with like-minded interests. You can do that through events, promotions, contests, classes, film screenings, whatever. It's easier if you run a specialty shop - a mystery or cookbook or history store, rather than a general book store, for example. This is applicable to all kinds of stores, not just bookstores. (Though some of your shoppers are still going to browse in your place then buy elsewhere. There's no avoiding that.)

Provide a variety of things to lure customers in and keep them there. The most obvious are hybrids - cafe, bar or laundromat and bookstore, salad and sandwich shop and clothing store, etc. Use the revenue from one to help support the other.

Personal service from knowledgeable salespeople. Every successful brick and mortar shop may well need its equivalent of the Apple "Genius Bar."

Sell products that buyers need, or greatly want to feel and/or see in three dimensions, taste, smell or otherwise experience in person before buying. These are often specialty and high-end items or most fresh products.

I'm not a huge shopaholic, but I also don't want small, local stores to disappear. One of the things I love about the neighborhood I live in is the abundance of small, locally-owned shops selling a variety of products and the sense of community I get when I spend time in them. I don't get that from Amazon. But like anyone without an unlimited well of money to draw from, I just can't afford to pay too much of a premium for the things I need and want.

Like most people, I want it all. I want the deep discounts that I get from Amazon and other online retailers, and I want my local small businesses to thrive. In some cases those desires are proving to be mutually exclusive. But they don't have to be, at least not for all small businesses, especially those that manage to adapt to this ugly/beautiful, brave new world.

WHAT DO BANKS WANT? THOUGHTS ON REFINANCING OUR HOUSE

2011-11-19T08:56:00.000-08:00

They want to make money. That's what every business wants.

Traditionally, the most stable, steady profit-making enterprise for banks has been lending money. Sure, there's much higher yields to be made from speculative, high-risk investments and money manipulation, but to ensure the continued health of a bank it needs a solid portfolio of dependable low-risk loans.

And, one of the primary reasons that the economy is still so stubbornly sluggish is that banks are sitting on piles of cash that they aren't lending out. Because of that, companies can't expand, they can't hire new workers, people can't build, buy or sell houses. For any free market economy to survive it needs constant activity fueled by money - more often than not in the form of loans. It's like the proverbial shark that will die if it doesn't keep swimming.

So why was it so enormously difficult for Eva - who I live with - and I to refinance our house recently?

We are about as close as it gets to zero risk borrowers and yet trying to get a bank to take our money was a Herculean task.

We bought our house eleven years ago, not quite at the bottom of the market but near enough to it that our property is still well above water. For our refinance, we were attempting to borrow approximately 15 percent of the current appraised value of our house. (And, according to three different realtors the official appraised value was laughably low compared with current real market value.) If our house burned to the ground, the lot alone would be worth at least two or three times the amount we were asking for.

And we're excellent customers. We have never missed, or even been so much as a day late with any payment.

And the whole point of refinancing in the first place was to cut our monthly payments - by about half - which would make it even less likely that we would miss a payment or be late with one in the future.

So we called up Harris Bank - our then current lender - reminded them of what good customers we've been and told them we wanted to refinance.

They turned us down flat.

On the one hand, what incentive did they have to give us a lower interest rate when we've been paying a higher one for the past eleven years? That would have meant they'd be making less money off of us.

On the other, they were risking losing a couple of very good, reliable customers at a time when banks are claiming that the going is tough for them, and making no money at all from us.

I pointed this out to them. They said sorry, that's the way it is.

Too bad for them. Bye bye Harris.

Thanks to the tenacious, patient and expert efforts of a fantastic mortgage broker, Eva and I jumped through numerous flaming hoops, shoveled the requested shit out of the Augean stables of our finances - being self-employed didn't help - and prevailed. We refinanced our house down from a five percent loan to a three-and-a-half percent loan, cutting our monthly payments in half. (If any of you need a really good mortgage broker I can send you the name and contact information for ours.)

So, I've got to ask, why?

Certainly banks ought to be more cautious than they were over the last decade when it comes to lending money for houses. They got severely burned making stupid loans to pretty much anyone who asked for one for any property no matter how ill-conceived the whole deal was, or how unlikely the person taking out the loan was to be able to pay it back. They figured that the property market was going to continue going up and up and up forever, so even if the loans blew up, they'd still be left with property worth a lot more than they'd loaned out for it.

They were wrong.

So now, to avoid it happening all over again, a lot of banks have put into place internal regulations that make it very difficult for them to loan money to anyone - not just the people who probably shouldn't be taking out loans in the first place.

But because banks' lending business has slowed to a crawl and they still want to make money, they are returning to the other, even riskier, financial juggling activities. Sometimes those do chalk up huge gains. But they also can cause enormous, rapid losses that are horribly destructive.

Apparently banks, and the various government agencies that oversee them, and Congress (of course) haven't learned anything from the recent and ongoing debacle.

The fact that Eva and I had such a difficult time refinancing our house may seem like a little thing. But it is a symptom of a much more severe malady that is not merely getting in the way of our country's (and big chunks of the rest of the world for that matter) economic recovery, but setting us up for the next big fall.

REFLECTIONS - IS THERE ANY OTHER WAY? - ON NOSTALGIA

2011-11-14T13:47:00.000-08:00

I've had cause over the past couple of months to think about my past more than usual.

On the personal / mortality side of things: one aunt died. Another has been diagnosed with what is possibly her terminal illness. It was the seventh anniversary of my mother's death. For the first time in my life I spent a week in the hospital due to something that could have killed me.

There aren't a whole lot of pictures of me from my first nine years of life. That's because November 7 this year was the 50th anniversary of my family's house burning down in a wildfire that gave us little time to evacuate, much less take much of anything with us. The only thing other than memories that I have left from the years before the fire is this:It's the cooled puddle of a silver or steel or some kind of vase that melted in the house and that my mom scraped up from the ashes when we were allowed to go back and sift among the smoldering ruins.

Then there's the personal / political side of things. Occupy Wall Street makes me think back to the days when I was a student radical in the '60s and '70s. I've been watching the new History Channel show "Vietnam in HD." Growing up when I did - a teenager in the late 1960s, eligible to be drafted in 1970 when kids just like me were being drafted in large numbers and sent to die in Vietnam - did a lot to make me the person I am today.

I went to a book launch party not so long ago for an anthology of short stories called "Send My Love And A Molotov Cocktail," edited by my pal Gary Phillips. One of the contributors, John A. Imani, had written a story set during antiwar demonstrations at UCLA in 1972. I'd also been at those demonstrations.

The launch was held at The Southern California Library, "...a people's library, dedicated to documenting and preserving the histories of communities in struggle for justice..." I poked around in the library's archives, just looking at the labels on the boxes of collected materials. There were a number of collections that were familiar to me, that possibly even hold leaflets or newsletters or posters or articles that I wrote, edited, distributed or hand cranked the mimeograph machines to help print.

I have my own collection of printed materials from those days. I plan to go through them and see if the library wants any of them. And I've got a collection of "buttons" that I hadn't looked at in many years until I just now took this picture of some of them:It pleased me to think that some part of my past might be preserved in that collection, that I may have contributed in some very small way to the historical record. And I do recall those days fondly, though I think of them as neither the good old or bad old days, just as days like any other - a mix of good, bad and mostly just getting by.

I like to think that I lack nostalgia, that in my mind the good days are still ahead of me, that the next book I write is going to be my best, that I get handsomer and more desirable with age - okay, well, maybe that one not so much, there's only so much self-deception that even I can muster.

Nostalgia is almost always made up of convenient lies and selective truths. It is good to remember the past - ideally with all its blemishes, failures, ugliness, beauty and triumphs acknowledged - but it is seldom of any use to dwell in it.

If you're reading this and hoping that I'm somehow going to wrap it up in a way that makes sense of it, that has something significant to impart, sorry you are S.O.L. The only lessons I've learned from any reflecting I've done on my past, the past of others or the past in general are that there is nothing whatsoever that can be done about it and that you can't let it get in the way of trying to do things better in the future.

Oh yeah, and that the future is pretty much out of your control, too, but you can't let that stop you from trying.

I guess I just talked myself into getting back to work on the next book.

UPON REFLECTION, A MEA CULPA

2011-10-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

With regard to the last post, having further reflected on the matter I think I left something important out. It's one thing for strangers to rip each others writing apart. Any reasonable writer expects that from editors and critics, desires it even. But for friends to do it, first requires the development of a great deal of trust.

I do have one friend like that - Ashley Ream. We know each other well enough, are confident and secure enough in the knowledge that we respect, like and admire each others writing that when we tell each other that something we have written sucks our reaction is to wince, sometimes curse, then start thinking about why it might actually suck. (Sometimes we decide the other was wrong, sometimes right, but we know each other well enough to take each other seriously and not take offense at what we have to say to each other.)

But it took a while to get to that point with each other. Trust doesn't develop quickly, no matter how much you like someone or how sympatico you are with them.

The mea culpa part of this post is that I now realize that I jumped the gun, possibly by several years, with the friend whose work I criticized. That was a big mistake on my part. It was stupid and I'm sorry for it.

While I certainly stand by what I said in my previous post, there was an important element left out. Let that be a cautionary tale.

THE TYRANNY OF PRAISE – WHAT DO WRITERS WANT, OR NOT, FROM EACH OTHER

2011-10-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

It seems possible that a recently expressed honest opinion of mine may have lost me a developing friendship that I had high hopes for.

Like many of my friends, this one is a writer and a lot of our talk has been about writing, other writers, books, ideas, etc. Our talk was always straightforward, honest and filled with our opinions about the subjects at hand. I encouraged this person (who shall remain nameless and genderless) to send me some of their writing. (I offered to send some of my works in progress in return as I am always on the prowl for intelligent, honest, blunt criticism of my own work.) I got sent a short story.

While I liked the writing in general, I didn’t particularly like the story. My opinion – I know, we’ve all got them just like assholes – was that it didn’t work for a couple of big reasons (macro-level) and it had some other stuff wrong with it for more specific (micro-level) reasons. I said as much, giving the two major reasons and offering to go over the others if that was wanted.

It wasn't wanted. My friend did not take my initial criticism of the big picture problems well, not at all. To the point where I’m concerned that it may have ended our friendship.

This has made me think a lot about what us writers want from each other, or not and how to be clear about it.

All of us want praise, of course, who doesn’t? It’s encouraging, stimulating, pumps us up and pushes us forward.

But praise is easy to come by, whether it’s honest or not, whether it’s informed or ignorant. I’m very happy that I’ve got supportive family and friends. My life is better because of it. I’m certain that I have more self-confidence in everything I do in life because of it. It’s an important component in making me who I am. And because of all that it even helps make my writing better.

It’s not enough though, not nearly enough, to help make my writing as good as it can be. I need the addition of criticism for that – solid, intelligent, insightful, honest and blunt – sometimes hard to take - criticism.

Believe it or not, sometimes I write crap. (Hell, a lot of what I write is crap, at least at first.) So does every single other writer. The only difference between a good writer and a lousy writer is the ability to keep working through the crap, to recognize it for what it is and to make it better.

And that part of the process can be very painful because one of the reasons why we all keep writing is that we know in our hearts that we are good at it, that what we write is good, and that it’s worthy of being read by other people, by strangers. So when something we write is crap, or someone else thinks that it is, that punches us in the gut.

I am not saying that my opinion is the be-all and end-all when it comes to recognizing crap, or problems with a story or a manuscript or anything else. It’s just my opinion. Try and nail down the opinions of any dozen of us writers, and you’ll probably come up with several dozen different conflicting opinions.

But listening to those opinions, weeding out the ones that are due to some sort of twisted personal problems or that stem from an ill- or misinformed reading, or all too obviously have their heads up their asses, then giving consideration to the ones that are left, is the only way any writer ever gets any better.

Sadly, getting honest, well-informed, blunt, pulling no punches opinions and criticism out of someone is an extremely rare and precious commodity.

I’ve never been a member of a writers group. That is because in my experience they almost all exist as a means to provide support, encouragement, incentive and praise to their members and to do that they fail to provide the really hard to hear criticism that all writers also need.

If I ever do hook up with a writers group, it will probably need to be one in which none of the members know each other outside the room where they meet. (Or maybe we should all be masked and disguising our voices.) Where we aren’t trying to maintain or create friendships. Where the only thing we want to do in there is help to make each other’s writing better by being as shitty and unpleasant and brutally honest with each other as it takes.

One of the most important lessons of my life as a writer came when I was a new hire on a business magazine in Hong Kong. I came up with what I thought was a great idea for a story. It was a monthly magazine and I worked my ass off on that story for three weeks. I got some great interviews, I unearthed some remarkable facts that hadn’t come to light before, and then I sat down and wrote the hell out of the thing. I turned it in to the editor in the full glow of knowing that it was the best thing I’d ever written – prize-winning material.

I got it back a half hour later with a note scribbled on the first page: “This is shit. It’s not why I hired you. Rewrite.”

I wanted to walk into his office and quit. I wanted to throw things, break windows, slug somebody, anybody.

I took a walk. I had a bowl of soup noodles with fish balls into which I ladled nearly an entire jar of extra-spicy chili paste.

When I got back to the office I took several very deep breaths, picked up my article and walked into the editor’s office to ask him what was wrong with my piece.

He looked at me and said, “I don’t have time to explain. Figure it out.”

I went back to my desk, mumbled and swore and grumbled and cursed my editor and every generation of his family all the way back to the apes.

Then I got to work and I figured it out and it was a much better article for it. (But he was still an asshole and I would have appreciated some clue as to what he thought was wrong with it.)

So what is it that we writers actually do want from each other? And how do we make it clear that’s what we really want and aren’t just paying lip service to what we think we should want?

BACK AT THE DESK, DILEMMA AT MY FINGERTIPS

2011-10-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

What is a writer to do when faced with the realization that the best way to tell a story he wants to tell is in a style that he isn’t all that comfortable with and doesn’t even particularly like to read?

I don’t like magical realism. I forced myself to finish the first 50 pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and then I threw it across the room in frustration and disgust. I loathed it. So sue me. Other than Eduardo Galleano I haven’t been able to get through any of the other much lauded South Americans, either.

I am not entirely consistent. One of my favorite books of the past few years was Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea (who is Mexican – Tijuana – by way of Chicago) and it certainly takes a few spins around the room with magical realism. I have never been able to read what is widely regarded as his masterpiece – The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Although on my recent road trip I listened to him read it – he does a wonderful job, which is rare for a writer reading his own book – on my car stereo and enjoyed it thoroughly. It worked for me as a story that someone was telling me in a way that it didn’t work for me to read.

The book I am currently working on has given me fits and starts. Initially it was going to be the middle one of three thematically linked novellas. I finished it, I thought, at about 40,000 words. (Long for a novella but too short for a novel.) But that grand scheme didn’t work out.

Now I’m faced with rewriting it as a full length novel that will stand alone. And I can’t simply expand it. It’s not going to work that way.

Worse yet, it has occurred to me that the story involved can best be told in a way that at least flirts with magical realism, and maybe even has to actually climb into bed with it and get down and dirty.

What’s a writer to do? Sometimes a story will dictate its form and if you want to do an adequate job of telling it, you have to succumb to its demands.

It’s times like this when I have thoughts of going to trade school and becoming something useful, like an electrician.

ACROSS AMERICA ONE HOUR AT A TIME - DAY SIX

2011-10-05T17:29:00.000-07:00

Kingman, Arizona to Home (Los Angeles, CA): Finally made it. The weather didn't cooperate, it poured rain and blew wind from Victorville all the rest of the way home. There were wrecks littered along the road, but they couldn't stop us. A stop at Total Wine & More in Rancho Cucamonga nearly bankrupted us though. It is the Disneyland of Booze. I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to be drinking on the varied dope they've got me on, but there's plenty to drink in the house should I be so inclined. And I am so inclined.

Here's my latest photographic victims:

Needles, CA. A couple who'd just driven down from Washington State.
Ludlow, CA. They were repaving part of a gas station.
Victorville, CA. A clerk in a convenience store. At first she thought I might be a secret shopper, since they take pictures.
Rancho Cucamonga, CA. Candy, on the left, is terrifyingly knowledgeable about wine and other booze. I blame her for the amount of money we spent in the place. But I recommend her should you ever be in Rancho Cucamonga and want the perfect tour guide to the wonderland of booze.
Home. This is what I look like after two weeks without shaving. Because I am so very skilled at finding ways to cut myself shaving, and the drugs they've got me on have thinned my blood, I have been warned to only shave with an electric razor for fear of nicking my nose and bleeding out on the bathroom floor. I ordered a well-reviewed electric razor online and it was waiting for me when I arrived home. I think it is now just about charged up. But I figured I'd humiliate myself first by posting this picture. It's good to be home.

ACROSS AMERICA ONE HOUR AT A TIME - DAY FIVE

2011-10-04T17:43:00.000-07:00

Gallup, New Mexico to Kingman, Arizona: By now, if you've been paying attention, you should realize that we are taking, essentially, Route 66 across the country. Well, we're on Interstate 40 but for most of its way it either parallels what is left of Route 66 or runs right over it. Some towns, like Seligman, Arizona, seem to survive entirely off nostalgia for the old highway.

Here's some of the people I encountered today on my hourly stops.

Ofelia's Knife City, AZ. I asked Ofelia - at least I'm pretty sure she was Ofelia - if she would pose with her favorite knife. She said, "They are all my favorites. They make me money." So I posed her at the cash register instead.
Winslow, AZ. Stopped for lunch at La Posada Hotel, one of the great quirky hotels anywhere. Run in part by , a painter with a twisted sense of humor. Here's a woman in front of a painting of Nancy Reagan, part of the First Ladies series.
Seligman, AZ. Inside the Route 66 souvenir shop pictured above. A group of tourists from Quebec, Canada were shopping for t-shirts. They were a little concerned when I wanted to take their picture, they'd just finished a three day hike into a nearby canyon and hadn't had a shower yet.

ACROSS AMERICA ONE HOUR AT A TIME - DAY FOUR

2011-10-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

Amarillo, Texas to Gallup, New Mexico: A late start due to needing to get a blood test and the results. I first went to one clinic that refused to release results to anyone other than a doctor. I think that's illegal - the patient is entitled to the results. I tried arguing with them but failed. So I then went to a nearby hospital and threw myself upon their mercy. They were merciful. This trip being almost entirely about transportation, rather than recreation, the only highlight of the day was a stop at Tito & Mary's in Albuquerque for enchiladas Christmas style. Yum. Here's the people I met at my hourly stops.

Tucumcari, NM, this man and his dog were driving the truck with his motorcycle and most of his family's belongings in it. His wife and the kids were following in another car. He was laid off in Indiana and is moving the family to Phoenix where he'll go to Harley Davidson mechanics school. We chatted a bit about the 1930s, which seemed far too apropos a topic.
Milagro (Miracle), NM didn't seem all that miraculous. This couple ran a rather beat up old gas station and convenience store without much on the shelves.
Albuquerque, NM, the waitress at Tito & Mary's brings a chile relleno and a plate of enchiladas.
Grants, NM, long-haired clerk at the RediMart.

ACROSS AMERICA ONE HOUR AT A TIME - DAY THREE

2011-10-03T05:09:00.000-07:00

Midwest City, Oklahoma to Amarillo, Texas: A relatively short, four hour, day of driving. With a wee bit of fudging on the one hour rule, we only stopped twice. (Not to worry, I keep my legs flexing and moving while sitting in the car.)

Katie, waitress at T.C.'s Country Kitchen, Clinton, OK.

Shamrock, TX at classic Route 66 Conoco Station.

FOUR CRANKY, CONTENTIOUS GRIPES ABOUT BASEBALL

2011-10-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

I now interrupt my regularly scheduled blog to indulge this morning’s bout of grumpery.

