You stay classy, Switzerland

Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques

How fucking neutral of you.

Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets, and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer. There are about 400,000 Muslims in a population of some 7.5 million people. Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey, and most do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia

So this is completely pre-emptive. Or, to put it another way, paranoid and racist. If radical Islam is a problem in your country, how is banning minarets gonna solve it? Would banning steeples have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing? Should Belfast have outlawed four-leaf clovers in the '80s?

You gotta love this part:

The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.

In other words, we recognize the principle of non-discrimination, just not when it applies to actual people living in our country.

Denmark pulls this shit all the time. This year, right-wing parties have proposed banning the niqab (the only-the-eyes-showing burqa) in public, which would apply to less than 100 people in Denmark, and banning judges from wearing the Muslim headscarf, even though there aren't any Muslim judges in Denmark.

There's a difference between a problem and an issue. Integration of immigrant populations, for example, is a genuine, complicated problem that needs to be addressed by adults. The kind with ideas, and expertise. Radical Islam, on the other hand, is an issue. We only talk about it in hyperboly and hypotheticals. We ban shit that no one is even doing. We legislate on our worst Chimpanzee instincts. We make posters like this:

The people who made this poster, and this ban, aren't interested in integration, or constructive solutions to the problems they actually have. They just want to complain that the world isn't the same as the one they grew up in, and punish their minorities for being in their streets and in their shops. 

I mean, how else do you explain a law that, even its most strident supporters have to admit, will only radicalize Muslims further? You've only got four minarets in your whole country. Sheesh. 

The fact that 60 percent of Swiss voters approved this is Freedom Fries-caliber embarassing. I hope the left wing politicians in Switzerland are working on some sort of collective Cringe Sorry Our Bad proposition for the next election cycle. 

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I’ve been in Sydney for the past five weeks

Sydney’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Everything looks like a postcard. Here’s a war memorial and reflecting pool.

This is where I studied. It’s only like 80 years old, but is trying to look Middle Aged.

Here’s a random church.

Here’s a hella gay-ass statue.

Here’s an awesome art exhibition. They built a bedroom around a statue!

Here’s the Blue Mountains.

Here’s the ‘Three Sisters’, the tourist tick-box part

Here’s me wearing a shirt I bought in Indonesia for 2 bucks.

Here’s the Blue Mountains again, looking nondescript.

Here’s one of the drag shows that you find at every single gay bar, every single night.

Here’s the second most obese country in the world mocking the first.

Here’s me fulfilling my pictoral obligation.

Here’s the world’s most famous Danish-designed building.

Here’s the skyline and the upside-down sunset.

Here’s the inside of that Danish-designed building I was talking about.

Here’s the skyline again.

Here’s a famous bridge. I don’t know if it was designed by Scandinavians.

Here’s the money shot.

Here’s Manly Beach at 8 in the morning.

Here’s the grass a bit further down, at around 8.15.

Here’s a cool statue exhibition at Bondi Beach.

Here’s my favorite statue from the exhibition.

Here’s some buildings.

Here’s the same memorial, only daytimier.

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The ‘Precious’ problem

I just came back from seeing 'Precious':

‘Precious’ trailer

There's been an interesting debate over the film since it was released last month.

Not since ‘The Birth of a Nation’ has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as ‘Precious [..] Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show.

Black pathology sells. It’s an over-the-top political fantasy that works only because it demeans blacks, women and poor people.

That's Armond White, a (black) movie reviewer for the New York Press, who seems to think that all movies about black people should have an immaculate protagonist, an unthreatening premise and a triumphant denouement.

I usually roll my eyes at this shit. Armand White is a known cinematic asshole, always the first to jump on a contrarian bandwagon. He spends most of his review attacking Oprah, Tyler Perry and the movie's director, Lee Daniels, as 'media titans' and 'a pathology pimp'. I've been reading his reviews for years, and he always pulls this shit where he judges every movie primarily on its political message. Its actual content and quality– how honest it is, how compelling it is — always come second. 

Then I saw 'Precious'.

Fuck. Did it have to be a bucket of friend chicken that Precious steals and binges on? Did her mother have to have lines like 'I only leave the house when I'm playing my numbers?' There are scenes, especially in the first half and particularly the one where her mother scams a social worker for a welfare check, that feel like they were written by an Appalachian militia.

'Precious and her mother share a Harlem hovel so stereotypical it could be a Klansman’s fantasy,' White writes. 'Fuck!' I thought, watching Precious's mother force-feed her a plate of pig's feet as retribution for forgetting the collard greens, 'he's right!'