The post-season is underway and I’m rooting, in order, for the St. Louis Cardinals, then in ascending order for the teams with the lowest payrolls, until you get to the Phillies and the Yankees – the highest payroll teams – who can kiss my ass. I respect teams that develop their winning ways, not buy them.

As always, the post-season makes me think of things that I like and don’t like about baseball. Here’s four things I’m cranky about:

Pete Rose – Put him in the Hall of Fame, un-ban him. So what if he got caught gambling. The only difference between him and the no doubt hundreds, if not thousands, of other players who undoubtedly bet on baseball is that he got caught. The Hall of Fame is filled with unsavory characters – Ty Cobb anyone? Stop this nonsense now and let Pete Rose in.

Saves – What’s the big fucking deal with saves? They’re bullshit. It’s all pumped up faux-drama to increase ticket sales. Sooner or later someone in SABR is going to crunch all the numbers and come up with the statistical probability of a team losing or winning a game that they lead by three runs in the ninth inning. My guess is that pretty much any big league quality pitcher could come in fresh for the ninth with a three run lead and the majority of the time – unless they were backed up by a team of little league players – their team would win the game.

Roger Maris – He’s the current single season home run record holder in my book. No one who hasn’t been juiced on steroids has beat him. People moaned about him doing it in 162 games, while Babe Ruth did it in 154. The more important statistic is that he did it in fewer at bats than Ruth did. Split the category – home run record on steroids / home run record not on steroids. And while we’re at it, Hank Aaron is still the career leader in home runs, at least until maybe Albert Pujols breaks that record. And while we’re still at it, toss Barry Bonds in jail, at least for a week or two, just on general principle.

Designated Hitter – Do I even have to argue this one? National League games are more fun to watch. There’s more drama, more managing to be done. Isn’t it about time baseball admitted the error of its ways?

I now return you to my regularly scheduled blog. Next – the continuation of Across America One Hour at a Time.

ACROSS AMERICA ONE HOUR AT A TIME

2011-10-01T07:11:00.001-07:00

Wagon trains averaged about two miles an hour across the country. We're averaging something just under 70. That should pick up across Texas, New Mexico and Arizona where the speed limit is 75.

It doesn't mean it's fast though, not as fast as I'd planned. I'd figured on three days of hell bent driving to get back home to Los Angeles. It's going to take six. One of the things about having a blood clot is that you have to be careful to move your leg around - at least once things are stabilized enough to risk that. So, we are sticking to no more than six hours a day on the road, with stops every hour along the way to get out and walk around for a few minutes.

Day one, Clarksdale to Little Rock, Arkansas

We left the hospital around 11am. This is where I'd spent the past seven days and 15 hours:
First stop was at Hertz at the Memphis Airport so that Eva could return her rental car. It was actually about an hour and 15 minutes. (There was also no person for me to take a picture of. I'm going to try and take a picture of a person, or people, at each stop hereafter.) Palestine, Arkansas - Man with his father's 1959 Ford Fairlane We spent the night in Little Rock where there is a very pretty riverfront park and the Clinton Library and Center.

Day 2, Little Rock, AR to Midwest City, Oklahoma

Russellville, Arkansas. Bikers at a gas station. Dora, Arkansas. Squash Blossom Natural Grocery. Lake Eufaula State Park, Oklahoma. Robertson's Ham, Bacon & Sausage, Seminole exit off I-40, Oklahoma. We had dinner with some old pals, writers Meredith and Win Blevins. The owner of the restaurant where we had dinner - Chile Mercado Mexican Grill. Tomorrow it's on to Amarillo, Texas.

BAD GENES + STRONG BLADDER + FEEBLE MIND = DAY 4 IN HOSPITAL

2011-09-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center: If only I’d had to pee more often, maybe I wouldn’t be here. You get Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT, blood clots, usually in the legs) when you are mostly immobile with your legs cramped for long periods of time. It’s what they warn you about on long airplane flights.

Some people get it more easily than others thanks to their genes.

It can be fatal. A piece of clot can break off and careen through your bloodstream coming to rest in your lungs – a pulmonary embolism, in your heart – causing a heart attack, or in your brain – stroke.

So when you notice that your leg has swollen and turned various shades that it isn’t supposed to be, the smart thing would be to go get it checked out. You might get lucky and it might be something other than DVT. I had about a 36 hour smarts delay when I noticed that about my left leg. That’s not too bad. It’s not to say I couldn’t have simply dropped dead during that time, but plenty of people don’t do anything at all about it.

When the nurse practitioner told me that she suspected DVT and I should be checked into the hospital, I considered waiting until the next morning. After all, it was Thursday night and that’s the only night that Po Monkey’s – a place I’ve wanted to go since I first heard about it – is open. Hell, if I'd dropped dead on the dancefloor there, hopefully they’d just prop my corpse in a corner with a cigarette in my mouth and a Bud in my hand and I’d have gained some sort of immortality.

But I didn’t. I did what you are supposed to do and I’ve been in the hospital ever since trying to get the clot organized and stabilized enough that I can actually go home. If I only had stopped to pee more regularly when I was driving out here, this might not have happened. Instead, there were days when I drove straight through – six, seven, eight hours of driving non-stop. I like that sort of thing sometimes, the meditation of the highway. Damn meditation. I should have known better.

I might get out of here tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday. Then the drive home is going to be quite a bit slower than is my usual style: no more than 4-5 hours in the car a day, stopping every hour to get out and walk around for a few minutes. It’ll take seven days from here to Los Angeles. I’d originally planned to do it in three.

Oh well, at least I’m not dead and there’s much to be said in favor of that. I have a couple of recommendations for y'all (I’m in the south.)

One – if you’re on a long flight or a long drive, get up or get out of your car and walk around for a bit every hour or two even if you don’t think you want to.

Two – if you are ever in Mississippi and have something go wrong with you, this Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center is a very fine place. The people are incredibly friendly and attentive and beyond merely competent. And they’ll give you bacon and eggs with grits and a biscuit for breakfast.

NOT FROM THE HOSPITAL - NOW A HOTEL - WHERE BESSIE SMITH DIED

2011-09-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

Clarksdale, Mississippi: And hopefully not from the hospital where I died, either. But that's where I am. It's a very nice hospital, as these things go, too. (The hospital where Bessie Smith died is now a hotel here in Clarksdale - room 2, you can stay in it.)

Two days ago my left leg seemed swollen. I ignored it, as one does, and very happily went about my business of touring the Delta. Yesterday morning it seemed somewhat more swollen, but I figured I'd deal with it later. As one does.

After a day of touring I went to Cathead - a truly fantastic store for blues, folk art, books, everything relating to the Delta - and also the place to go for local information. Roger, who runs the place and who makes some excellent documentary films and has written one of the better general introductory books to the blues, suggested a local clinic if I wanted someone to look at my leg.

I did. The very attentive and concerned nurse practitioner sent me to the hospital. I checked in last night and this morning they confirmed deep vein thrombosis - a blood clot, the sort that can break apart and kill you if you don't catch it and take care of it.

I almost didn't go. Last night was the night I was going to go to Po Monkey's - the only remaining rural juke joint anywhere and a place I have wanted to go ever since I first heard about it. I considered the fact that it would probably be a better place to keel over dead than most, but then good sense got the better of me. Tonight T Model Ford is playing at the best juke joint here - Red's Lounge; tomorrow night it's Robert Balfour - two of my very favorite, old and not going to be around all that much longer blues players. But I won't be sneaking out to see them either, no doubt.

Shit. I've got a good bottle of scotch in my luggage here in the hospital room. I wonder what the doctor would think of me having a drink or two?

Anyhow, this is all by way of explanation as to why you aren't going to get much more in the way of posts from the road, at least for a while. (They want me in the hospital for about five days.) Luckily, before this came to pass I did get around some. Here's some pictures and some explanations:

Robert Johnson, the blues singer and guitar player who you know even if you don't think you do - most of his songs have been covered by rock and roll bands and lines from his songs and guitar riffs are impossible to avoid - is reputedly buried in three places. Not because they chopped him up, but because there was some controversy over which was the real spot. I visited all three. The last one of the three is the one that has the best claim to being the real burial place. But visiting all three is a good way to see the area.

After visiting the likeliest real grave, I went for lunch to Hoover's Grocery & Launderette which is in Baptist Town - part of Greenwood - just down the street from the corner where Robert Johnson often played and where he died. Sylvester Hoover runs the place and he was sorry that they don't usually do hot lunches anymore, not since the grocery burned down and they had to move both businesses into the laundry. But, well, he did have some ribs. Do I like ribs? Yes I do.

These were not just ribs. These were a whole new order of ribs, something else altogether. Inside they were dark rich red like the best country ham and they tasted kind of like that and so smoky it was almost too much but it was perfect. Outside they were somehow crisp and crunchy with the right amount of char and rub. There was sauce on the side but it was superfluous. Here's the place and here's Mr. Hoover, and there's the corner where Robert Johnson played and died:

In the course of all this grave visiting I drove around and looked at stuff and took some pictures like usual. Here they are:

WHAT IS IT ABOUT MISSISSIPPI?

2011-09-21T07:12:00.000-07:00

Mississippi, Day 1: I am, as those of you who regularly read this are well aware of by now, not a particularly – or even any, really – spiritual or mystical sort of person. Yet there are places in the world where for no reason that I can quite fully put my finger on I simply feel at home, at peace, comfortable, engaged. Mississippi – to be specific the Delta and the Hill Country – is one of them. (Indonesia is one of the others, but I’ve already blathered about that earlier this year.)

Mississippi rolled into my mind over the years. My first association, as a child, was with the name. Thanks to the river, thanks to Mark Twain I’ve always unconsciously associated the place with travel and flow and adventure.

Then, as with so many of us who grew up in the 1960s the associations turned terrible – the scene of some of the most brutal battles of the Civil Rights Movement, a place that seemed alien and scary, primitive.

But at about the same time that was happening, I discovered the blues; music born of the struggles and torment, the strength and humor and intellect of the place and time it came from. Music that muscles its way out of the blood and sweat stained soil of this place, filling the air with ghosts and history and a culture that somehow comes across as triumphant in spite of the wretchedness and misery that created it, that made it somehow possible. And a culture that has informed and transformed much of all the other culture that I’ve been deeply affected by throughout my life. The blues, or something a whole lot like them – at least their sensibility - is part of nearly every book, song, movie, artwork, etc. that has reached far inside me and made me feel deeply.

And the people I meet have been almost universally friendly, welcoming, pleased to have someone visiting their state, their town, their farm who is in return friendly and genuinely interested.

Then there’s the light. Literally. Throughout the day, but most dramatically during the long evenings, the light here is palpable. It gives dimension to what could be a flat, nearly barren landscape. It is a photographer’s dream.

So I’m going to shut up right now and post some pictures from yesterday. I won’t even tell you what they are other than that they are roughly in the order I shot them, from the Hill Country around Holly Springs (lunch at Phillip's Grocery and an interesting conversation with a man selling the Nation of Islam's newspaper) to Greenville in the Delta and my favorite steak place in the world for dinner. There will be more today.

ON THE ROAD – SO MUCH TO CATCH UP ON

2011-09-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

I’m leaving Memphis in about 45 minutes and headed south to the Mississippi Delta. There will undoubtedly be much to blog about from there, so I’d best try to catch you up on the past week or so in the meantime.

Norman, OK to St. Louis: It poured rain pretty much the entire way, visibility was limited and photography non-existent. At nearly every other off-ramp there was some sort of "Adult Super Store" or "Men's Spa." Apparently people driving Interstate 44 to St. Louis through the Ozarks require some extra attention. They also require catfish, and I stopped at a place called Dowd's Catfish House in Lebanon, MO. It was awfully good. The fried okra was also especially good. And also, apparently, they need to be on the look out for escaped hogs. There were a number of billboards exhorting those of us driving by to "Report Feral Hogs."

St. Louis, Bouchercon: What is there to say about a writers and readers conference? It was a lot of fun. Hanging out with old and new writer pals is the very best of water cooler time – something you don’t usually get when you work at home in front of your computer day after day. Meeting readers, both those who have heard of you and read your books and those who haven’t but who are interested, is always incredibly gratifying and humbling. Conferences like this remind me both that I really enjoy hanging out with my fellow writers and we are all incredibly privileged to have people interested in what we write and have to say.

And yes, we do drink too much. I did actually get back to my hotel room from the bar one night by about 1am – but I still couldn’t go to sleep until 3. In any event, the people whose company I enjoyed, who I shared that wonderful heady mix of silliness, seriousness and wonderment with, are almost too numerous to mention by name. So I’m not going to. You know who you are.http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

I was having far too much fun to take any pictures during the conference. I did take some walking around St. Louis though. (I had the usual fun conference walk – becoming something of a tradition – with my pal SJ Rozan. SJ used to be an architect and there is always some building or another that has caught her eye. In this case we went to see the War Memorial Building which was truly elegant, simple and very beautiful. Click on her name to go to her blog where you will sooner or later find some photos, no doubt. Actually, right click on her name and go there in another window or tab so that you can easily get back here.)

Road to Memphis: Colin Cotterill and I headed south from St. Louis, trying to take old Highway 61 – do a Google search, you’ll see how many songs there are about it, probably the second most after Route 66 – for as much of the trip as we could. It was, as you can see from the pictures, a somewhat religious experience. (It was Sunday after all.)

This is what we could only think of to call Road Kill Jesus. Look at it straight on and all you see is the cross, move to the side and the flattened out Jesus shows up. It was actually kind of cool.

Memphis: Graceland, the National Civil Rights Museum (built into the Lorraine Hotel where Martin Luther King was assassinated), Beale St., Gus’s Fried Chicken (some of the world’s very best fried chicken) – fun was had, much walking was done.

Graceland was not quite as remarkably garish, tacky and overblown as we'd hoped, smaller, too. But still, it had its moments.

The National Civil Rights Museum is very well done. It's built into the shell of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated. Standing, essentially, in the room, looking out at the balcony where the bloodstained concrete has been patched over and across the street at window where the shot came from, is frightening and very moving.

Across the street from it, however, Jacqueline Smith has inhabited a street corner for more than 23 years to protest the museum. She used to live in the Lorraine when it was a transient hotel, before she and the other residents were kicked out to make the museum. She wants people to boycott it. She thinks the money would be far better spent helping the poor and building low income housing by way of honoring the vision of Dr. King, rather than simply memorializing him. I'm still not sure how I feel about what she has to say, but she does make a strong, rational case. Check out her website.

Gus's on Front Street is the home of my new very favorite restaurant fried chicken in the country:

And far too much beer was drunk, all over town. Luckily we had a very knowledgeable "beer goddess" in one place to steer us in the right direction.

And Beale Street is very touristy, cacophonous with dueling blues bands of varying quality and many languages and accents that aren't usually associated with the South. Luckily for everyone, they do not permit reptiles:

We had much more civilized beers at Ernestine & Hazel's down on Front Street in a gentrifying area that some people are still fearful of going to at night. Their loss. Great bar, run by a very nice guy, with a truly superb jukebox. And it used to be a brothel upstairs - though no longer:

I am now in Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta and shall blog about it later, or tomorrow. Right now it's the time of day when I ought to be out and about taking pictures.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT DRIVING ACROSS AMERICA

2011-09-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I woke up in Amarillo, Texas having spent a surreal evening at the Big Texan Steak Ranch and decided to go for breakfast. I went to the Stockyard Cafe, which had been recommended to me by a local and several websites. Great huevos rancheros. When my waitress came by to see if I wanted more coffee, she asked if I was there for the auction, the cattle auction. Well, why not?

So I stuck around and went to the cattle auction. Everybody there was about as friendly as could be and happy to explain to me what was going on. Then I sat down next to a group of Amish people and chatted with them. Turns out, they were on a road trip, too. They were on their way back to their home in Indiana from California and thought they'd stop at the Stockyard Cafe for breakfast and to take in the cattle auction. We talked for a bit and it was interesting and fun - and yes, some Amish do drive cars, not only horses and buggies.

Then I headed east and stopped at Bug Ranch - the Volkswagon Beetle answer to Cadillac Ranch farther west down the road. Then I stopped at "the largest cross in the Northern Hemisphere." I had lunch in a place that would have been a burger joint if the guy who founded it hadn't decided he wanted to do something other than burgers, so he opened a steak sandwich place to stand out from the crowd.

Then I spent the evening visiting writer pals in Norman, Oklahoma.

A lot of what I drove through was hours of grain silos in the flat distance, and cattle crowded around water wheels and I loved every single moment of it.

There are undoubtedly those of you out there reading this who are thinking - so what? Who cares? All that empty space.

I feel sorry for you. This is the country you miss when you simply fly over it to get where you're going. This is the country that is interesting and human and hard working and honest and fun - the place that makes me very happy to be an American. You can find this America in Los Angeles and New York and Chicago if you try hard enough, if you get out of your neighborhood and your comfort zone, but it's very much in your face when you drive across the country.

The great thing about this country has always been the journey, not the destination - the big, wide in-between spaces and the people who inhabit them. I feel most connected to it when I'm in those places, the vast midlands that people on the coasts wonder what the hell I'm there for, or the places that "nice" people are afraid to go, where they think menace lies around each bend - which is what some of my friends seem to think about the South, where I'm headed next.

Anyhow, just wanted to get that off my chest. Now I'm in St. Louis, at Bouchercon, surrounded by mystery writers and readers and staying put until Sunday when the road trip resumes. Here's some pics from yesterday:

HAVE HIT THE ROAD - 3

2011-09-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

AMARILLO, TX: The Big Texan Steak Ranch is not the place to go if you want to eat a great steak. The t-bone I ordered was okay, but no more than that. There was, however, too much of it, which is what the place is known for.

A good hundred miles or so before Amarillo along Interstate 40 you begin to see billboards advertising a Free 72 oz Steak.

Well, not free exactly. You have to eat the 4-1/2 lbs of meat, along with a large and loaded with stuff baked potato, and three breaded and fried jumbo shrimp, and a salad, and a dinner roll, and you have to do it in an hour or less. (If you fail in the attempt, it costs $72.)

They once fed one of the steaks to a 500 lb Siberian tiger. He ate it in 90 seconds. The current human record, held by Joey "Jaws" Chestnut - who is also the World Hot Dog Eating Champion - is 8 minutes, 52 seconds. Klondike Bill, a professional wrestler once ate two of the meals in the allotted time.

Four people were attempting the feat when I was there tonight. I am sorry to say that I have failed all of you in the reporting department as I was too queasy to stick around and see if any of them succeeded. When I left they had 20 some odd minutes to go and it didn't look like any of them were going to make it. A conversation had broken out among the four as to whether or not it might have been better to order the steak super well done - as that would probably burn some of the extra fat out of it. (The 72 oz is the cooked weight.) From the look of it, it was a fairly chewy steak at any temperature.

Earlier in the day I went to Cadillac Ranch, which isn't quite Stonehenge, but it's not bad. On the way out of town tomorrow I plan to stop in at Bug Ranch - the VW equivalent.

Here's some pics:

This guy came from France to test his mettle against Texas-sized portions. It is, apparently, not the way that Frenchmen usually eat.

Tomorrow it is off across the Panhandle to beautiful Norman, Oklahoma.

HAVE HIT THE ROAD AGAIN - 2

2011-09-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

Albuquerque, NM: A relatively short, but scenic, drive today through the Painted Desert, past Shiprock and the Petrified Forest and at least 338,442 "Indian Trading Posts" selling blankets and pottery and fry bread and what have you.

Just as I was leaving my room at La Posada, however, I noticed a framed clip from an old magazine that was hanging in the room. Remember, I was in the Carole Lombard Room. Well, here is one mighty strange photo of Carole Lombard smoking a cigarette:
I waited until Gallup, New Mexico to eat anything. That's because New Mexico has some of the very finest food to be had in the country. In the restaurant at El Rancho, a very funky, old movie stars of the 30s and 40s hotel, I had delicious huevos rancheros Christmas style - half red / half green chile. I have stayed in the hotel once before - in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Suite. It isn't expensive. I recommend it. Although I'm not really sure what the part of their slogan that says - "Convenience of Tomorrow" means.
Not far beyond Gallup, I crossed the Continental Divide. All the water that falls on on the east side of this sign flows out to the Gulf of Mexico and then the Atlantic Ocean. Water on the west side flows to the Pacific. I was thinking I might pee on the side of the sign - it was about six inches wide - and spend some time speculating as to where my pee would end up, but there was a woman tending her garden nearby so I didn't. Yet another missed opportunity to imagine conducting a scientific experiment.
One of my favorite things about driving across America is that the weather becomes a significant feature of the landscape. There are some much more dramatic examples of what I mean in an earlier blog. This one. But there was some pretty attractive weather today.
Before dinner - chicken enchiladas Christmas style (it's the only form of Christmas that I like at all, otherwise I'm a total Scrooge) - I cruised around Albuquerque. Like a lot of places along the remnants of old Route 66 it really plays up the connection. I sort of prefer the ghost town parts.

Tomorrow it's into the Texas Panhandle, stopping in Amarillo to admire the stockyards.

HAVE HIT THE ROAD AGAIN - 1

2011-09-10T18:58:00.000-07:00

Winslow, AZ: I'm in the Carole Lombard room of one of my favorite hotels in the world, listening to a mile or more long freight train rumble past outside my window. Earlier I was in a rocking chair in the garden, good scotch in hand, watching the sunset and the trains roll by. (Not to worry, if you don't like the sound of trains all night, they provide you with earplugs in the guest rooms.

La Posada was built in 1930 by the Harvey Company as a railroad hotel. The architect and designer was Mary Colter, the most famous (maybe the only famous) woman architect and designer of her time. It was her favorite building and when you stay here it is obvious why. Colter was one of the first architects to truly appreciate that there was such a thing as a unique American architecture and she made fantastic use of it. She took regional archetypes and developed them into modern (for their time) buildings. One of her first was the Hopi House gift center at the Grand Canyon.

In 1997, La Posada was falling down. It was bought by a guy named Allen Affeldt along with an artist named Tina Mion. They have restored it and done an astounding job. It is also filled with an eclectic wonderful art collection, much of it the paintings of Mion - who is a quirky, amusing and very arresting painter. They also have a great restaurant. I have a reservation for dinner in 40 minutes so I'd best crank out this blog.

In any event, this is one of the reasons why I love road trips even if at times the day's drive seems endless and dull. I took I-40 today, which roughly parallels old Route 66. There are parts of old 66 that are pretty fun and entertaining, a lot of it has become buried under enormous piles of nostalgic kitsch. Funny, it's all '50s Corvettes and crap like that, you don't see much about the Okies and Arkies fleeing the Dust Bowl desperate to find work in the promised land of California. Oh well.

Here's a few pictures. The first is one of the remnants of old 66. The rest are all at or around La Posada.

WRITING SUCKS, BUT WHAT ELSE AM I GOING TO DO

2011-09-09T08:02:00.000-07:00

You can't read this post here but you can read it on Murderati - a very fine blog indeed - where I am guest blogging today. Click on this paragraph to get there.

IT'S COUNTY FAIR TIME AGAIN

2011-09-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

And of course I went, as I do every year that I can, with my standing County Fair Companion, the multitalented juggler who wears numerous hats - writer, save-the-worlder (or at least improve it), crazed long-distance runner, bunny lover, etc. - Ashley Ream.

And, as I also do every year, I took some pictures. They can tell you more about my experience of the Los Angeles County Fair than I can. So here goes:

There were a lot of people at the Fair other than us:

And of course there were other sorts of animals, too:

And I mentioned that Ashley loves the bunnies. The real ones were out of reach in pens, so I made her pose with this poor young woman who was no doubt sweltering inside of her bunny suit:

And what would a county fair be without stuff to judge and award ribbons to? Here are some pie contest judges, pie contest entrants anxiously awaiting judgement, and a previous cake winner.

People waited for rides and then went on rides.

And people ate stuff, lots of stuff, most of it really bad for them (and me.) The best thing I ate at the Fair was the porkchop on a stick ("A delight like no other.") It was indeed a delight, excellent even, but really, it was very similar to many other porkchops I have had, only on a stick. The Fair seemed the wrong place for sushi. Neither of us was tempted by Buster's 2 lb Belly Buster burger. But other people were.

But the Fair doesn't want to leave its patrons without ways in which to improve themselves as well, physically (and even spiritually but I didn't take pictures of the Christian, Muslim, Scientology or other such booths.) I don't know how long you'd have to stand on the Magic Fit to work off one of those 2 lb burgers, but I imagine it would take quite a while. And if something you ate stained your teeth, well, you could have that taken care of, too. And lastly, if it was all just too much, you could relax in a massage chair.

NOW FOR A BIT OF FAIR WARNING - I MIGHT BE HEADED YOUR WAY

I'm leaving Saturday for one of my road trips. I shall attempt to blog at least once from every place that I spend time. Here's where it looks like I'm going:

Winslow, AZ - overnight stop
Albuquerque, NM - overnight stop
Amarillo, TX - overnight stop
Norman, OK - overnight stop
St. Louis, MO - Bouchercon, 4 nights
Memphis, TN - 2 nights
Clarksdale, MS (Mississippi Delta) - 5 nights
Dallas, TX - overnight stop
Van Horn, TX - overnight stop
Tucson, AZ - overnight stop
HOME

IF YOU DON'T THINK TOO GOOD, DON'T THINK TOO MUCH

2011-08-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

Ted Williams - "The Kid", "The Splendid Splinter", "Teddy Ballgame", "The Thumper", "Mr Red Sox", "Toothpick Ted" and "The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived" - said that.

He meant it as advice to someone trying to hit a baseball with a bat - arguably the single most difficult thing to do in any sport. Consider that someone who manages to get a hit in baseball three times out of every ten tries is a great success. Only on the rarest of occasions, and not since 1941 (70 years ago), does anyone consistently get a hit four times out of ten. (Oh yeah, and that guy was Ted Williams.)

But as much as I love baseball, this blog isn't about that. What Mr. Williams had to say about hitting a ball with a bat is applicable to all sorts of things, including writing.

Maybe I can press the point with another quote and a video clip. Bruce Lee, in Enter the Dragon, says and demonstrates much the same idea. The quote is: "Don't think; feel. It's like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory."

Okay, so maybe that just confuses matters and maybe this whole point I'm trying to make is a stretch anyhow. But the point is that one of the greatest enemies of any writer is over-thinking, over-working, over-tweaking, over-fiddling, over-worrying, over-you-name-it. (Batters, too.)

Once you've put together the basics of something then just do it, and do it some more and even more. An athlete relies on muscle memory to get them through the mechanics of what they need to do. And that only happens through repetition, practice, over and over and boringly over again until you don't need to think about it, you just do it because it's natural.

Writing's no different. The more you do it, the less you have to think about it and the more likely it is you'll find yourself swinging for the fences or reaching out to all that heavenly glory.

CENTRAL AVENUE SIGHTS

2011-08-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

If you've been following my blog for any length of time, you probably know that I have something of a love affair going on with Central Avenue, south of downtown Los Angeles. Or at least with its history. Up until the late 1940s it was one of the most glamorous, vibrant, fascinating, musically and culturally rich and exciting stretches of street to be found on planet Earth.

I'd learned a bit about it growing up in Los Angeles. I learned a lot more about it in the course of researching my first book: WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL. And then I learned even more about it in researching the book that I have most recently written - which my agent is currently sending out to editors - CENTRAL AVENUE.

I blogged about Central Avenue and included some photos in November 2009. (If you missed it, you can see it by clicking on this sentence.)

This past weekend was the 16th Annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival. The festival is an important part of the efforts to acknowledge the Avenue's history and to revitalize it as a thriving residential and commercial community. It's a good thing to support and it's also a lot of fun.

Some pictures are below. As for the new book, as soon as I know where it's going to find a home, look here - and elsewhere on my website - for an excerpt and further information.

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MY STRUGGLE WITH SUMMER

2011-07-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

There are times when I'm pretty sure I would have been better off having gone to summer school all through school, every year. Not because I wish I'd graduated high school at 15 or anything like that, or college at 18. But because if you don't become a teacher summer holidays in your youth set you up for a lifetime of struggle. Especially if, like me, you don't have a boss breathing down your neck other than yourself, spurred on by the occasional horrifying glance online at your bank account or last royalty statement.

Right now it's 83 degrees outside, sunny, not too humid. The me who grew up spending 17 years of summer holidays - kindergarten through my BA - is convinced that I ought to be out and about doing something other than sitting in front of this computer. I should be taking pictures, playing baseball, exploring different parts of the city, walking along the beach, SCUBA diving, sipping drinks on a terrace with a view, something else than what I'm doing.

Just writing this I'm distracting myself. I've got other stuff I ought to be writing: rewriting the second book in my new L.A. Trilogy, writing the third book, writing the first Lei Yue book, there's two other book ideas in varying states of progress and a non-fiction book idea percolating and a couple of short stories I have in mind.

But waaahh! I don't wanna!

I'm too old to be feeling this way, aren't I? I haven't been in school with a summer holiday since, since - oh shit, Gerald Ford was President. But all those damn formative years when I was growing up have apparently suckered something deep inside me into thinking - it's hot outside, it's summer, I should be out somewhere having fun.

I've got a plan. I'm not sure how much good it's going to really do me since I'm only doing it for three days, but I'm heading to the desert where it's 109 at the moment and only likely to be even hotter on the days I'm there next week. No one in their right mind wants to go outside in weather like that. And in spite of all evidence to the contrary, I am, I insist, in my right mind.

Plus, the deluxe hotel room in the deluxe hotel I will be staying in, normally goes for something north of $400 per night when the weather's good. I'm getting it for $89. (It's questionable whether or not the owners are in their right minds - why bother staying open in the summer?) And there's a swimming pool approximately 15 feet from the door of my room. And the air conditioning works.

Maybe I'll get some writing done. Maybe I ought to see about staying out there for the rest of the summer.

I don't have kids but I do have some advice for those of you reading this who do. Do them a favor, send them to summer school or encourage them to go into teaching.

CARMAGEDDON LOOMS

2011-07-12T09:38:00.000-07:00

To read the papers, to listen to the radio or watch the TV news, to see the electric signs along the freeways is enough to convince you that the end of Los Angeles as we know it will commence at about midnight this coming Friday, July 15.

Ten miles of the 405 – one of the world’s most congested freeways (“free” only in the sense that you don’t pay a toll to drive on it, otherwise the word is ironic) will be shut down until about six am the following Monday morning in order to tear down a bridge. According to nearly everyone the result is going to be CARMAGEDDON – THE TRAFFIC OF DOOM.

Oh get over it.

First off, the main part of the city it is going to affect is the Westside. And who wants to go over there anyhow, especially on a weekend? (I suppose beach lovers want to go there on weekends but I’m not one of them so I don’t care.) The Westside is Los Angeles-lite at best, the least interesting, least diverse, deathly-dullest part of the urban area.

Secondly, it’s the 405 folks! Sure it’s going to slow to an average speed of zero miles per hour. That’s down, I guess, from its usual average of something like twelve miles per hour or less. Not much of a drop in speed really.

When the 2 or the 210 or the 134 or the 10 east of downtown or the 5 north or the 60 east or the 110 south most of the time or the 101 north most of the time (we are blessed with many freeways on this side of town, unlike the deprived westsiders) – the freeways I take way more often than any others – drop from 65 or 70 to 30 or 40 mph, something they do once in a while – I and everybody else on them simply crank up our radios, suck it up and get where we’re going without too much additional fuss.

Thirdly – traffic? We spoiled Americans, we don’t know traffic.

Last August, on the outskirts of Beijing there was a nine-day, 100 kilometer traffic jam. And when I say “nine-day” I mean that’s how long you would have sat in your car listening to the same stupid blather on CNN or Fox radio (or their Chinese equivalents), or the latest crappy Top-40 playlist over and over and over again while waiting to get where you were going.

When I was in Bangkok for business in the spring of 1991, I got out of my last meeting of the day at a little after seven pm. It was raining and about 98 degrees F (about 37 C.) I got into a taxi and four-and-a-half-hours later I got out at my hotel – a distance of slightly more than three miles (4.828 km.)

The Bangkok correspondent for the magazine I worked for had a desk in the back of a van. While his brother-in-law drove the four to five hours average round trip – about five miles (8.04 km) – to the office, he’d put in office hours on the road.

One enterprising massage parlor bought deluxe vans, put beds in the back of them and offered pick up service from the Bangkok airport. Problem was that it got pretty expensive to spend as many as three hours with a “masseuse” on the way into town – rather than the hour that most customers indulged in at the parlor itself.

Every day is Carmageddon in a lot of places, but I guess we need something to make us feel special, or that we can complain about, or to distract us from the possible real life disasters that are waiting for us just around the corner.

Anyone shorting their U.S. T-notes yet?

HOW MANY TIMES MUST I SAY IT?

2011-07-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

What is wrong with us Americans? Why do we fawn all over and swoon at the site of members of the British Royal Family? William and Kate are no more than the latest odious, spoiled, inbred relics of the bad old days to pollute our shores and snarl our traffic. Every single thing that they represent, every fabric of their being is antithetical to the ideals that the United States was founded on. We fought a revolution against these assholes! Do I really have to repeat all that's wrong with the very concept of royalty?

Sheesh, if I was King, I'd give the bastards 90 days to vacate all of their ill-gotten premises and move into council housing or off with their heads. (And that's more lenient than I used to be on the subject. I must be mellowing with age.)

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? BURNING QUESTIONS for AUTHORS & BOOKSTORES

2011-07-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

A spectre is haunting bookstores – the spectre of e-publishing and sales.

Historically bookstores and authors have been partners, they have relied upon each other to try and make a go in two fields that have always been a tough business.

But the times have changed. These days, a lot of what is hurting bookstores is helping authors.

How can a store, working on very thin margins, with increasingly high overhead, hope to compete with Amazon and its deep discounts? Or with e-book sales – the only actual growth part of the book market?

And authors cannot afford to ignore Amazon and e-books. Increasingly, to make any kind of living from their writing, they need to focus their attentions on them.

I have read angry tweets and blogposts from booksellers railing against authors who link to Amazon from their websites to sell their books and who are lavishing their promotional attentions on e-book sales. And as a lover of bookstores I can sympathize with that.

But as an author, what am I supposed to do? Just like a bookstore, I’m trying to stay in business.

I make $2.06 from the $2.99 sale of an e-edition of one of my books through Amazon. I make $1.19 when a bookstore sells a trade paperback of the same book at its list price of $14.95. (Sales of my backlist in trade paperback editions had been at a slow trickle over the past couple of years. Now that the e-books are available, my total royalties are on a pace to increase by more than 350 percent this year.)

Have the changes in technology and the market turned authors and traditional booksellers from friend to foe?

It greatly saddens me that so many bookstores have closed, and that so many more are going to close. There is just no way that the new marketplace for books can possibly support nearly as many bookstores as have existed in the past. Only the strongest, most innovative, most creative bookstores are going to survive.

And as someone who loves bookstores, whose first job was in a bookstore, who credits bookstores for some of the minor success I’ve achieved so far as an author, I want to do what I can to help at least some bookstores survive, even thrive.

What can I and other authors do to help bookstores without hurting our own sales? I cannot stop promoting the sales of my e-books or even my paper & ink books that people buy from Amazon or other online sellers. How else am I supposed to earn the money that, among other things, allows me to buy books from bookstores?

The important question for us authors is: what do brick and mortar bookstores offer readers/book buyers that they can’t get cheaper and more conveniently online?

And, just like anyone in business, the next question for us authors is: what’s in it for me? How can working with bookstores help our bottom line?

The one and only thing that traditional bookstores can offer us authors that online booksellers can’t, is personal, face-to-face interaction: between us and the bookseller, between us and the book buying public when we show up for events at bookstores, and between the bookseller - who is representing us authors when they sell our books - and their customers.

How valuable are those things in the modern book marketplace is a vital question for both bookstores and for authors, like me, who still want to work with and support bookstores.

The very sad truth seems to be that the fewer bookstores there are - the less impact bookstore sales have on an author’s bottom line and the less cost-effective it becomes for authors to work with bookstores to promote their books. (If you know what you’re doing, you can reach a whole lot more people in an hour spent online than you will ever reach from any book event – which involve investments of many more hours of time and money.)

I love bookstores and want them to survive and prosper. But there seem to be limits on what I can do to help them.

I can continue to shop at them myself, which I will certainly do.

I can continue to do my best to write books that they can sell. I’d love to write a bestseller for them to sell. That’s what I, and every other author, have always done and it hasn’t changed.

I can put links to independent stores on my website and find other ways to encourage book buyers to shop at those stores. But I can’t afford to not link to Amazon and to my e-books where my readers can, if they choose, buy my books cheaper and more conveniently.

I can continue to do events and drop-in signings at bookstores (if they’ll have me after this blog) in the hope of helping them attract more customers – both to the event and afterwards when they know me and my book better and so they can do a better job of hand-selling. But my publishers have never contributed to my book tours – few publishers do for any of their authors – and events end up costing me time and money, just as they do the stores.

I am sorry to say that as much as I want to help, bookstores can really only help themselves if they want to survive. How they can do that is a subject for a whole lot more discussion and experimentation (if they can afford it with their already slim margins.)

In the meantime, if any booksellers can think of realistic (not charity, not compromising our own sales) ways that we bookstore-loving authors can help, I’d sure love to hear them.

ENOUGH WITH THE CANNIBAL JOKES

2011-06-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

Eva and I were just in Truckee, CA for a couple of days. It's high up - 7,000 feet - in the Sierras, just above Lake Tahoe. We were considering the possibility of spending as much as a month there sometime this coming winter. (If we do, she will spend as much time as she can on cross country skis and I will spend a lot of time writing - and probably drinking.)

Luckily, with a population nearing 15,000 it has come a long way since the Donner Party missed the trail there in 1846, leading to the deaths of 42 of its members and the consumption of several of their corpses by the others. Here's where they took their wrong turn:If the hotel - wood building in background - and the 76 station had been there 165 years ago probably none of us would have ever heard of the Donner Party.

Here's the monument to them:If any of you out there reading this can figure out what the hell the inscription means, let me know in the comments. I sure can't figure it out.

It is a beautiful area:

Chinese workers built the western half of the transcontinental railroad right across what is now Donner Pass and down into Truckee:
They built long tunnels to house the tracks so that they wouldn't be impassable with snow in the winter. And they propped up the tracks with boulders where the mountain curves didn't cooperate.
This is tunnel 6, dug 1,600 feet through solid granite. They were able to dig about four inches a day. It would have taken them 17 and a half years except that someone had the bright idea to bore a wide hole through the top of the mountain, halfway into where they wanted the tunnel to go. Workers were lowered down into it so that the tunnel could be dug out from four places at once: both ends and each way from the middle.

We have a whole lot to thank Chinese laborers for, at least historically.

I'm on a quest to find the oldest, continuously operating Chinese restaurant in America. If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, please let me know.

I hereby, probably rashly, promise that should we spend a month in Truckee this coming winter, I will write a blog every day. The Donner Party kept diaries, there's a tradition for me to uphold.

I LEFT MY HEART...IN LOS ANGELES

2011-06-23T09:09:00.001-07:00

Taken from the window of the office in the house where I'm writing this.

There was a time when I really hated San Francisco. It wasn't simply the old rivalry thing between L.A. and San Francisco. Well, maybe it was a little of that. But there was something about the place that just plain annoyed me, gave me the creeps, felt wrong and shallow and, in the Texan phrase - all hat and no cattle.