Imagine watching a movie with an all-Native American cast, where the first 45 minutes were just characters sitting around an evergreen-wooded trailer saying things like 'I sure do love this firewater!' 'Let's make money selling roman candles!' and 'Let's scam the white man by opening a casino!' As much as I hate to admit it, that's the sort of cringe I got watching 'Precious'.

Look, I'm a left-wing, overthinky homosexual living in Denmark, for pagan-ritual's sake. I don't know any more about the black experience in Harlem in the 1980s than I do about the Welsh experience in Australia in the 1870s. I do know  stereotypes, however, and the way they get used as ammunition. It's genuinely unsettling to see them in life size, at 24 frames per second.

I fully admit that cringeyness, and Armond White's anger, come not from the movie itself, but from its failure to fulfill its obligation as Blackness Ambassador or whatever to the rest of the country. It is essentially us going, 'Egads, what will the white people think?!'

This reaction is incontrovertibly bullshit, I know. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously. Majorities do form their opinions of minorities based on culture. Depictions do matter, regardless of who's doing the depicting.

Minority groups spent the better part of last century fighting over the quantity of representation in mainstream culture. Now they're fighting over the quality of that representation. And that's OK.

I would be pissed if a mainstream, critically acclaimed movie depicted gays as meth-fueled promiscu-yuppies (and pissed-er, if I'm honest, if it was written or directed by heterosexuals). But at the same time, I get frustrated when the gay experience isn't depicted in all its complication and ugliness. We deserve to be just as nuanced as any other decadent, unbreeding population group.

In my mind, minority representation on film needs to be judged only on its verisimilitude. I can take welfare queens and teen pregnancy when they're in the service of something that, overall, feels true. As far as I'm concerned, 'Precious' fails not because it makes black people look bad, but because it's two dimensional and Paul Haggis-y.

Armond White sees the mother character — an almost unadulterated cinematic monster — as a blow against black people. I see it as a blow against art. Any character who literally throws a baby on the ground is no more representative of black people than Freddy Krueger is representative of Dutch-Americans.

Neither 'Precious', nor any other minority-themed film, is going to be the inspirational squeegee that finally wipes the last scum of bigotry from American society. It will be a great thing for America, and the movies, if we stop expecting them to be. 

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Hong Kong: The Peak

On the day it rained, I traipsed out to a religious site

This is apparently the biggest Buddha in Asia. Not that I have anything to compare it to.

All the Buddhas I’ve seen previously have been on windowsills.

I don’t really understand what Buddhism’s about, but they seem more outdoorsy than the Catholics

And their merchandise is cooler

I met a nice Aussie-French couple, and we took a cable car all the way back to the city.

I wish the suburbs in America looked like this, all densely people and untouchedly benatured.

The public transport was more comprehensive than just the boats, too, I promise.

All of a sudden it was blazingly sunny when I got back.

I heard about a tram that goes up a mountain the middle of the city

So I walked around looking for it. Hong Kong is usually pretty good with the signage.

I never found the tram, but I did walk to the top of the mountain.

Like I said, you are constantly at risk of ending up on top of mountains there.

Didn’t they use one of these buildings in The Dark Knight?

Yeah, I think it was that one, too.

I made it! I smelled like morning incense and afternoon BO by this point.

I stayed up there for a long time, watching the light change.

And counting windows like a starry night.

I kinda hope this isn’t where they catch the fish I kept eating for dinners.

I kept looking out and thinking, ‘damn the pollution’s thicker than soup! … Mmmm, soup.’

I always thought this was a lake here, but it’s actually a strait between two islands

This was just 180 degrees away

What, your country’s mountains don’t have shopping malls on top of them?

This is literally the view from a Burger King. I’ve never been more jealous of teenage fry-dippers.

And this is the view from McDonald’s. Seriously.

In China, the sky is always the color of freeway

I waited to see what would happen at nighttime. And this did.

Afters, I headed down to that bright light there for a humbao feeding frenzy

But not before I said goodbye.

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Hong Kong: Dragon’s Back

You can tell I really liked Hong Kong

I did literally no preparation whatsoever before I arrived

I just woke up early every morning

and Googled ‘stuff to do hong kong’ over breakfast

The first cool thing I’d find, I’d jot down the transport coords

and head out

That’s how I found this trail called ‘The Dragon’s Back’, on the south tip of Hong Kong island

I didn’t know how long it was, or what I should bring or whatever.

It just showed up on a list of ‘Asia’s most beautiful hikes’

It was my first-ever hike in Asia, actually, so I have nothing to compare

But after five hours, four of them hopelessly lost, I’m pro-it

It was one of those trails where your legs are trembling for like 2 hours afters

This ‘go for altitude!’ compulsion I have whenever I travel is reaching fetish levels.