I don't feel that way any longer. I now really like, even love, some things about the place, but as a whole I find it merely okay. These days I think of it as having an over-sized hat for the amount of cattle it does have. But it does indeed have some pretty nice bovines.

City Lights Bookstore is certainly one of them. Every time I'm in San Francisco, even if only for a few hours, I have to go there. It is a shrine, a monument, a place to go and pay homage - and money also, of course. I feel it is my obligation to future generations to help support the place. And it is so filled with books that are difficult, if not impossible, to find elsewhere that the trick is to narrow down my selections to a semi-affordable lot. My trip there yesterday cost me a bit north of a hundred bucks but I'll be savoring it for weeks to come. (I'm a slow reader.)

The Berkeley Bowl - okay, so it's in Berkeley, not in San Francisco - is one of the very greatest, if not the very greatest supermarkets on the planet. L.A. kicks the Bay Area's ass when it comes to variety and quality of ethnic markets, but we have nothing that can even come close to the Berkeley Bowl for a comprehensive, high-quality, reasonably-priced general supermarket. The best similar market in L.A. is practically a convenience store by comparison. I nearly cried when I was in there the other day. Central Market in Austin, Texas is the closest I've seen to it, but even it is not quite up to Berkeley Bowl's snuff - and it's a lot more expensive.

I have had some excellent meals since I've been here. The two standouts having been in Oakland: Lunch at The Brick Pig's House where the 90 year old family bbq recipe from Arkansas is going very strong. And dinner last night at Commis which was innovative and interesting and fun and very tasty indeed.

Other than seeing some friends, I haven't done much else here. (I've been house-sitting for four days.) Sadly, my favorite bar in the city - Jezebel's Joint - has long since closed down. It was a place that was representative of one of the other things I do like a lot about this place - it's easy, fluid, laissez-faire sexuality. In that sense the Bay Area does seem like a more highly evolved sort of place than most.

Then again, in the spirit of competitiveness between SF and LA (and NYC, too, for that matter) I would like to point out that L.A. (in Silverlake, my neighborhood) had a large gay rights demonstration - following a raid on a gay bar called The Black Cat - a full two years before the more famous Stonewall events in NYC. And in 1911, when California voted in favor of women's suffrage, it narrowly passed only because more people in Los Angeles voted in favor of it than did in San Francisco where it lost.

So, in the days I've been up here I left my heart in Los Angeles, but there are some things I wish I could take back home from here with me when I head back down Interstate 5.

READERS WHO WON'T LIKE YOUR BOOKS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM

2011-06-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

Last weekend at the California Crime Writers Conference, Kris Calvin who had attended my workshop came up to me afterwards with a newly purchased copy of THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD for me to sign. I gave her my standard warning: "That's the book of mine that's filled with the most sex and violence. You might want to take it with a glass of wine."

This morning, in a comment on Ashedit's blog, in reply to a comment on that blog by me, she wrote: "...as a woman of a certain age, I’m sure I looked like I was there for the cozies and just got in the wrong line. Under the circumstances, your comment was quite thoughtful."

She's already read the book and liked it. Thanks Kris.

Actually, I give the same warning to everybody, regardless of age, sex, creed, color or place of national origin. Call it a disclaimer, if you will. THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD is a very tough book. It is filled with sex and violence and even sexual violence. I felt that it had to be to get the story told with the kind of impact I wanted it to have. I don't feel that those elements are in the book gratuitously, and most of the readers and reviewers who have commented on it seem to share my feeling.

Still, I did once talk someone out of buying it. And I felt really terrible about that. It was at a book event where only one very nice person showed up in spite of the store's and my efforts to promote the event. I chatted and drank tea for quite some time with the one attendee and it became apparent - obvious - that she was going to hate The Living Room of the Dead, probably wouldn't be able to get through it, and might very well hold it against me and the bookstore for the rest of her reading days if we sold it to her. (She was particularly fond of Lilian Jackson Braun's cat mysteries.)

I ended up spending nearly a hundred bucks in that store to assuage my feelings of guilt over having driven away the only customer I'd attracted to the store in the first place. (Apparently she appreciated it, though, and became a regular customer after that.)

What's an author to do?

I don't want to write books that everybody will enjoy. I'd then have to worry that they were wishy-washy books.

I like to challenge and provoke my readers, and myself, with ideas and surprises and strong scenes that evoke strong reactions.

But hey, I'm like anyone else - I like to be liked. I like it when my readers enjoy my books and say nice things about them.

And I don't like to make assumptions about people. Much of the time those assumptions are proven wrong anyhow. (Which is, much of the time, pleasing to me.)

But sometimes you do encounter people who you just know, with certainty, are not going to like your book/s. Is the meager royalty from that one sale worth alienating them?

So other than that one time, I have resisted giving anyone an anti-sales pitch. But in the spirit of caveat emptor, I try to help them make a somewhat informed decision.

What about any of you other authors out there who might chance to be reading this? Have you ever signed a book for someone you were pretty sure was going to hate it? Ever recommended to someone that they not read your book?

CRIME WRITERS CONFERRING

2011-06-14T09:14:00.000-07:00

I don't think it's all that strange that I loathe meetings but I like conferences.

When they are necessary at all, meetings ought to be like most sentences ought to be - short and to the point. They seldom are.

Conferences, on the other hand, are a more leisurely, sociable affair. The eating and drinking, schmoozing, hanging out in the hallways, and more importantly the bar, the flirting, the arguing, the discussing can all be a lot of fun and even useful.

Last weekend was the California Crime Writers Conference (CCWC) in Pasadena and it was everything I like in a conference. (Disclosure: I may be a bit biased, I was one of the organizers, the "Programming Co-Chair.")

Unlike the big reader/fan oriented conferences - which I also like, I hope to see you, yeah, you who's reading this, at Bouchercon in St. Louis in September - this was very much a writers conference. The emphasis of the program was on workshops, classes and demonstrations that might be of use to crime writers in their work. Near as I could tell from the comments, we succeeded in that.

We also succeeded in having all the sorts of fun that people are supposed to be having at conferences. Although, since I live reasonably near the venue I didn't stay in the hotel so I can make no observations or educated remarks concerning what went on there after hours.

I did get plenty of exercise. While the sessions were in session, I wandered up and down the hallways poking my head in and out of rooms to make sure everything was running smoothly. I shot pictures. I ran errands. I toted and lifted and hauled things. If I ever do this sort of thing again - which I probably will - I am going to get myself a pedometer. It is possible that I walked well over five miles each day through the corridors and staircases of the Pasadena Hilton. I rarely sat down.

And I wasn't even the busiest, most exhausted person there. I think that distinction may have fallen on - like a ton of bricks - Sybil Johnson, President of the Sisters in Crime Los Angeles Chapter and one of the two conference chairs and chief organizers. (The other being Naomi Hirahara, Prez-Emeritus of Southern California Mystery Writers of America.) Here's a picture of Sybil that she's going to hate. I took it just after she'd had her first few sips of bourbon at the Agents & Editors Cocktail Reception on Saturday night, possibly the first time she'd sat down all day. My guess is that she was punchy tired and relieved that it was all going so well. (I wonder if her giving me the finger was intentional? Maybe she knew she wasn't going to like this picture. Sorry Sybil.) (UPDATE: Sybil sort of even likes the picture and wonders where I got the idea she was giving me the finger. I was joking about her giving me the finger, but her hand uncurling from around her drink sort of looks like it.)

And here's some more pictures from what was a great, fun, interesting and instructive weekend:T. Jefferson Parker (Saturday) and S.J. Rozan (Sunday) were the keynote speakers.Agents and editors were fed drinks and appetizers at a cocktail reception to soften them up for attending writers to schmooze.Attending writers did their own fair share of drinking, too. Really? Hmmmm. Writers? Go figure.
There were panels, presentations and workshops which, as these things tend to be, were not exactly visual spectaculars. But according to all the comments were useful and interesting, entertaining even.
Then again, it wouldn't be any kind of crime writers conference without some weaponry and/ or violence. Thanks to the Pasadena Police Department for a class on the when, why and how use of force by police officers.
And as most crime writing conferences seem to attract a majority female audience (oh you bloodthirsty women, you) there was the ever popular "how to stage a realistic fight" class in which a woman gets to beat on a guy. (Thanks to Bill Hayes and Jennifer Thomas of Old School Kenpo in Torrance, CA.)

The next California Crime Writers Conference will be in two years. Most likely around this same time in June 2013. I recommend it.

SADDENED OVER THE RAPTURE & RAPTUROUS OVER MEXICO

2011-05-22T11:01:00.000-07:00

Promises, promises. As ever the nutjob Christians failed to deliver and the true believers are still among us. I was really looking forward to getting rid of a whole lot of wide-eyed, self-righteous morons, but here it is two days later and they're still here.

Oh well. I do take some solace in that apparently a great many of the self-annointed were fleeced of their earthly goods prior to their anticipated elevation into the heavens. As my father so aptly put it, "People that naive and stupid are a lot like rabbits. They exist almost entirely as feed for other animals that are higher on the food chain."

He's right. I'm not inherently a scam artist or a thief or a con man, but crooks gotta eat, too. And if they can make a good meal out of the misguided followers of charlatans, I'm all for it.

Okay, so now that that's off my chest, I'd rather talk about something I enjoyed - MEXICO.

Last week I went to Mexicali and Ensenada and points in between. The trip was for research for my as yet untitled, first Wen Lei Yue novel. (Well, first and a half if you count the second half of SHANGHAIED.)

Just as happened, or rather didn't happen, when I went with a friend last year to Tijuana while she researched her novel, I wasn't kidnapped, robbed, raped or beheaded. I'm certain that comes as a great surprise - and hopefully relief - to the many people who seem to harbor the delusion that that is what will be the inevitable consequence of a trip south of the border.

I suppose, sadly, it bears repeating: The United States is one of the most violent, crimeridden places on the planet - at least parts of it. Los Angeles, where I live, is no slouch when it comes to murder and mayhem. Why should I be afraid of Mexico?

To toss around a statistic, the U.S. murder rate last year was 6.8 out of every 100,000 people. The overall murder rate in Mexico was 13.7 out of every hundred thousand. BUT, if you take away the murders in Mexico that were related to the drug trade - not even including the few innocent bystanders - the murder rate in Mexico was just about equal to the U.S. at 7 out of every hundred grand. Tijuana is safer than Denver, or Phoenix, or Los Angeles.

So enough of that. It's frustrating that I feel the need to preface the good things I'm going to say about my trip to Mexico with that sort of stuff. Get over it. There's only news in reporting when unusual or extraordinary things do happen - "if it bleeds, it leads" - not in reporting the things that don't happen.

Mexicali's an interesting place. It's the capital of northern Baja California, has a population nearing a million, is a major industrial center - including a high tech industrial park called "Silicon Border" - and other than Americans fleeing across the border to find better, cheaper medical care it doesn't have much tourism.

Those of you who have read GRAVE IMPORTS and SHANGHAIED might recall that Wen Lei Yue, Ray's sidekick who has now become the main protagonist of the series, was born to a Chinese family in Mexicali. The city has the largest Chinese population in Mexico. And that population is growing somewhat as Chinese companies begin to set up factories in Mexico to produce goods to export to the U.S.

It is difficult to go more than a block, at the most two, in any commercial part of Mexicali without seeing a Chinese restaurant. I ate in a couple of them. It wasn't my idea of good Chinese food, but who knows, it might be the best of its sort in Mexico. It probably is. (So as to avoid going too much into food in this blog, I here refer you by link to a posting of mine on Chowhound.com in which I describe the culinary side of my trip to Mexico. Click anywhere on this paragraph to get there.)

Mexicali used to have a large and thriving Chinatown. Not so much anymore, though there are architectural remnants, a new shopping building in a Chinese style, a monument and plenty of Chinese cafes mixed in among the taquerias, shoestores, nightclubs and brothels of the old city center and redlight district. Here's some pictures: (As usual, click on the pic to see it larger.)

I will at least show a couple of food pictures, of sorts. The first is the menu from the Number Eight Chinese Restaurant - open 24 hours - in the redlight district. I was intrigued by the Wonton Soup with Carnitas, but it turns out that in Mexicali Chinese restaurants "carnitas" is simply "cha siu" (Chinese style roast pork) rather than the roasted then fried pork of Mexico. The local "asaderos" - masters of asada (grilling) - tend to set out large arrays of salsas and condiments, the like of which I have yet to see here in L.A.

As a photographer, one of the things I like best about Mexico is the use of bright colors - they pop out at you when the light hits them. And then, in Mexicali you are almost always aware of the border. You can turn up a street and uh oh, there it is. I know that it isn't, but it seems so, so arbitrary.

After two swell days and nights wandering around Mexicali, I got in my car and headed west over La Rumorosa to Tecate, then south through the Valle de Guadalupe to Ensenada.

La Rumorosa is a town on a rocky plateau at about 5-6,000 feet between Mexicali and Tecate. The road that goes through it is an amazing, strange, eerie road that curves wildly and steeply up from below sea level at Mexicali to the town. Turnouts along the way are lined with memorials to people who have died in auto plunges off the road. Sometimes in winter there is snow up there. The road is well-maintained but there are plenty of trucks and some crazed drivers. I took it slow and easy and enjoyed it plenty.

Once over La Rumorosa, turning south through Tecate you enter the Valle de Guadalupe - a beautiful valley of rolling hills, vineyards, olive groves, palm groves, wineries and numerous roadside food stands and restaurants. Here, however, I am letting you, dear reader, down from the photographic standpoint. For some reason I took no pictures on this part of the drive. Take it from me, it looks like Napa, the wineries have tastings, many of the wines I have tried from the region are excellent, and the jar of pickled red jalapenos and the jar of olives that I bought at a roadside stand are fantastic.

The valley spills you out on the coast, just a few miles north of Ensenada.

I'm not crazy about Ensenada. It is a town that exists almost entirely to service tourists, especially the cruise ship tourists who show up in droves. (NOTE: I have been informed, in no uncertain terms, that I am wrong about this by a number of highly vocal posters to a forum on the website BajaNomad. They all seem to be a lot more familiar with Ensenada than I am, so I stand corrected and am looking forward to a return visit so I can better get to know the place.) It does, however, have the largest container port in Baja California - a prime entry point for people being smuggled from Asia, particularly China, on their way to the U.S. That's why I was there.

Well, that and Manzanilla restaurant, a truly fantastic restaurant that is described in the Chowhound posting I linked to earlier in this blog post. (A recent blog post by the blogger MasaAssassin has an interview with the chef.)

Other than bars, strip clubs and horrible souvenir shops, the main attraction for visitors to Ensenada seem to be pharmacies where you can score drugs that usually require prescriptions in the U.S., either simply because they are cheaper or you want them without a prescription. There is a whole, large, not very touristy part of Ensenada, but I got there too late in the day to do much driving around to discover it. So, I finished my lunch, my exploration of the harbor, then mostly stuck to the awful tourist zone. But, here's some pictures:The fish market.
The bar at Manzanilla restaurant.Strange round building that I know nothing about.
Thursdays are 2 For 1 beer night at Hussong's. I saw two skinny guys working rapidly through two large ice buckets filled with bottles, maybe 24 bottles in all.
Anthony's is a disco that is popular with college kids and people off cruise ships. It is filled with women you can take out to the short time hotels nearby. At the "table dance" stripclubs, however, no takeaway is necessary, there are private booths and VIP rooms available inside for that sort of thing.Thus the popularity of Viagra and Cialis in the numerous nearby pharmacies.
Of course they have mediocre Chinese restaurants in Ensenada, too. Why would anyone think that fading, discolored, not very well shot photos of food would attract customers inside?What I was really there for was to see the harbor - where Wen Lei Yue will arrive in Mexico, smuggled on the container ship where I left her at the end of SHANGHAIED. I was hoping there'd be both a huge cruise ship, as well as a big freighter in port when I was there, but there was only the freighter. And it wasn't even a particularly scenic time of day to shoot a picture.

Anyhow, a good time was had. I got the research done that I needed to get done. And now I'm looking forward to going back sometime to engage in some leisurely wine tasting in the Valle de Guadalupe.

LA TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS IN THE CENTRAL CITY - THAT'S BETTER

2011-05-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

At last weekend's LA Times Festival of Books I had one particular interaction that really summed up for me why I liked it better this year - at USC, near downtown L.A. - than I have in previous years - at UCLA, in West L.A.

A family came up to me as I "manned" the Sisters in Crime L.A. Chapter booth. The parents were probably in their 30s, one daughter was a young teen, the other maybe nine or ten. They were Hispanic and they had come from a booth selling books in Spanish. Now the parents wanted their daughters to meet some writers who wrote in English and to also look over the English books on sale. We chatted for a while. The parents apologized that they couldn't afford to buy books, that instead they often took their daughters to the library. I told them there was no reason to apologize, that the important thing was that their daughters and they were interested in reading and in books and wanting to know about writers. Their commitment to that, and to show up at a book festival on a weekend - via public transit (far easier to USC than to UCLA) no less - was a wonderful thing. We talked about books and writing and then they went on their way.

Throughout the day I spoke with similar families and individuals, people who loved books and reading, couldn't really afford to buy many, or any books, but who used their local libraries and were happy to be at a festival where they could meet writers and other like-minded people. A lot of them had also come via public transit.

This year's LATFOB was a great deal more diverse - near as I could tell from walking around and observing the crowd - than it has been in previous years. (By "diverse" I mean by race, ethnicity and national origin.) My completely unscientific, based only on personal observation, estimate is that about half the crowd was not Caucasian. (At UCLA it always seemed like it was 85 percent or so white middle and upper class people like myself, like the Westside itself.)

I have no idea how book sales went. It could be that booksellers weren't all that happy. I have a feeling that the book buying public in L.A. is heavily skewed toward the more affluent Westside. But this year's LATFOB struck me as much more representative of the city as a whole, and of the greatest single thing about Los Angeles - it's diversity. And I liked that very much.

It doesn't have much to do with what I was just writing about, but here's a picture of me, Paul Marks and Laura Levine signing books in the SinCLA booth.
Like any book event these days I spent much of my time talking with other writers about ebooks. Several times while I was sitting in the booth, hoping to sign paper and ink books that people bought, I was asked if my books were available for Kindle, or Nook or some iGadget or another. They are. Five people told me that they planned to buy my ebooks. I made jokes that if they brought their e-reader to me I'd sign it for them.

Joking aside, it's an interesting question that a lot of us writers were pondering. A lot of people do want their books signed. Some people collect first editions. How is that going to happen? One thing I've been considering is to print out a bunch of copies of the covers of my ebooks. I can sign those for people. I suppose with regard to first editions, one possibility is that, say, there is a special e-cover for the first, oh, 500 or a thousand or whatever ebooks are downloaded. Then a different cover comes out.

I don't know. Anybody have any thoughts on the matter?

I also encountered several writers who had recently finished their first book and were polling us published authors as to whether or not we thought they should consider going straight to self-publishing ebooks, rather than a traditional publishing deal. The consensus among the writers I spoke with, and overheard, seemed to be that for someone who hasn't been previously published, a traditional paper and ink deal was still important, maybe even vital, for a first book (or two) to give it credibility. (A traditional publication comes with at least something of a reassurance that someone other than the author thought the book was worth publishing and that it has been edited, copyedited and proofread by others who presumably know what they are doing.) In spite of all the changes going on in publishing, most writers seem to think that hasn't changed - at least not yet.

No one, however, could agree on what this all means to mid-list authors such as myself who already have a track record of traditional paper and ink publications. That's something that is currently driving myself and most of the other authors I know who are in the midst of careers similar to mine utterly nuts.

e-GADS! More thoughts on ebooks and some useful information, too.

2011-04-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

If you're a writer, editor, agent, publisher, book designer, bookseller, book distributor, etc., and not completely out of touch with reality, you've been thinking and reading a lot about ebooks lately. And if you are anything like me, you're still trying to sort out the whole thing, figure out what the hell it all means to you now and what it's going to mean to you in the future. I've been reading pretty much everything I can get my hands on about this brave, scary, fascinating, disruptive, opportunity-laden (take your pick) new world.

eBooks are the future whether you like it or not. Sales of paper and ink books are going to continue to decline in the future - though probably never entirely go away. And eBooks are going to become the dominant form of book publishing.

A friend of mine who is a designer and marketing person who has recently been laid off from a long time job in the music industry asked me for some information on e-publishing. She is more interested in the technical side of things than the author's point of view. I sent her a long email filled with links to articles and websites that I hoped might be useful to her. If you've been keeping up with developments like I have, most of what follows will probably be familiar to you. If not, maybe some of it will be useful to you, too.

Everything in red or blue is a link.

ISSUES FROM THE AUTHOR'S PERSPECTIVE

The dialog that has had the publishing world all ababble over the past few weeks is the one on Joe Konrath's blog between him and Barry Eisler - who recently turned down a half million dollar contract offer (for two books) to self-publish ebooks. If you haven't read it, you should. Click on this paragraph to do so.

Nathan Bransford has some interesting points to make regarding some of what's brought up in the Konrath-Eisler conversation. Click on this paragraph to read that.

The Shatzkin Files also has a lot of interest to say regarding the conversation.

If you aren't a member of the Author's Guild, you should be. The Guild's Fall 2010 / Winter 2011 Bulletin has numerous articles on e-publishing that are all interesting and/or useful to authors. Unfortunately the Bulletin doesn't seem to be available to link to. So this paragraph will simply lead you to the Guild's site where you can join up and get your own copy.

THINGS A WRITER NEEDS TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT

Editing & Proofreading - This should go without saying. Don't edit yourself. You're bad at it. I don't care who you are. Get someone else to edit your book. Then get another someone else who is a grammar nerd to copyedit your book. Then you, and hopefully at least one other - two would be better - people need to proofread the book before it gets turned into a file for uploading.

Book Formatting (as opposed to file formatting for upload) - A lot goes into making a book readable: font style and sizes, title page, copyright, edition and ISBN information page, table of contents, acknowledgments, chapter headings and styles, paragraph styles, page numbers, etc. Traditionally, your publisher does all that for you. If you are e-publishing a book yourself, you have to do all that for yourself, or find someone who knows what they're doing to do it for you. Sure, you can e-pub a Word or PDF manuscript file, and just as surely it isn't going to look very good if you do. I don't have any links for you here, you'll have to do some research to find people or companies who will do this for you if you can't do it for yourself.

Covers - Chances are, you're going to need new, attractive, attention-grabbing covers. If you've gotten the rights back to your backlist - like I have - most likely you don't have the right to use the same covers the books were originally published with. If you're publishing a new book, it needs a good cover. Again, no links here, find someone who is good to do them for you.

ISBNs - Every new edition of your book, other than those you e-publish to sell on Amazon, will need a new ISBN. Barnes & Noble requires a different ISBN than the one you use for other ebooks - such as those you might publish on Lulu or Smashwords, with iBooks or for the SONY e-reader. You can buy them a lot cheaper in lots of 10. You can buy them from the website you will get to by clicking on this paragraph.

Copyright Registration - It isn't required to register your copyright, publication itself creates a copyright, but if legal questions ever do arise, a registered copyright can be helpful. In traditional publishing, the publisher should register the copyright for you. If you're e-publishing your own books, you should consider doing it for yourself. Once again, click on the paragraph to be taken to the site.

Library of Congress - You don't have to have your book in the Library of Congress, but hey, it can't hurt.

Paper & Ink - No matter what you do, some people are going to want traditional copies of your books. If you're e-publishing yourself, there are ways to have small print runs, or print-on-demand books printed and distributed. One of those is with Amazon's Create Space service.

Another is by finding an Espresso machine that you can use. In Los Angeles, Flintridge Books has an Espresso machine and you can contract book printing through them. (Go to the store and take a look at books printed on the machine first, though. While the quality is good, I don't think that it is yet quite up to the quality available from traditional printing methods.)

TECHNICAL ISSUES

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu and Smashwords all have software on their sites to help you publish and upload your ebooks to their sales sites. There is more that can go wrong in the process than they would like you to think there is. If you aren't completely sure of what you are doing in the way of formatting the files for upload, you should probably get someone to do it for you. That's what I did.

I recommend eBook Architects. I found them to be reliable, fast, reasonably priced and responsive to my questions and requests. There are plenty of other companies who provide the same service, though. You can google for them.

If you do want to do it yourself, or if you have someone else format the files for you and then you need to upload them, here are a variety of links that will come in handy:

Amazon's Digital Publishing Site.

Barnes & Noble's Digital Publishing Site.

Lulu - an online digital book seller, publisher and marketing company.

Smashwords - another online digital book seller, publisher and marketing company.

Mobipocket - the development site for .mobi files, which are what you upload to Amazon for sale for Kindles.

Lexcycle - sort of an FAQ for the creation of epub files for B&N, SONY, iBooks, etc.

Jedisaber - another FAQ with further information on the creation of ePub files.

Apple's support page for creating ePub files from Pages. (A word of warning, Apple not only pays lousier royalties (than the others) for books sold on its iBook site, but it is also the most finicky when it comes to formatting files for uploading to its site.)

That pretty much sums up what I have come across that seems of use to me so far. If you've come across anything else please let me know in the comments. This is certainly the biggest business issue for authors today and is going to continue to be for quite some time. The more we all know about it, the more likely we are going to be able to take advantage of opportunities and the less likely we will fall into traps.

HERE'S WHAT I DID IN JAKARTA

2011-03-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

I am, obviously, not all that afraid to embarrass myself - in public or private. I hate the way I look and sound on video. But... as these videos are now available and I am committed to exposing myself on this website - well, within limits - here are the videos of my two presentations / panel discussions in Jakarta at @america. For some reason, the videos don't show all of the slides in my presentation, concentrating instead on my hidung besar and other such oddities. In both cases, I begin the show with my own presentation, then the panelists take over and I do my best to moderate.

So, here they are, feel free to fast forward:

The American Road Trip Tradition - March 13

Baseball, in America & Indonesia - Feb 27

ON MY WAY HOME - MUSINGS ON ASIA

2011-03-16T20:53:00.000-07:00

EVA Airport Lounge, Bangkok Airport: I considered slugging this "Thailand" as well, but since I've already checked out through immigration, I don't suppose I'm still in Thailand. I'm in that netherworld of airports and no man's lands between border checks.

I learned a few new things while I've been here, but mostly I've had a lot of old ones reinforced. Here's a selection:

Buddhism, like any other religion, is a whole lot of different things to different people. Like most religions, everyone tries to claim it's really a philosophy, some concepts, some ways of living one's life and "not really a religion." Bullshit! The vast majority of the people who practice it, practice it and relate to it no differently than adherents of any other religion do to theirs. Buddhists often say things like, "I hope Buddha protects me." "I prayed to Buddha to make more money." "Thanks to Buddha for..." "Buddha is challenging me by..." etc. And Buddhists do a whole lot of different things. Thai and Tibetan Buddhists happily eat meat. Balinese Buddhists sacrifice animals - including puppies. Buddhists are as dismissive of women, or use their religion to suppress women, as much as any other religion. Buddhists all over the place pass the collection plate and rake in plenty of cash and get involved in all sorts of interesting scandals - financial, sexual, political, you name it. Sure, Buddhism, like pretty much any other religion, has some good, useful precepts. But in its actual practice it is as venal, corrupt, corrosive and generally offensive as I find any and all other religions.

Women are horribly exploited and oppressed in most countries, sure, but it's also not quite so simple. According to an international survey released on Women's Day this year, about five percent of North American companies have women CEOs. In EU companies, the figure is about nine percent. Guess what country has the highest percentage of women CEOs of any in the world? That would be Thailand, with about 30 percent. China comes in second at about 19 percent. Still, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Thai women are forced into prostitution by economic, social and cultural circumstances. And Thai society doesn't seem much bothered by that. But at the same time Thailand is very much a matriarchal society in which women generally hold the purse-strings and run the households. Go figure.

Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population and they are trying their damndest to love us (Americans) even though we don't make it easy. Electing Obama, who spent part of his childhood there, was a big help - Indonesians take great pride in that. Our invasion of Iraq, however, our conduct of the war in Afghanistan, the demonization and suspicion in our media of Muslims, our support for oil-rich brutal oppressive dictatorships (in part because we think they'll help us hold back the terrorists) all make making friends with Indonesia a whole lot harder than it should be. And we really could very much use a good, largely Islamic, friend in the world.

Architecture - well, just scroll down to the blog about that and you'll see what I'm saying.

Whining and casting blame is something that we Americans have become expert at. People in Asia don't have time or patience for it. It just gets in the way of getting their jobs done, developing their countries, feeding their families, making their lives better. It is the one thing that they understand the least of about us Americans (what have you got to really complain about?) and the thing they like the least. I'm with them.

Counterculture - a good, solid core of wacky, creative, disruptive outsiders who can hold their societies up for examination, introspection, even ridicule are the one thing that most Asian countries seem to lack, and sorely need. It won't be easy to develop that - these are societies that put a premium on harmony and social cohesion and greatly discount individualism. So far that dedication to purpose and the greater common good has served them in good stead. And there is certainly no good reason to toss it all out. But beyond a certain point, if a society, an economy, a body politic is to continue to develop, and not simply plateau, it needs its nut jobs, its crazies, its wild eyed visionaries who sometimes make people uncomfortable. There are some of them around the region who are making themselves known, and there are some of them who are being brutally held down in places like China and Singapore and Malaysia and Vietnam - not to even mention Burma and North Korea. But there aren't enough of them, not yet, and I have no idea how a country provides for their development.

Those are just a few thoughts that have come to mind.

THE LUNCH THAT GOT AWAY

2011-03-15T21:22:00.001-07:00

Bangkok, Thailand: That's the title of my short story that's in the new anthology, Bangkok NoirHere's a picture of me, Colin Cotterill (another of the included writers) and Christopher G. Moore (yet another of the included authors and the editor) in the office of the publisher here in Bangkok.Clicking anywhere on this paragraph will take you to the publisher's website, where you can buy copies. (It will also, eventually - don't know when - be available as an e-book.)

And here, to whet your appetite, is a short excerpt (it is only a short story after all) from

THE LUNCH THAT GOT AWAY

“Sorry, no fish today, Khun Ray.” Plaa looked more upset by that than she ought to be.
Maybe she had sold out. I hoped so for her sake. But it was still early, and this would be the first time ever.
“Plaa, is something wrong?”
“No, no problem, Khun Ray, only no fish today.”
She’s a bad liar.
“Come on, what is it?” She bit her lip and looked away. I could barely hear her.
“Robbers, Khun Ray, take fish and all my money. Make big trouble for me.”
I’d been buying lunch from Plaa for a few years. She makes the absolutely best green curry-coated, banana leaf-wrapped baked fish I’ve ever had. And she sells it every day out of her cooler on the street at Sukhumvit Soi 11, across from my hotel, for 25 baht.
I was in town for one hellish day of appointments. Our Bangkok correspondent was mad at the editor of the magazine. I couldn’t blame him. I was, too. But I don’t see why he had to take it out on me. I guess it was my fault for letting him arrange my schedule.
My first appointment had been an interview at the Central Bank at four-thirty this morning. The guy I met gets into the office at three to avoid traffic. My last interview is set for seven this evening, back next door to the Central Bank. In between I’ve got four more appointments scattered all over town. Those six interviews are going to add up to a total of about three hours of work, for which I’m going to spend at least twelve hours stuck in traffic.
I like Bangkok when I don’t need to get anywhere.
At least the correspondent loaned me his rolling office, so I can work at the desk in the back of the van as his brother-in-law drives me around town. And, having been the one who introduced me to Plaa’s fish, he didn’t want her to lose out on my business, so he kindly routed us past her usual spot just before lunch.
“When did this happen, Plaa?”
“I get here ten o’clock, Khun Ray. They waiting for me, push me, take cooler, run away.”
That’s an hour ago, and Bangkok is a very big city. I doubt there’s much I can do.
But I like Plaa. She works hard and spends little on herself so she can afford to keep her fifteen year old daughter Noi in school and out of the bars. I’m here to write an economic update on the country. My appointments are all with bigshots. But it’s Plaa, and people like her, that actually make this place tick.
“Do you know who it was? Did you recognize them?”
In Bangkok everybody knows who everybody else is, at least within their neighborhoods. And why would anyone come across town to rob a street vendor?
She gets a look on her face that I don’t like. A look that tells me she knows who it was but doesn’t want to say.
I ask again and she pretends like she doesn’t understand me. I know she does. Her English isn’t good, but it’s good enough.
There’s a tap on my shoulder. It’s Cho, my driver for the day. He wants to get me back in the van. We’ve only got an hour to get to the next appointment, and it’s a couple of miles away. I’d walk if it wasn’t ninety nine degrees and ninety some odd percent humidity and not likely to rain at any minute, and I wasn’t in a suit.
Cho wants to be a journalist. I have him sit in on my interviews in case I need any translation. It’s a matter of pride for him that we’re punctual, no matter how bad the traffic.
But I don’t want to let this drop. I’m getting tired of hearing all the glowing reports about the booming Thai economy. I could already write exactly what the next three interviews are going to tell me. ‘It’s 1992, if the economy keeps growing at eleven percent a year, by 2000 it will be, blah blah blah.’ I can do the optimistic math as well as the next well-connected mogul or government minister. It all sounds too good to be true, which it is.
Plaa’s got a real problem, maybe one I can do something about.
“Cho, Plaa was robbed. I think she knows who did it but she won’t tell me. Could you ask her?”
He leads her a few feet away, their backs turned. They talk for a minute before Cho comes back to tell me what he’s found out. Plaa stays where she is but turns toward us. Her face is pointed down, but I can see she’s looking at us through the top of her eyes.
“I think maybe better we go to your appointment, Khun Ray. This maybe big trouble. Better we not involved.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Man who steal from Plaa work for Big Shrimp.”
The name sounds familiar. “What’s that?”
“Big new restaurant, Sukhumvit 37. Owned by wife of general.”
I’d heard of it. There was a small stink raised when an old apartment building full of working class people was torn down to clear the land for it. And the general himself has recently been associated with some shady land deals. But wives of generals are well connected.
“Huh? What would they want with Plaa’s fish? And she couldn’t have had much money.”
“They want know how Plaa cook her fish. They offer her money, but she not want to tell. Her cook same as mother and grandmother. Is family secret. Today they steal fish and money and tell Plaa if she not tell, then she no do business any more.”

FUN WITH BUILDINGS - ASIAN SKYLINES

2011-03-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Take a look at these partial skyline and building views. The top one is Pudong, across the river from Shanghai (in 2006, no doubt it's changed by now.) The next three are around Jakarta, the three after that are high-rise apartment buildings in Bangkok.

UPDATE: Here's a few more I took this morning (March 16) of Bangkok office buildings:

Take a look at these:
Chicago, Houston and Minneapolis.

Chicago has some fun old skyscrapers, and a few new ones with a sense of playfulness in the architecture, as does Minneapolis (the new ones that is), but for the most part, almost any developing Asian city is kicking our fat, lazy, slow American asses when it comes to fun, interesting, playful, exciting, innovative architecture. Increasingly our buildings just look like the boxes that all those new Asian buildings came in.

SAMPAI JUMPAH LAGI, INDONESIA

2011-03-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Jakarta, Indonesia: Once again I'm sorry to be leaving. You know how there are places in the world that feel like home, that stimulate all your senses and excite your intellect and make you laugh and where you just plain feel comfortable? Well, Indonesia is one of those places for me. It's hot and sticky and I don't do great in that kind of weather. I've developed a nagging cough - I think from the one-two punch of massive pollution and going in and out of fierce air conditioning in Jakarta. I call it "Sakit Jakarta" - Jakarta Sickness. At this very moment I am alternately sweating and chilled - and I'm pretty sure I don't have a fever. And yet I love this place, I can't get it out of my system.

Go figure.

I love the contrasts. Indonesia is one of the most modern, traditional, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, natural, artificial, fast-paced, slow-moving, challenging and comforting places I know.

Last night I moderated a panel and gave a presentation on road trips across America, at a new U.S. Cultural Center in Jakarta called @america. It was in Pacific Place, a huge and super swank new shopping mall next to the stock exchange building. (There's a Bentley dealership on the ground floor.) Very few Indonesians can actually afford to buy anything there - even the food court is high-priced for most of them. But plenty dress up in their best to come and ride the escalators and window shop and look around.

My fellow panelists were highly educated, sophisticated, well-traveled Indonesians, as were most of the people in the audience and I felt as warmly welcomed and well-received by them as I did by the people in Jatinegara, where I was the night before (see the last blog), in a neighborhood that is poorer than anywhere in Los Angeles. Much poorer.

I don't know any other country that extends as genuinely warm, friendly, humorous and gracious a welcome to outsiders as does Indonesia. And I don't think it's just me viewing the place through rose colored lenses. I wish I knew what the secret is. I wish it were a virus and we could infect the rest of the world with it. My own country, the U.S., could use some.

So I'm loathe to leave. But I am looking forward to some good tacos.

JAIPONGING THE NIGHT AWAY

2011-03-11T19:17:00.000-08:00

Jakarta, Indonesia: Would I take my expensive camera, complete with two expensive lenses, to one of the poorer neighborhoods in the U.S. at night, to sit around on the street with locals drinking beer and shooting pictures of them doing something that is at least occasionally frowned upon by society at large - banned, even?

Probably not. It would be unwise.

Here, I don't think twice about it. One of my very favorite places on the planet is under a highway overpass at night, on the edge of a very dark, very poor, very dirty neighborhood called Jatinegara, where I am usually the only non-local to be seen. Even Indonesians from other parts of the city don't go there - some are afraid to. (I fruitlessly try to explain that while yes, Jakarta has crime, even increasing amounts of violent crime, it wouldn't even make the top 25 in crime statistics in the U.S.)

People in Jatinegara are, in my experience welcoming, friendly, helpful, happy to attempt conversing with me in my terrible Indonesian and proud that someone from far away is interested in their neighborhood and their lives.

There, six nights a week - they take Thursday night off - two stages are filled with musicians, singers and dancers performing Jaipongan. Rather than attempt to explain it, I will refer you to Wikipedia - which in this case, so far as I can tell, does a reasonably good job.

Men dance on the ground in front of the stage - sort of dancing with the women on the stage, who they shower with money - usually one and two thousand Rupiah bills (12 to 25 cents U.S.) - but also dancing with each other in a sort of martial artsish friendly competition for the attention of the women on stage.

Some of the women on stage might, or might not be, available for takeaway (so to speak), but you'd probably need to be a regular and get to know them first.

Last night I was there, by myself, enjoying one of my favorite things to do anywhere. I might have even danced a little - luckily there is no photographic evidence of that.

Here, though, is the other photographic evidence of my night out:

And okay, so he's not really a jaipong musician, but I'm pretty fond of nose-flute guy. He's good, too.

NOTHING TASTES LIKE CHICKEN

2011-03-09T23:53:00.000-08:00

Jakarta, Indonesia: Excepting, maybe, chicken. This seems like an issue here in the country where chickens were invented. Well, from whence they sprang - like potatoes and chilies from Peru and rock and roll from Africa by way of Mississippi.

Today I went to a local branch of the famous Taipei dumpling house, Din Tai Fung. It is fast becoming a large chain. (There's a branch in L.A., in Arcadia, as well as many throughout Asia.) Their specialty are Xiao Long Bao, (XLB) what are translated on their menu nearly everywhere (except here) as "juicy pork dumplings" - what New Yorkers (oh, those quaint rustics) refer to as "soup dumplings."