This is where I started to get lost. Went downhill. Signs in Chinese.

I ended up in a weird village on the water

Where I talked to a Hong Kong lady about running errands by boat

‘We have filipino helpers who do that for us,’ she said. ‘We’re too lazy otherwise.’

There were tiny little sidewalks, and all the houses had vicious, barky dogs.

There was a little tidal bay where two dobermans chased after me barking

Which was the scariest animal-related experience of my life

I wish I had a filipino helper who knew how to kung fu those Resident Evil-ass dogs

I was hella rattled after the dog thing, and went back to familiar territory

I kept looking at the view, like ‘fuck those fucking dogs oh my God’

My legs all shaking and shit

I ended up on a highway, and hopped on the first bus I saw.

Which took me to a place called Stanley. Dogless views for miles.

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Hong Kong: No one ever writes children’s books about big cities

Hong Kong is partly horizontal, but mostly vertical

People wash their clothes like we do, but they dry them differently

Other than that, they mostly shop, eat and drive places

We have unicorns, they have dragons. A giant lizard is more imaginative than a horse with a horn.

Buying food goes like this: Point, boil, eat from stick

Hong Kong isn’t the city that never sleeps, that’s New York.

Hong Kong is the city that sleeps all day, then stays up all night being sweaty and ravenous

One day it rained

And I took a boat

Later that day it was sunny

And the buildings dried outside like people’s clothes

Sometimes people reflect on things, and sometimes cities do too

The sun doesn’t make it into the canyons, but the wind does

When there are hills, maps make long distances look short

Signs are sometimes hard to read, even when they’re in your own language

Cities are great when they have lots of ways for you to look at them

In people we call this narcissism, but in places we call it scenery

The moon is the only star you can see

Because there’s too much light during the dark

Cities are full of people who live there

But also people who used to live there.

Cemeteries are where we put the latter

And buildings are where we put the former

Buildings are shinier, and warmer on the inside

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Hong Kong: Ma On Shan

On my way back to Denmark, I stopped off in Hong Kong for three days

On my last day there, I rented a bike and peaced out to the suburbs

And ended up accidentally biking to the top of a mountain

I was biking along a river, and the road turned inland and started uphill. ‘Fair enough’, I thought.

Next thing you know I’m in my lowest gear, huffing like an Indiana preteen.

I had no idea where I was going, but I figured, ‘well, I’ve come this far’.

This is the same logic that got Hitler into Stalingrad

Two hours of biking and one hour of clamboring later, and I was at the ridgeline.

There was a weird tinnyness in the air that I couldn’t figure out

Finally, I realized that all the other hikers were listening to music on their cell phone speakers

Hong Kong is pure urban porn from above

It’s all skinny highrises next to untouched countryside.

If you gotta occupy a small island, that’s the way to do it

The skyline came out to greet me on the bike ride back

And the river was misty with … OK, pollution.

This was the second time in Hong Kong that aimless wandering took me the top of a mountain

If altitude were travel’s sole success criteria, I’d be Winston Fucking Churchill

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I love countries with a surplus of used bookstores

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Yesterday I bought a collection of Bernard Shaw one-act plays (fuck Dan Brown, plays are the best things to read on airplanes) and something called 'The Jewish Century'. Together they cost 8 Aus-bucks.

The Jewish Century starts out like this:

Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefits of individuals, nuclear families and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.

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The Jewish part I'm not so sure about, or at least I haven't read up to the author's justification of it, but the rest of that is a great description of the social history of this century. Eight Aussie bucks, man.

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Security theater

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A more profane, less articulate version of this paragraph occurs to me whenever I find myself untying my shoes in front of a conveyor belt:

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event: we confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning. If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.

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Biking up a mountain

I woke up early, in a conquering mood

Rental bike: Check

Overcarb breakfast: Check

In shape enough to bike 1,200 meters up into the Tasman freshness: Unlikely

The first hour of the journey went pretty well, and my legs and mind were full

of ‘I can do this’-ness

The trail got gradually steeper, though

So that each meter was harder than the last

The last two hours was pure ‘Are we fucking there yet?’

I wobbled around the top for a bit

Trying to take in the views between panting and sweating

After a while, I just got cold and hungry

It was amazing up there, though.

And the viewing hut looked hella Flintstones, for some reason

What’s that song lyric? ‘Everything looks perfect from far away’?

Former prison colonies are best viewed from altitude, yes.

That’s a grain silo there, my racist cab driver told me.

And this is the view down the backside of the mountain.

Mike: 1, Mountain: 0

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