Here, in deference to the majority Moslem population of Indonesia, they are "juicy chicken dumplings."

It's a bad substitute. People are already wrong when they say that, for instance, frogs legs taste like chicken. They don't, they taste like frog's legs. They're wrong, too, about snake, especially cobra. Dog absolutely tastes nothing like chicken. And pork, most decidedly, does not taste even remotely like chicken. When I want an XLB, I want that porky goodness that doesn't taste like anything else.

Now I happen to love chicken. It is among my favorite meats. Yesterday for lunch I went to my very favorite nasi Padang (Minang) restaurant in the whole world - Natrabu on Jln. Agus Salim here in Jakarta. At a nasi Padang restaurant you sit down and piles of plates are stacked in front of you. You only pay for the plates that you eat the main ingredient out of. (Traditionally you can spoon the sauce from any plate onto your rice, and if you don't eat the solid stuff you don't have to pay for that plate.) It is the spiciest food in Indonesia and I love it.

I was spoiled for choice. And a full five of the choices - of which there were about 20 - were chicken (ayam): ayam goreng (fried), ayam pop (sort of poached in oil, served with a sharp red chili paste), ayam panggang (grilled with a tasty paste), ayam bakar (baked) and ayam in a creamy, spicy coconut milk sauce that I forget the name of. Any one of them would have been splendid. The chicken here is smaller than in the U.S. where even the chicken breasts have implants - and darker, too. It has a lot more flavor.

But it ain't pork, and it's never gonna be. They do, however, pit roast up a mighty fine crispy, crackling suckling pig in Bali. Buddhists and Hindus are happy to eat pork.

This week in Jakarta I have launched upon a new strategy. I am limiting my exposure to the outside world by day. When I go somewhere I take a taxi from my air conditioned hotel to the air conditioned wherever I'm going. Not only is the heat and humidity taken care of, but the air is more breathable. My lungs, though still experiencing a certain level of sakit Jakarta (Jakarta sickness) do feel better than they did after I overdid it during my first week here.

But I do go out at night. Last night I went with my friends Tim and Carol to Jatinegara, which is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Jakarta, maybe in the world. We were going to see people playing, singing and dancing jaipongnan in the street under an overpass next to the railroad tracks. We got there too early, at 8pm, and nothing was going to get underway until at least 10. We didn't want to hang around for hours, especially as they both had work to go to today, so we walked around for a while and have made plans to go back at the right time tomorrow - Friday.

There was plenty going on in the neighborhood though, and here's the photographic evidence:

LET THEM LIKE MCDONALD’S EVEN IF I DON’T

2011-03-07T18:28:00.000-08:00

Jakarta, Indonesia: On my way to the Denpasar airport to leave Bali, I passed through the tourist hellhole of the south. I passed several McDonald’s, a couple of Burger Kings, a few KFCs – which got me to thinking.

The McDonald’s in Indonesia are often open 24 hours and they are often full. At one time the McDonald’s on Jalan Thamrin in Jakarta was the busiest, most profitable McDonald’s in the world. (It's now either the one in Moscow or one in Germany, there are arguments about this.) All ten of the busiest McDonald’s worldwide are outside the U.S. – probably all 20, maybe more.

I don’t like McDonald’s. There are very few places on the planet where I don’t feel that I can find something better, cheaper even, not too far away. But a whole lot of people love it and that’s their business and like it or not, when it shows up in a place like Indonesia it is a sign of progress. To most Indonesians those golden arches are a sign that their lives are getting better, that there might be some opportunities opening up that didn’t used to be there.

Same with KFC. I don’t understand its popularity in Indonesia – where fried chicken was invented and where within spitting distance of any given international franchise you can find better and cheaper local fried chicken. Still, I am apparently in the minority.

Does that make me part of the problem? A cultural imperialist happy to spread my Yankee crapola all over the world, destroying the local “authentic” culture through the imposition of globalization?

It would be the height of arrogance for me to deny people here something they like in the name of providing me with a more “authentic” experience of their country.

And you know, Bob Dylan had it right: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” Indonesians regularly vote in favor of international fast food franchises with their rupiah, and for most of them that money is harder to come by than it is for most Americans (and Western Europeans) - so those “votes” are pretty damn meaningful.

Luckily, though at times and in places more difficult to find than others, the “authentic” Indonesia is still out there to be found. Sometimes it is even right next door to a KFC or out back behind a gigantic mall. (For that matter, all these new fast food restaurants and glitzy shopping malls are pretty authentic to Indonesians. They’re part of their life, an increasingly welcome part of it.)

But if you want to find the traditional Indonesia you just have to look and not get distracted by the glow of the golden arches or by your own perspective that wants to deny other people what you already have the choice to spurn or not yourself.

SSSSSHHHHH!

2011-03-05T17:47:00.000-08:00

Tirtigangga, Bali: I am loathe to write this blog. I have been coming to this place since 1985 and it is mostly unchanged and I would love for it to stay that way.

SO STAY AWAY! READ THIS AND FANTASIZE ABOUT COMING HERE, BUT DON'T COME HERE. OR AT LEAST DON'T ALL COME HERE AT ONCE.

There are books one reads by people who came to Bali in the 1800s and who were horrified at how much it had been spoiled by the early 1900s. Every ten years or so new people show up here and when they come back ten years later they are outraged by how overrun their beloved Bali has been by voracious hordes of outsiders.

And it's kind of true. The government originally did a very good job of ghettoizing much of the tourism in the south - Kuta, Sanur, Legian, lately Jimbaran and some other beaches. Ubud was permitted to become the cultural showcase - sort of Bali Disneyland as it were. (Apparently the restaurant and hotel owners in Ubud recently ganged up on the kaki lima (pushcart food vendors) and banned them from city streets. FEH! I never liked that place anyhow. It deserves all the idiot hordes who are showing up because of that dumb book and movie.) Denpasar was the big city, the commercial hub, and as such it was permitted to be as filthy and crowded and noisy and crass as most of the other big cities in the country - or the world for that matter.

But when I first came here, it only took a little effort - and ideally a rented Volkswagen "Thing" (they all seem to have come here for an afterlife) to escape the international tourist ghetto in the south. Since I never spent more than a day or two in the tourist hellholes, I never felt overwhelmed by my fellow foreigners in Bali. I'd hop in my vehicle and head north.

This time I was worried. I'd heard disquieting rumors. Amed, the sleepy black sand fishing and salt producing village north of Tirtigangga had been developing fast. Candi Dasa, the beach community to the south the same.

And it's true. Amed has become a French colony of sorts, and a SCUBA diving center. Candi Dasa seems popular with Germans and Australians.

But praise the lord and pass the ammunition - Tirtigangga has been spared!

There may be one or two more homestays, set deep back into the hills, than when I first came here. One or two more restaurants - warung really - that provide pizza to bule, but basically it is the same place I visited for the first time 26 years ago.

This morning I woke up early, able to leave the hotel after Nypei Day by six am, and took a long walk through the nearby rice terraces and villages. It was the same place I have loved all these years - almost entirely unspoiled. In my entire weeks stay here, I have encountered, to say hello to, only 13 other foreigners. I have seen some five or six others in the distance. (Oh, make that seven or eight - two just walked into the Water Palace.)

I think this must be in part due to the beach not being close at hand. Tirtigangga is in the foothills and while you can see the ocean, it takes about a half hour or a bit more to get to it. Fine by me. I'm not a very beachy person.

Now I would never be so presumptuous as to say that Tirtigangga is the "real Bali" or anything like that. As a people, the Balinese seem to have a remarkable ability to go about their traditional business in the midst of what the rest of us would regard as overwhelming distractions of the modern, and pushy foreign world. They have even made a very successful cottage industry out of leveraging tourism in a way that helps them maintain their traditions and culture. (If anything, motorbikes, which are their own seeming current fetish objects, are the biggest threat to the place.) Even in the middle of the tourism tornado that engulfs such places as Kuta Beach, Balinese culture, tradition and even tranquility somehow manages to survive - thrive even.

But here, removed somehow from the onslaught of, well, of people like me, is the Bali that I truly love. A few pictures from this morning's walk in the neighborhood are below:

THEY KILL DEMONS - DON'T THEY

2011-03-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

Tirtigangga, Bali - Nyepi Day (part two): If one believed in demons and such like, one could easily get the impression that Bali is a dangerous place to live. From the amount of appeasing or not aggravating of them that goes on, one gets the feeling that nasty spirits are everpresent, always ready to make you suffer if you let your guard down.

Even the benevolent gods have tempers. If you decide you want to climb Mt. Agung – Bali’s holiest – you dare not speak, not even whisper, try not to even think if you can avoid it the name of Ratu, the god who lives up there. That makes him mad and you don’t want to do that. He might smight you and you are, after all, on the exposed slope of an active volcano – probably not a good place to get smote.

And it’s questionable just how benevolent he is anyhow. Bali does have great soil, it’s growing season is year round, thanks to its volcanoes. But every so often one of them erupts and flattens and burns all sorts of stuff that was simply minding its own business. The last time Mt. Agung threw a big fit, a bunch of monks at Besakih temple – the holiest on the island and on the mountain’s slope – threw themselves into the lava flows to appease Ratu. Everyone says that stopped the lava flows and saved the temple. Well, I don’t say that, but everyone else does.

And of course if you’re a woman and you’re having your period, just forget about it. There are so many place you aren’t supposed to go that every menstruation day is like Nyepi day for you.

So if you believe in demons, well, you’ve got to do something about them or you are being irresponsible. Right?

The Balinese do all sorts of stuff on an ongoing basis to keep the demons at bay. But on the night before Nyepi they parade a whole bunch of them, called Ogoh-Ogoh, made out of paper mache, around the streets, through the villages, hoisted on bamboo platforms carried by often drunk young noisy men, accompanied by raucous gamelan marching bands (I actually heard some ingenious combination of percussion instruments sound vaguely like Hendrix) and the usual buzz and fumespew of millions of motorbikes.

Then they burn them. If they’re still in any shape to burn. It poured rain off and on yesterday and as many of you might recall from childhood, rain and paper mache don’t mix.

Here’s some pics:

BUDDHISTS KILL PUPPIES - DON'T THEY?

2011-03-04T17:07:00.000-08:00

An after the fact disclaimer: I just woke up with a terrible nightmare in which an enraged mob of angry Balinese Buddhists were threatening to tear me limb from limb for defaming their religion after my blog went viral and PETA got into the act. Okay guys, I know you're only there in my subconscious - and maybe the viral part is a little wishful thinking - but chill, please. I only saw the baby pig with my eyes and heard it squeal with my ears. As for the chicken, goat and dog - I was only told that they were also going to be sacrificed and the implication was that they were also about the same age as the piglet.

Tirtigangga, Bali - Nyepi Day: How's that for an arresting headline? Well, some kinds of them do anyhow. We'll get to that later.

Yesterday was special. The day before Nyepi Day. (If you don't know what Nyepi Day is, read the last post.) I was met at my hotel by Pak Agus who had requested, nearly demanded, that I accompany him to see the festivities of the day. I was happy to comply. He is a smart, friendly, genial and generous man who also speaks good English. That meant that my limited Indonesian wouldn't stand too much in the way of my getting a good sense of what's going on.

I followed him on his motorbike, in my rental jeep, to his family compound in a small mountain village not too far from where I'm staying. I was invited for lunch. Everyone in his family speaks at least some English, mostly because they all do now or have worked in the tourist biz. They could not have been more welcoming or friendly, but they'd already eaten. I was left to help myself to a great spread of rice or rice cakes with pork (Balinese and people deep in the jungles are the only Indonesians who regularly eat pork - most of the rest are Muslim) done three ways, banana wrapped grilled minced beef, a very tasty sambal (chili sauce) and a few other things. I sat by myself on a pleasantly breezy verandah in front of the main house and had an excellent, if a little odd, lunch.

Soon it was time to go to a nearby Balinese Buddhist ceremony, but first I needed to be appropriately dressed:
The ceremony was held in the market building in the town square. When we got there it was filled with men dressed in white and women in the usual big crayon box full of colors. There were kids running around and teenagers looking bored and texting their friends like they now do all over the world. There was a mountain of offerings of all kinds - baskets of fruit and vegetables and cakes with roasted chickens artfully splayed across the front of them, cases of soda pop, immense floral displays, whole roast pigs, piles of meat and more. An old man in a very regal, gaily festooned hat presided over the whole affair from an altar where he was well attended by men and boys. Everyone sat around, chatting in low tones, letting the ceremony go about its business buoyed by their presence.

Then it began to rain - hard. Everyone bunched closer together to avoid getting too wet. Umbrellas came out and were set in front of the raised platform of the market building to prevent splashing. A group of women had no umbrellas, but a shop keeper who was open across the aisle from them was more than happy to charge them the extortionate - it's already raining, too bad, take it or leave it - price that umbrella sellers all over the world charge once the rain starts. (I made a joke about it in Indonesian to the group of old women sitting near me and they laughed heartily. It filled my head with linguistic pride.)

Finally some guys brought out a very cute baby pig in a wicker basket. I asked Pak Agus what that was for - though I had my suspicions. This is Bali. I don't care if they are Buddhists or not, but they kill stuff for their gods. They have very demanding, bloodthirsty gods here.

Yep, a sacrifice. And that wasn't all. They were also going to sacrifice a chicken (well, duh, who doesn't do that?), a baby goat (okay, been there, done that), and a puppy. A puppy?

Well, when it comes to sacrifices, or dinner for that matter, I'm egalitarian. I see little worse in slaughtering a pig or a cow then a puppy or a kitty cat. Ya gotta do, what ya gotta do and as we humans are on top of the food chain, watch out everything else. Still, even my hard heart took a slight erratic beat at the puppy thing - Westernized sentimental sap that I am.

And I'm not 100% certain, but it seems to me that they had some children do the honors. They make horror movies about these sorts of things, don't they? Kid forced to butcher puppy, grows up to be serial killer in crazy mask butchering sorority girls, or something like that. Well here, presumably, in a different culture, they grow up to be model citizens, passing long honored traditions down to their kids.

Sometime not long after the killing stopped, the praying began. They do seem to go hand in hand in most cultures, do they not? The rain stopped, too.

When the praying stopped, pandemonium broke loose as everybody rushed to take back their offerings and take them home - after parading them through the street in front of the building first - so that they wouldn't spoil beyond the point of being edible.

Apparently there are spirits who live around your house. When you make your offering, the spirits climb aboard and you then carry them to the ceremony. The ceremony though, unceremoniously pushes them out of your offering and into the spirit world invoked by the ceremony. So at the end, your offering now cleared of spirits, you can take it home and eat it. Anything else would be a waste.

So now some pictures. Don't worry, there are no pictures of puppies or anything else being slaughtered. I couldn't get close enough and it was too dark, so you're spared.
My host, Pak Agus and his father.

And here's a little preview of my next blog post (possibly later today):

HAPPY NYEPI DAY

2011-03-02T20:04:00.000-08:00

Well, you'll probably hear from me before then, or during (if the internet is up) or soon after, but it's coming right up. And here, for your edification, is the notice that was printed up and passed out to the hotel guests here at the Tirta Ayu Hotel in Tirtigangga, Bali - those guests being me. There might be someone else here on the day, but it is seeming unlikely.

A note from hotel management:

Dear Guests,

March 5, 2011 marks the first day of the Balinese New Year 1933 called Nyepi Day. For the Hindus, Nyepi is a day spent in total silence, meditation and introspection, reflecting on the past year's events.

The Nyepi Day will commence from March 5, 2011 from 6.00 am until 6.00 am on March 6, 2011, a day of complete silence without any noise, traffic, fire and lights. The island will be shut down; the harbors around Bali and the airport will be closed for domestic and international passenger flights. The only people to be seen outdoors are the Pecalang, traditional security men who patrol the streets to ensure the prohibitions are being followed. Exemptions on movement will only be provided to emergency service vehicles and personnel.

In accordance with local regulations, all Tirta Ayu's guests must remain within the property's premises during the Nyepi Day, from midnight of one day before to early morning on the next day of Nyepi. Guests, although free to do as they wish inside the hotel, no one is allowed onto the water palace area or streets or to go on tour. However, guests have full access to the lobby and restaurant areas and are welcome to use the hotel facilities as normal, while keeping noise to a minimum.

Tirta Ayu will minimize use of lighting and power. Guests can have breakfast, lunch and dinner at the restaurant or order room service. But dinner must be finished before 6 pm on the Nyepi Day. As well as spa treatment will end the service earlier than 6pm.

Cable and satellite TV operators are ordered not to broadcast during the full 24 hours on the Nyepi Day. It is recommended that guests prepare in-room entertainment (books, iPods, iPads, etc.)

Thank you for your kind attention and cooperation.

The Management

Well, this should be interesting. Here's a few pics from yesterday while I'm at it:

ONE LUCKY SOB

2011-03-01T01:59:00.000-08:00

One of the very few times I ever ate at a McDonald's (I think it was a McDonald's - memory fades) was in Washington D.C. in 1972. I'd been driving across country with my Cousin Robert. We were staying at the house of a senator who shall remain nameless - a Democrat, but that's all you're getting out of me. We'd been out of the house most of the night as we didn't want to get in the way of him having his mistress over.

Finally, on our way back, we hadn't had dinner so when we passed an open McDonald's at a little before 1am we stopped in for burgers. I recall the time very clearly. It was in a black neighborhood at a time when racial tensions were high. There were three other white people in the place, including a security guard who stood under a clock - 12:50am. We got our burgers to go.

The next morning the news was ablaze with a shooting at that very same McDonald's - at 1am. All three white people in the place were killed.

That wasn't fate. It wasn't karma. It wasn't saving me to accomplish some great deed later in my life. It was just my cousin and I being kind of nervous and wanting to get back to where we were staying that made us get our order to go. (I almost never get orders to go. I much prefer eating where I'm served.)

Nothing is written. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. Life is chance and chaos and confusion.

And I like it that way. It makes things a whole lot more interesting. It makes them even more beautiful when they work out well and a bit more understandable when they don't.

I have lived an extraordinarily lucky life. Even well beyond not having been shot in that McDonald's. I was lucky to be born when and where I was. Lucky to be born to my particular parents. Lucky to have a strong immune system and a healthy curiosity about the world around me. I've been lucky in my career and lucky to have had enough money throughout my life that my career has largely been of my own choosing. Lucky in that over the years my many misadventures proved in retrospect to be more adventure than mistake. Lucky to have met and known the people I've come across all over the world - from movie stars and billionaires to a burglar I was friends with in Jakarta, a liquor-store stickup guy I knew through an arts organization, and any number of sex workers.

I am just one plain lucky guy. Not to lord it over any of you. My guess is that most, if not all of the people reading this blog are pretty lucky in their lives, too.

But since I don't pray. Since I don't make offerings to any of the gods I don't believe in. Since I don't tithe or regularly engage in the sort of public service that I probably ought to. I don't have kids, or want them, so I can't leave better people to create a better world after me. (I do give to charity. I am kind and helpful, when I can be, to other people. I do my best to do no harm.)

But since I'm here in what I think is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Drinking a scotch, sitting on a verandah overlooking the Tirtigangga Water Palace, listening to the kids splashing in the water as dusk creeps in across the Indian Ocean having now covered the island of Lombok in the distance in cloud and dark. I feel so incredibly lucky in so many ways that I feel I need to acknowledge it and be thankful for it in my own secular manner.

And there are plenty of you out there reading this who I have to thank for all this remarkable luck.

And if one of you happens to be someone who shot some white people in a McDonald's in 1972. Thanks for showing up a few minutes after I left.

STRANGER IN PARADISE

2011-02-28T20:51:00.000-08:00

Tirtigangga, Bali, Indonesia: I like people. I like animals and plants and nature well enough, but really, it’s people I care for and choose to be surrounded by. I like big, ugly, dirty, crowded, noisy, exciting cities. I like exotic restaurants and thriving markets and sleazy nightlife. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. It is rare that I want to visit anywhere else.

So what am I doing here?
This is Tirtigangga, Bali. It is the most beautiful, relaxing place I know contrary to everything I know that I love about the world. Maybe it’s because there are still people. I took a walk this morning around the rice terraces and had maybe a dozen conversations with people I passed by. The whole valley is a riot of greens and other natural colors, not a surface anywhere that isn’t in some way natural. Yet it is hacked and hewn and shaped entirely by the actions of people.

The sound of burbling water is everywhere and nearly all of it is because the water that was here naturally has been channeled and directed and contained for the use of the people who live here.

It is the most thoroughly unnatural natural environment I know and I’m spending a week here, hoping to get some writing done and maybe clean some of the filth out of my lungs from Bangkok and Jakarta and some of the filth out of my head from the same.

I’m planning on days spent waking up early for long walks in the rice terraces. A light breakfast, writing for a while, lunch, maybe a nap, maybe a massage, maybe some more writing, drinks on the terrace overlooking the Water Palace then dinner. Some reading then, then bed.

I’ve still got my attendant worries and demons, but this seems like as good a spot as any in which to either exorcise or battle them. At the moment it looks like it might pour rain, just in time to eat lunch, it seems like a good idea to me.

I haven’t really tried a place like this as a writing retreat before. Maybe it will work. I’m stuck on a couple of things and getting away from one’s routine is sometimes good for getting unstuck. We’ll see. Unfortunately if it works really well, it’s a long way to go when I need it again.

THE MALLING OF JAKARTA

2011-02-26T06:16:00.000-08:00

Jakarta, Indonesia: There’s a reason why shopping malls are so popular in Jakarta – all over Southeast Asia for that matter. They generally beat being outside, even for locals who are accustomed to the conditions. Most importantly the air is conditioned, and for more than mere temperature and humidity. Inside a Jakarta shopping mall is one of the very few times that one is not subjected to billowing clouds of auto exhaust and other forms of pollution.

There are two kinds of malls. One sort is where locals shop. They tend to be large, ugly, slapdash sorts of concrete constructions filled with hundreds, no, thousands of small cubicles, shop spaces and counters selling an astounding array of lower end items made in Indonesia or India, Vietnam, Sir Lanka, Bangladesh, etc. There are still some Chinese products as well, but they are moving upmarket.

The local malls are jam packed. Motorbikes and bajaj (the dreadful, three-wheeled coughing, sputtering, exhaust and noise spewing mechanical contribution of India to the foulness of the typical Jakarta street) buzz around the outside of them like so many pestilent mosquitoes. Instead of malaria, these mosquitoes are responsible for respiratory ailments. Inside people scramble for bargains, haggling and socializing and catching some slight respite from the world outside, even if it is only in little gusts from fans or the occasional enclosed, air-conditioned shop.

The other malls are something else. They’re enormous, modern, opulent, created by some of the world’s greatest and most creative architects and designers. Looking at the shops inside them you have to wonder who buys anything here? And there are a lot of them – at least eight or nine megamalls by my loose count so far.

As I write this I’m in the Pacific Place Mall where there is a Bentley dealer on the ground floor. There are people in this country who can afford Bentleys. But there aren’t a lot of them and my guess is that those who can don’t trot on down to the showroom when they want to pick one up. They have a driver for that. Or the showroom comes to them at home.

There’s an Apple store and a SONY Style store and all sorts of stores that are almost entirely empty here on a rainy Saturday afternoon. There are people walking around, stealing glances into the shop windows, but other than food from the many restaurants, cafes and coffee bars in the food court, I don’t see anyone buying much of anything.

I think these malls, some of which are enormous – enormous enough to rival or surpass such American behemoths as the Mall of America – are more concerned with prestige for their builders – mostly wealthy Indonesian-Chinese families – than they are with actually turning a buck. Even in America, where more people can afford to buy all this overpriced designer stuff – or at least go into credit card debt for it – a mall like this wouldn’t have any sort of mass appeal.

They are very nice places, however, to escape the world outside. Something that really needs doing from time to time. And while I can’t heartily recommend the bebek goring (fried duck) that I had for lunch at Grand Indonesia Shopping Town, it was pretty amazing to find it there along with two of the spiciest sambals (chili sauce) that I have ever had, at a price that was about a dollar, maybe two more than you'd pay for it on the street - if you could find it on the street. There’s plenty else to choose from in any event. It was in a four story food court, featuring, maybe, a hundred or more venues. And it was starting to get crowded.

In these photos I have failed miserably to do any sort of justice to the over the top opulence that is the Grand Indonesia Shopping Town.The "Damn! I Love Indonesia" store.

MAD DOGS AND - ACTUALLY I'M SORT OF AN ANGLOPHOBE

2011-02-24T18:52:00.000-08:00

Jakarta, Indonesia: There's that thing about the noonday sun and I ought to know better.

Yesterday I took a walk, a simple walk. I took a taxi from my hotel to Sunda Kelapa - the old harbor here in Jakarta, one of my favorite places on the planet. I got there at about 10:30 in the morning and started heading out the jetty with the 15th century on my left and the 21st on my right. I soon picked up some company - a nice fellow who wanted me to buy a "Dayak" blowgun he was selling. I didn't want that but I was happy enough to have someone to practice my Indonesian with, so we walked together chatting happily about this that and the other for the better part of 1-1/2 hours. I'd pause to take pictures every so often. I bought us bottles of water to drink. There was no shade and, well, what they say about the equatorial sun is true - it's relentless.

I was having too good a time to notice.

So then we parted company and I walked over to Pasar Ikan - the fish market - and the neighborhood of Pluit that is nearby. And I walked around there for another hour and a half or more, pausing to take pictures, chat with people and look at stuff.

And there was some shade, not a lot but some, and as usual when I am walking around a place I love or somewhere new, I wasn't noticing that I might, just might be possibly getting tired and overheated.

I thought I might walk over to Cafe Batavia in the oldest colonial part of the city and have lunch. But I got somewhat turned around, possibly due to the fact that my brain was lightly poaching in my skull.

I walked across the river on a bridge and the stench nearly made me gag.I walked along and over numerous canals that might have once been nice, shady places to rest but are now teeming cesspools (literarlly) of feculence.

I knew things were getting dire when I began to regularly hear all the laughing. People in Indonesia are generally incredibly friendly, sympathetic, empathetic even, and certainly tolerant of the wacky ways of us bule. But that doesn't mean they won't laugh at you when you deserve it.

I deserved it. My walk around town had become some sort of perverse parade. See the sweat drenched, bright red, saggy clothed white guy shuffle past. I made light of myself to those I passed: "Saya bule panas." ("I am a hot white guy.") But after a while I couldn't even get that out.

I came to my senses at a big street and fell into a taxi, asking him to take me back to the hotel. I haven't left it since. I think I'm suffering from all sorts of exposure - to the sun, to the heat, to pollution, to mostly my own stupidity.

I'll get better and probably go out and do something similar again. Should you happen to read somewhere that I have keeled over dead in some exotic locale, don't waste much sympathy on me.

THE PAK, BAPAK, COACH OF INDONESIAN BASEBALL AND ME

2011-02-23T18:08:00.000-08:00

Jakarta, Indonesia: In the early days of the non-aligned movement, in the early 1960s when it was heavily pushed by Indonesia's Sukarno and Cuba's Castro, a Cuban national baseball team came to Jakarta to play some games. Pak Haru, who I will be sharing a stage with on Saturday, was at those games. He's widely considered the father (pak) of Indonesian baseball. According to him, however, there is a bapak (grandfather) who he watched play in the games with Cuba. The bapak, too, will be on stage. As will the coach of the Indonesian National Baseball Team.

A couple of months ago I was invited to Indonesia to put on some presentations, and hold a workshop or two at a new U.S. Cultural Center called @america. The center targets Indonesians who want to study in the U.S., have studied in the U.S. and are generally interested in the U.S. and American culture.

But baseball? In Indonesia? I had my doubts.

Still, there are about 240 million Indonesians and anywhere from nine to nineteen million of them in Jakarta depending on where you draw the city's borders, and out of that crowd there are undoubtedly more than enough to fill the 200-400 capacity auditorium where I'll be on stage talking baseball. (And then in two weeks, talking about the "American Road Trip Tradition.")

I shall, among other things, attempt to explain - using diagrams - the suicide squeeze play (my personal favorite) to the audience. I will try to explain why I find homeruns boring, why I love Ichiro Suzuki and why I far preferred watching Greg Maddux pitch to Randy Johnson.

Yesterday, when meeting for the first time with Pak Haru, I tried to twist my love of baseball into the context of Indonesian shadow puppet plays. I was looked on with what can only be described as bemused tolerance. (Indonesians do bemused tolerance extremely well, except for on the rare occasions when they run amok - an Indonesian word that has made its way into English.)

I am not sure, but there may well be video evidence of this - possibly even live streaming video evidence on the @america website during the event. (4-6pm Jakarta time on Saturday. 1-3am in Los Angeles.) If you don't want to stay up for it I'll understand. And I'll let you know how it goes.

JAKARTA - WORDS FAIL ME

2011-02-21T05:34:00.001-08:00

Well, not really, I am blogging after all.

On nearly every single objective criteria by which people judge cities, Jakarta fails - miserably. It's filthy, crowded, hot, the infrastructure is a mess, getting around town is nightmarish, it's ugly by most standards, it has a whole lot of rats and too many open sewers and trash heaps and even fires seeming to randomly shoot up from places you don't want to think about under the sidewalks and some of the most grinding poverty on the planet.

I love it. When I get into one of the under air-conditioned taxis at the airport and start sweating on my way into town, my blood pressure drops at least 30 percent. My shoulders sag into an at-ease position. I breathe a long deep, exhaust-filled sigh of relief.

If I believed in past lives, which I don't, I'd be likely to say that in some previous existence I must have lived an extremely swell life in this place.

Most of you are probably glad you didn't come with me to dinner tonight.

I walked around the corner from my hotel, along a massively crowded street filled with honking and belching cars and high whiny sputtery motorbikes. I walked sort of balanced on the curb and sometimes in the gutter because the sidewalk is made up of a progression of cracked, cracking and entirely missing concrete blocks above an open sewer. Rats, some of them enormous, paid me no mind as they ran back and forth in front of me.

I passed small warung - outdoor food stalls with a seat or two and shops - where people sat in the smoke from cooking fires and the auto exhaust and the heat and the humidity, eating their dinners or having a cigarette. Everyone said good evening as I passed, and I returned the greeting.

I got to a collection of three warung, all of them offering nasi Padang - my favorite style of Indonesian cooking. It's from West Sumatra and is the spiciest of all Indonesian food. The benches and picnic tables in front of them were filled with taxi drivers. One of them scooted over to make room for me.

To order, all you have to do is look in the window of the cooking cart where dishes are piled high with food that's been cooked who knows when and point at what you want. I knew what I wanted so I ordered without looking - food that I know they will have at every nasi Padang joint in the world. I got a heaping plate of rice covered with beef rendang, grilled chicken, kangkung (a spinach like vegetable that kicks the ass of spinach) and sambal hijau - a freshly cooked mash up of fresh green chilies and dried anchovies. It came with a mug of lukewarm tea from Central Java. Most of the taxi drivers were eating with their hands and I started to as well. But then someone came out with a fork and spoon and since two other people were using them I wasn't too embarrassed to follow suit.

It was delicious. I did my best to have a conversation with the taxi drivers and they were very accommodating - politely correcting my Indonesian when I made mistakes and encouraging me to talk about ever more complicated topics.

When it came time to leave I was so full I could barely stand up. I paid my 15,000 rupiah ($1.50) - nope, not a typo - said my goodbyes and headed back along the street.

It took a while to get back to the hotel. All kinds of people wanted to stop and chat, learn a little something about what I was doing there, tell me a little something about themselves, practice their English or help me practice my Indonesian. There were no streetlights. It was dark and could have been scary. I was surrounded by thousands of people, nearly every single one of who was a great deal poorer than I am, yet there was a friendliness and camaraderie and genuine curiosity about each other that is unlike I have encountered anywhere else.

I did live here for about two years - 1995-97 - and the city is a great deal more crowded than it was then. I'm not sure what it would be like to live here anymore, but objectivity has nothing to do with my feelings for the place.

I think a lot of you might have your own version of Jakarta. My sister Nancy feels the same way about Mexico City and some places in Africa. I met someone once who thought that Bartlesville, Oklahoma is heaven on Earth. Are there any horrible places that you love? Have any idea why?

FEELING SQUIRRELY IN BANGKOK

2011-02-19T03:28:00.000-08:00

Bangkok, Thailand: Last night as I was walking back from dinner to my hotel, I spent perhaps 10 minutes admiring the sheer poetry in motion of a truly lovely, very passable katoey (transsexual) walking ahead of me in what had to be at least five or six inch heels. She was dressed in a slinky, dark red backless dress that perfectly framed the very dramatic black and white dragon tattooed on her back. The sidewalk along Sukhumvit here in Bangkok is pretty rough ground - uneven, cracked, patches of dirt and mud, a variety of surfaces - and yet she maneuvered her way along it better than I have ever seen anyone walk in such heels. She seemed intent on wherever it was that she was headed or I would have offered to buy her a drink.

Not long before I fell into step behind her, I was approached by another, much less spectacular in every way, katoey along the street. This one threw her arms around me then brought a rather large hand down onto the crotch of my pants and started rubbing me in a more than merely suggestive manner. She huskily whispered in my ear, "I want smoking. I want smoking, you." I have seen this trick before and the moment she threw her arms around me, one of my hands slapped itself down hard over the pocket where my wallet was and stayed there throughout the encounter. It was not all that easy to pry her hand off of my crotch with just my one hand, but I finally did manage. I quipped, "Smoking's bad for you," but I don't think she got it.

I'm having my doubts about Bangkok. Not because of these encounters, but possibly I have now been here too much over the past 30 years since I first showed up with my mother in 1981 on our way to Pakistan. (That visit was notable for my mom and I encountering a street walker near the Oriental Hotel. When I said to the woman, "this is my mother," her perfectly reasonable response was, "don't worry, I do mommy, too." That was good for a lot of laughs.) During the 11 years I lived in Asia, Bangkok was one of the places I came most often for work - at least four or five times every year.

In GRAVE IMPORTS I describe this city as being not unlike a cesspool with a number of beautiful lotus blossoms floating on its surface. That is still true. This afternoon a friend and I shared a pork larb and a green papaya salad from a street vendor on a back street. It was quiet, peaceful, the vendor and a friend and a taxi driver who was parked nearby had a gentle laughter filled conversation, it was cool under the umbrella set up on the sidewalk and the food was great, and remarkably cheap. It was a very pleasant moment, a respite. It was the sort of moment that crops up unexpectedly in Bangkok, and allows you to catch your breath and not be driven insane by everything else that assaults your senses at every turn.

But this time I'm finding fewer such moments than in the past. The stench of, of, I'm not quite sure exactly what - money? greed? uncertainty? rank commercialism? lust? - seems more pervasive than before.

It feels like everything and everybody here is for sale, and aggressively so in a way that they weren't in previous years. Maybe it's just my perception as a now infrequent visitor. (I was last here in 2005.) But after a while, walking around, I begin to see everybody as if in some way they are for sale, and then I feel like an asshole for thinking that.

There must be so many of this city's people who are not at all for sale, or rather rent, who are simply trying to live their lives and get by the best they can. I know that they're there, but I haven't come across many of them. For the first time ever I walk around and feel like everybody wants something from me and doesn't want to give me anything real in return.

I see the beefy, solitary, sunburnt whitemen moving along the streets in that jerking, rolling way that bodybuilders walk and I don't want to see myself as one of them. And I don't want other people to see me that way. But maybe they do. I'm sure we all look alike to most of the Thai people who see us - bulky, hairy, loud and large; attractive only in so far as our money holds out.

I want Ratch, the bargirl who I bought dinner for last night and who I had a long conversation with about reading and writing and telling stories and Thai politics and the justification or not of violence to know me and like me and respect me for who I am. And there's something pathetic and arrogant about that on my part. Why should she? When I took her back to the bar and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek goodnight, she seemed relieved as she turned back into the loud, sweaty, smoky, booze-filled room where other men would simply pay to paw her and not bother her with all their talk or wanting to know her or to have her know them.

Many of the men I see with the stereotypical small brown woman in near ass-baring short skirts or super tight jeans look somehow even more alone than the ones without a companion. It's especially sad when the women turn to make sure their men aren't looking, then flash me an expectant smile as if to say, 'maybe you're a better bet than this guy. What can you do for me?'

It was different when I had real purpose in being here. When I was a working journalist and interviewing government officials and businessmen and writing about the place. Now I walk the streets and wonder how much I'm like those other guys.

There are beautiful temples, great busy markets and the river full of lively traffic. But here's what it mostly really looks like:
And those are prettier pictures than the reality, because I deliberately waited for brightly colored vehicles to enter the frame, and my camera decided to super saturate the colors.

The reality is that colors are muted, dusty, filtered through a haze of smog and smoke and grit in the air.

Don't get me wrong. I love big, crowded, noisy, dirty cities with all their brutality and fierce humanity and complexity and confusion and disorientation. And there's elements of all that that I still like here in Bangkok, remnants of what drew me to the place in the past. But I'm also uneasy about it, squirrely in a way that I haven't felt here before.

ALL THE E-BOOKS & BANGKOK

2011-02-18T16:27:00.000-08:00

I'm in Bangkok and I've written, rewritten and want to rewrite yet again a blog post about it. Plenty of mixed feelings going around and it doesn't make the task of telling you - my faithful readers - about it an easy one. Don't worry, I'll get there sometime in the next day or two.

But, by way of a teaser, here's a picture of what much of Bangkok really looks like as one walks around in the 90 + degree heat and poach-an-egg level of humidity. There are some pretty things in the city, hardly even so much as an entire pretty part of the city, though. The pictures most people bother showing of Bangkok leave out what it really looks like. Take a look at this, try to conjure up the heat and humidity and stench of auto exhaust and other pollutants and cooking odors ranging from appetizing to gag inducing, imagine the noise and the constant brushing against you of people on the street pressed together by endless rows of vendors and their stands crowding the sidewalks.
Keep in mind that the color in this picture is a great deal more saturated than the color really is here. Most things are viewed through a haze of smog and smoke and grit and it is only because my camera is lying to you that the colors look so vibrant.

But what this blogpost is, is a bit of BSP for my eBooks. They are now available in pretty much any format you might want: Kindle, B&N (Nook), and on LuLu for iGizmos, SONY E-Reader, etc.

If you want one - which of course you do - all you have to do is click on this paragraph to go to the page on my website where you can order whatever format suits you by clicking on the cover of the book you want. (You can also still order the paper and ink versions, ideally from your closest independent bookseller, but of course from Amazon and such places as well.)

GETTING THERE

2011-02-15T14:56:00.000-08:00

If you ever have the (good?) fortune to find yourself in a layover in the Taipei airport, and you can talk yourself into - or simply show your boarding pass - the Evergreen Lounge, have an espresso. They have excellent espresso. By far the very finest I have ever had in Asia and I have drunk a lot of espresso in Asia. It's surprising.

If its xiao long bao you're wanting, though, go back into the terminal and pay for it. There's some superb xlb to be found there.

Getting this far - a three hour layover before my flight leaves for Bangkok - was something of a chore.

I was told to get to Los Angeles International at least 2-1/2 hours before my flight. Traffic at rush hour was overly cooperative and I got there three hours early. It took 45 minutes to get through security. The only country in the world where I have gone through airport security and they make you take off your shoes or your computer out of your bag, is the U.S. I guess it's good for the show, because it's pretty meaningless in terms of actual screening.

Then, once you get through security, the LAX international departures terminal has the most meager and poor quality services of any international departure terminal I have ever been in. There were expensive old hot dogs to eat, or green around the edges sandwiches, and I was hungry. There were a wide variety of salted and sweet snacks and bottled beverages or super overpriced off brand cocktails. That was it. There's a crappy magazine stand, Sees Candy and a feeble excuse for a duty free.

There's not much sense in complaining about the flight. EVA Air is pretty nice, nicer than almost any U.S.-based airline. Food was crummy, it was crowded and the seats could be better. But at least they don't force you to stay in your seat. They actually let you stand in the areas outside the restroom and stretch and talk with other passengers - unlike U.S. carriers that seem to worry you'll be conspiring with someone if you do that. And they have a nice variety of Asian movies with English subtitles to watch if you don't want to watch the standard airplane cinematic fare.

People ask me "how was the flight?" and I never know what to say. What is there to say? Is there such a thing as a really good, much less great flight anymore?

"The flight didn't crash. I got there pretty much on time. It was fine."

I'm looking forward to my trip. I do have a very strange fondness for arriving in the airport in Jakarta, Indonesia. I'm hoping they haven't banned smoking in the terminal since I was last there. In the past, as soon as I would exit the plane I'd be hit square in the nose with the mingled scent of orchids and clove cigarettes. Something about that odor relaxes me. I'd take a deep breath and feel my blood pressure lowering.

Still, even though I've been in three different Jakarta train stations and none of them smell as good as the airport, it's a shame there isn't a fast train from L.A. to Asia. I love train travel.

In any event, this is just a short blog post by way of letting you know I'm on the road: to Bangkok, then Jakarta, then Bali, then back to Jakarta, then back to Bangkok than home - part work, mostly for fun. Check back for pictures and stories as the trip progresses.

THE ELECTRIC RAY SHARP

2011-01-27T16:23:00.000-08:00

At long last, all of my books are available electronically. At the moment you can only download them from Amazon for the Kindle, or for your Kindle app on your iPad or iPhone or whatever iGizmo you've got. Before long they'll be available in other formats as well.

Here's the new covers with links to their Amazon pages:

Click here to buy from Amazon US.
Click here to buy from Amazon UK.

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Once again - and maybe this seems a little disingenuous in a blog post that is pimping the new ebook editions of my books - there are still actual, 3-D, paperback and hardback editions available of my books. (Many of them signed.) You can find them at a number of independent mystery bookstores. You can find one of those by clicking on this paragraph.

eBooks are a great thing. As an author, I appreciate their ability to spread my work farther afield. They are, like it or not, the wave of the future. But they are also a factor in the demise of bookstores - probably one near you. And I love bookstores. So yes, please do buy my ebooks, but also find ways to continue to support your local independent bookseller.

THE LATEST DEATH IN THE FAMILY

2011-01-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

The Mystery Bookstore is closing down on January 31. I am sad, a little angry (with nowhere reasonable to direct it) and not, unfortunately, terribly surprised. These are bad times for brick and mortar bookstores and they are only going to get worse.

For an author, even (maybe especially) a non-bestselling author such as myself, The Mystery Bookstore has been a source of tremendous support, comfort, knowledge, inspiration even and most importantly of all friendship. The first time I ever walked in there and saw my own book on a display table, I got teary eyed. Every time I've ever been in there I stayed longer (and bought more books) than I intended because I was enjoying myself so much talking with the staff and customers and browsing books.

But all that and five bucks will buy you the Kindle edition of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at Amazon.

I love books, I always have. My first job was in a bookstore - Book Bargain Center - which, coincidentally, was right across the street from The Mystery Bookstore. (It closed down long before The Mystery Bookstore opened.) Here in my office most of the wall space and too much floor space is taken up with books in shelves and piles. Most of the books in my to-be-read pile came from The Mystery Bookstore.

But I've also got a number of to-be-read titles waiting for me on my Kindle. When I recently took a 12 day trip to Turkey, I read four books on the trip. Three of them are still in hardcover. I was glad not to have to pack them in my suitcase.

Sometime soon I'll be announcing the e-book availability of all of my books. I've got nice new covers for them, they've been well formatted and they'll be cheaper than the ink and paper editions. Hopefully more people will read my books and I will make some money from them because of that. But I feel a little bad about it, too.

I wish I could see some way that brick and mortar bookstores are going to survive, other than as niche businesses for collectors - much like art galleries - but I don't. Maybe a few will if bookselling is just a small part of their business, like Wal-Mart or perhaps some coffeehouses that also happen to sell books on the side.

And that's really sad, as is the demise and/or decline of record/CD shops and newspapers and magazines. But it is inevitable as technology and markets roll on.

I can't fight the modern world and don't even really want to. New technologies and new markets are good things. In the publishing world it means that eventually more people all over the world will have more access to books for less money than before. It's hard to argue with that. And even for us authors the changes in the publishing business are likely to create all kinds of new opportunities sooner or later - though this sorting out period is looking kind of rough. In the long run, though, I'm optimistic about books and publishing and people's reading.

But in spite of my optimism, today I'm sad. Very sad. A future without The Mystery Bookstore is a future that I am not at all happy about.

INSENSITIVE ART? WHY HAS MOCA TURNED INTO A MORON?

2010-12-14T09:01:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year I let my membership in Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) lapse. It was a purely financial decision in a crummy financial year. Now I almost wish that I hadn't, so that I could cancel it in protest. Here's why.

This coming April MOCA is opening a new show called "Art in the Streets." It is supposedly going to be the largest graffiti exhibition ever in a major institution. As part of the show the museum commissioned an Italian street artist known as Blu to paint a mural on the north wall of its Geffen Contemporary building - less than a half mile from Olvera Street, the oldest street in Los Angeles. (More about that later.)

The mural, in the spirit of much of the best street art was political, confrontational and undoubtedly would have pissed off some viewers. It was a field of military-style coffins draped with large dollar bills rather than the usual American flags.

The director of MOCA,Jeffrey Deitch, ordered that the mural be whitewashed over. According to the L.A. Times, Deitch said that the mural was "insensitive" to the community, and that his decision was "about my effort to be a good, responsible, respectful neighbor in this historic community."

I got news for you Jeff. Art is supposed to be insensitive sometimes. It's supposed to be challenging. It's supposed to push boundaries and be outside of the mainstream. It's not only supposed to make people comfortable and please them with pretty colors. That's what design is for, not art, especially not "contemporary art" in what promotes itself as a cutting edge institution. And even more especially not "street art."

Some people are comparing this to the recent ruckus over the removal of David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly" video from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. under pressure from right wing Catholics and members of Congress. I've got a comparison that's closer to home - less than a half mile away.

In 1932 the famous Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was commissioned to paint a mural on a wall near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. The mural, titled "Tropical America" was completed on the night before its dedication - October 9, 1932. According to the Olvera Street website, "The central visual and symbolic focus of the piece is an Indian peon, representing oppression by U.S. imperialism, crucified on a double cross capped by an American eagle. A Mayan pyramid in the background is overrun by vegetation, while an armed Peruvian peasant and a Mexican campesino (farmer) sit on a wall in the upper right corner, ready to defend themselves."

The art powers that were in Los Angeles at the time, well, they didn't much care for Siqueiros' mural. It made them uncomfortable, at the least, and angry.

What'd they do? They had it whitewashed over. Sound familiar?

But now, 78 years later, Siqueiros is having the last laugh. The mural is being restored and a visitor center is being built next to it. And, The Autry National Center has an exhibition called Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied.

I looked for a good photo of the mural that I could post here, but the only one I could find was in an event listing in the L.A. Times website. Not wanting to step on anyone's copyright I haven't posted the photo here. But you can see it by clicking on this link, and if you click on the photo it will enlarge.

ATE NO TURKEY IN TURKEY

2010-12-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

We were in Istanbul for Thanksgiving. Originally we'd thought to seek out turkey on that day. Not fancy big hotel Thanksgiving dinner turkey for tourists, but some sort of local turkey - turkey kebabs, for instance. According to several people we asked, turkey is eaten in Turkey, but usually only around New Years.

So we gave up on the idea and went out to a restaurant called Asitane that specializes in well-researched food that was popular in high society during the Ottoman Empire. I had a sort of goose pot pie - which was as close to turkey as the menu got - and it was delicious.

The very next day we had lunch at a place recommended by the extremely smart and very useful - should you ever be in search of a good meal in Istanbul - blog, Istanbul Eats. (Three cheers for the internet. We ate extremely well thanks to these bloggers.)

And there, there was turkey on the menu.

We failed to order it though. We were there to sample some sort of stewed beef on top of a grilled smooshed eggplant dish that is only available for lunch and was so good that we had no choice but to eat two orders of it.

Food is good in Turkey. Some of it is even excellent. And the markets that it comes from are even better - colorful, lively, interesting and a riot of intense smells and flavors and sounds.

All this is by way of an excuse to post some pictures I took in markets and at food stalls. (Not all of these are food markets, and as usual, click on the pictures to view them bigger.)

More Turkey pictures to come and maybe some tales as well. And sooner or later, when I get around to it, all the pictures on my blog and more will be found at my Flickr page.

IT'S A MAN'S WORLD

2010-12-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

As usual, click on photos to see them bigger.

Istanbul, Turkey: Five times a day the voices of muzzein ring out from loudspeakers on the minarets of the more than 2,500 mosques in Istanbul. It's A Man's Man's Man's World by James Brown blares out across the city. (Click on the title to see/hear a truly bizarre rendition by JB and Luciano Pavarotti.)

Okay, not really and I shouldn't make too much fun of it as one of my favorite things in the world is to hear the Muslim call to prayer in a cacophonous multitude of voices echo across a city, town or village. I don't even mind being woken up by it. (I didn't even get sick of it having lived relatively near a mosque in Jakarta for the better part of two years. I'd wake up, appreciate it, then go back to sleep.)

Turkey and Indonesia are almost certainly the least oppressive, predominately Muslim counties for women. Women in Turkey got the vote not long after they did in the U.S. and before they completely did in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Japan and plenty of other seemingly civilized places. Modern Turkey was founded as a secular state and has for the most part done a good job of preserving that. Although these days it is being increasingly nibbled away at by Islamic politicos - something that has made many, probably most, modern Turkish women nervous.

Still, walking around Istanbul you mostly see men. The most women you see are in the new, shopping and cafe and nightlife districts around Taksim Square and Istiklal Caddesi - maybe as many as 30 percent of the people on the streets are women, only about one in five or so of them with their heads covered. It's where the modern young folk hang out.
Most places, however, it is mostly men - maybe 90 percent men, maybe more. They cluster in groups everywhere: drinking tea, playing cards, fishing off bridges, just shooting the shit and kicking their shoes on the cobblestones. And in some neighborhoods as many as half, or a little more, of the women you see have their heads covered. (Though it is still rare, if less so than only a couple of years ago, to see women in full purdah and with their faces covered.)Crowd of men in front of the train station.
All men drinking tea, playing cards, hanging out.
It's all men fishing off the Galata and Ataturk Bridges - we only saw one woman out of hundreds.

While even the mosques are mostly frequented by men, women are allowed in them. During prayers they are quarantined in their own small screened off areas. Presumably to avoid having their presence distract all the guys up front with a better view.When it's not prayer time, those distracting females are let loose to maintain the proper decorum in the other parts of the mosques:
But like most of the places I love in the world, I fell in love with Istanbul in part because of its contrasts and contradictions. Here are two side by side pictures of Turkish women walking in front of the womens section of the mosque of Salim the Terrible. I took the pictures about 15 seconds apart.
More to come from Turkey over the next few days.

IT'S A DESERT OUT THERE FOR SHRIMP

2010-11-08T10:14:00.000-08:00

Gila Bend, Arizona is not anywhere that you'd expect to find someone farming shrimp. Here's pretty much what it looks like all around the town of some 1,600 or so people, halfway between Tucson and Yuma along Interstate 8:
That isn't to say it doesn't have its attractions, especially around sunset:

And if you've got an appreciation for small American towns that probably haven't changed a whole lot over the years, which I do, well, places like Gila Bend are a fine place to spend a day wandering around:

Now I suppose that when they inaugurate the new solar energy plant on the outskirts of town, that's going to be a pretty big celebration. But once a year Gila Bend hosts its Shrimp Festival and that's where I was last Saturday.

If you click on this paragraph you will get to the website of Desert Sweet Shrimp and maybe you'll understand why there is a shrimp festival in the middle of the desert where temperatures during the summer are often somewhat north of 115 degrees.

I stayed at the Space Age Lodge - pictured above - ate plenty of shrimp (and a Sonoran hot dog - hold the mayo and ketchup (on a hot dog? are they insane?)) - drank some beers at Neto's Bar after the festival closed for the night, and took some pictures.

As for the shrimp, I had it simply boiled with a hot sauce, "scampi-style" and as "shrimp poppers." Sadly, and in spite of what it claims on the website, the local shrimp just didn't seem to have much flavor. It was plenty fresh, reasonably well cooked, but lacking in, how do I put this, shrimpiness. Maybe the water they use is too clean, or something.

But I had plenty of fun anyhow and here's some photographic evidence:
One of the winners of the bobbing for shrimp in cocktail sauce contest.

Shrimp eating contestants - non-bobbers.

The festival grounds. The salad on a stick ladies (I had one, not bad) told me that they thought maybe they'd misjudged the crowd that was going to be there. Other than myself, I never saw anyone at their booth. Maybe if it had been deep fried salad on a stick.

As darkness fell, and the band played a mix of '50s and '60s oldies, blues standards and Norteno corridas, dancing broke out.

NEW INTERVIEW & A FEW UPDATES

2010-10-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

There's a new interview with me by Morgan St. James at the Examiner.com. You can find it by clicking on this sentence.

Meanwhile, I've mostly been up to my ears in trying to finish the second novella in the trilogy I'm writing. As it takes place along the L.A. River, I've been spending a lot of time around and near the river. You may or may not recall that I have a great fondness for commercial nursery farms underneath powerlines. I recently came across a new one that I liked. There's a scene set there in the new novella. Here's a couple of pictures:

I also recently wandered around downtown L.A. during the first, hopefully monthly or even weekly (fingers crossed) CicLAVia. That's an event in which they close the streets along a route - in this case 7-1/2 miles from my neighborhood to Boyle Heights in near East L.A. - so that cars, skaters, pogo stickers, walkers, whatever, can wander the streets unmolested. Food trucks and carts set up along the way. People wore odd costumes. Bands played. It was fun. Here's a few pics of that:
March Fourth Marching Band - from Portland, Oregon. They were great, fun and bizarre.
Mennonites on Broadway.

Oh yeah, and last night I engaged in a taco crawl with the ever fabulous - though sadly unable to eat the requisite amount of salt - Christa Faust(pictured below under the watchful eye of a giant shrimp), her, now mine too, Scottish crimewriting, now taco convert buddy Russel McLean (seen here with cleaver and al pastor wheel), and Bill Krauss, my regular cohort in taco crime and an all around bon vivant.

A BLOG ABOUT WRITING FOR A CHANGE - SHORT STORIES & FUCKING DIALOG

2010-09-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

Being a writer, I suppose I ought to blog about what I do from time to time. Pretty pictures are all well and good, but if one of them is worth a thousand words, well, there's still all those words.

I've had short stories on my mind for a while. I don't actually read all that many of them and I almost never write them. But a few years ago I was one of the judges on the Edgar Awards panel for short fiction. We had to wade our way through over 600 submissions. This year I was one of three editors of the short story anthology MURDER IN LA LA LAND, put out by Sisters in Crime's Los Angeles chapter. (I'm also on the board - speakers bureau director.) For that, I went over 74 submissions. And, I've recently had my first ever short story published, in DARK VALENTINE magazine. And even more, my second short story will be published next year in an anthology called BANGKOK NOIR.

Here's what I think about short stories. Most of them suck. (But, I'd probably also say that about most books, movies, TV shows, CDs, etc. - so you short story writers, don't take any special umbrage from that.)

Here's why most short stories suck.

They don't get off to a fast enough start. Ideally a short story should grab my attention in its very first sentence, or paragraph, or absolutely no later than about its third paragraph. This is the one thing that made wading through all those 600 plus Edgar and 74 anthology submissions tolerable. If a story hadn't got me in its grip by the end of the third paragraph, I didn't even bother reading any further. There is a slim, very slim, chance that a story that isn't quick off the block might somehow turn itself around and manage to become at least okay, but there is almost no chance it will be any better than merely okay.

They try to do too much. A short story isn't a summary of a novel, or an outline for a novel, or even an idea for a novel. It is a self-contained unit that deals with a small or focused enough story that it doesn't need to be expanded upon. It can deal with big ideas and have broad implications, but it shouldn't leave its reader wanting more - other than, ideally, more, different short stories by the same writer. Some writers use short stories to try out ideas that might eventually find their way into novels. They can develop characters who they later want to use in novels. But if a short story wants to be a novel, write the damn novel.

They do too little. You know the word "story?" Well, it means something. A short story shouldn't simply be a vignette, a slice of life, a snapshot of something. It needs a beginning, middle and end. The plot needs to go somewhere and get somewhere.

Short stories, at least good ones, aren't easy to write. They're hard. Some people have an easier time writing them than novels, but even those people work just as hard on them, if they do a good job of it, as novelists do on their longer stories. I find that on a per-word basis, short stories are harder for me to write than longer pieces.

As for "fucking dialog," it's on my mind this morning because last night I started, for the third time, trying to watch the TV series that everyone else on the planet, other than me, seems to love - THE WIRE.

(For those of you who have a sudden visceral reaction of, "what the hell's wrong with this guy, he doesn't love The Wire?" Get over yourselves. I'll admit I probably am missing a few braincells here and there, but you probably are, too. How do you, after all, feel about the movie CHRISTINE - one of the all time greats?)

I will admit that watching the first episode, for the third time, last night, I liked a lot more about it than I have on previous viewings. I liked the characters. I liked the apparent developing plot lines. I liked the camerawork. I enjoyed much of the dialog.

But something about the dialog bothered me as much this time around as on the previous attempts - all the fucking swearing.

Now do not get me wrong. I have no objection to swearing. Many of the characters in my own books swear, a lot. Some of them in multiple languages. One of my all time favorite scenes in anything ever, was the lengthy conversation in DEADWOOD between Al Swearingen (sp?) and the boss of the Chinese community in the town, in which the only word they used was "cocksucker." I don't even have any objection to gratuitous swearing, or swearing used for no purpose other than to shake up or even piss off the reader.

But THE WIRE is, quite obviously, an attempt at gritty realism. And I'm sorry, but its dialog is lazy. Every single fucking character is swearing in nearly every single fucking sentence of practically every cocksucking, motherfucking, big hard dick in the ear conversation that they have. That is just plain bullshit. It is fuck-stupid, limp-dicked, sloppy television writing code for: "hey, look at me everybody, I'm a gritty realistic drama."

People, real people, don't talk that way. Real people don't talk any particular way. Even real people in small, close-knit communities don't always talk the same way as each other, even when they do share a number of linguistic similarities. I've been around lots of real people in lots of different circumstances in small tightly knit groups and big ones and oddly enough they don't all talk alike all the time. I know cops who barely swear at all and seem uncomfortable when people are swearing around them. I know cops who need a translator for people who don't know all the up to date slang and swear words. Same with crooks.

In writing, all writing, even the kind that gets done for television, one of the most important ways to define characters is through the way they talk. If all of your characters talk the same way, maybe you can create a sense of community between them, (and in THE WIRE, a twisted sense of community between the cops and crooks), but it's at the expense of them as individual characters and at the expense of realism.

So now go ahead all you THE WIRE lovers, let me have it.