Twat Writes Book

A ranty little piece about author/wanker James Frey is here at my buddy's site.

Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

This is my favorite live performance ever recorded. Now that I'm approaching 30 I can't see Kurt's suicide as anything other than an overgrown teenager's act of self-dramatization, but still. This was the last song he played on Unplugged, which was the last show he did before killing himself a few days later. He requested funeral flowers and candles on the stage. After he finished playing, he was asked if he wanted to do another take and declined. Imagine singing a song knowing it was the last thing you would ever perform. You would want to make it good. And he did.

Sick of Sausages - Street Food and the Failure of Government

This article on food trucks on Reason.com led me to investigate the sad story of Toronto's failed experiment in street food deregulation. As anyone who's travelled anywhere knows, Toronto's street food situation is not good. While New Yorkers enjoy fish tacos, DC-ites eat hot lobster rolls, and Bangkokers get every Thai delicacy imaginable, Toronto gets hot dogs, and maybe some poutine if you're in Nathan Phillips Square. This was all supposed to change in 2007, when then-Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman loosened health regulations to allow street vendors to sell a wider variety of prepared food.

Smitherman’s proclamation that Toronto would soon be saying “goodbye to the sausage and hello to the samosa” was proven wildly optimistic. City Hall took the opportunity to implement ‘Toronto a la Carte’, a branded, self-congratulatory pilot project where potential vendors were assessed for their history of bylaw compliance history; the nutritional content and food safety risk of their proposed menu; the suitability of the proposed menu for street vending; the ethnic diversity of the food items; their use of locally sustainable produced foods; their experience and qualifications; and their proposed business plan . Those lucky enough to progress through to the second stage of the process were reviewed by a “panel of food experts” who judged the proposed food items “from the standpoint of diversity, quality and culinary excellence”.

Unsurprisingly, only eight vendors out of a possible 15 chose to proceed through to the end of this process. Those unfortunates were then made to purchase ineptly designed carts for $30,000 each and permitted to sell food from designated sites around the city, provided they complied with innumerable regulations and paid $15,000 a year. Four years later, only six heavily indebted vendors remain in the program, the others having presumably grown tired of getting all their proposed menu changes approved by Toronto’s chief health officer.

The a la carte program expires in 2011. Ideally, its dismal failure will be taken as an indictment of City Hall rather than as a referendum on Toronto's desire for quality street food. It should be quietly euthanised, with a debt relief program created for the poor suckers who participated. Most importantly we should take the opportunity to learn from its failure, because the relative inconsequentiality of the issue makes it a useful arena to debate the role of government.

It's significant that this cause has been adopted in the US by Reason, the libertarian website whose parent foundation is partly funded by the Koch brothers. While I disagree with the fundamental principles of libertarianism, I think there's a number of areas where liberals should be making common cause with libertarians. Liberals and libertarians can, I think, agree that government should stick to what it is good at. We will disagree about what this is. A libertarian might argue, for instance, that governments should not operate prisons because this is a role that can be fulfilled more efficiently by the private sector. Liberals will argue in return that incarceration engages issues of human dignity that shouldn't be placed at the mercy of market forces. This is a fundamental disagreement, with little possibility of compromise.

I think liberals and libertarians can agree, however, that governments should not be marketing multicultural street food. Governments have no experience or expertise in marketing multicultural street food. Furthermore, there is nothing about the marketing of multicultural street food that lends itself to government regulation. The marketing of multicultural street food is, all things considered, something that is better left to private enterprise. The sad tale of Toronto a la carte seems to support this hypothesis. So why did the City of Toronto stick its nose in where it was neither wanted or needed? The answer is, unfortunately, democracy.

Democracy incentivises government officials to be responsive to popular demands. This is generally desirable, but can sometimes lead to perverse outcomes. We're all accustomed to seeing infrastructure projects emblazoned with "this highway/tunnel/sewer system brought to you by the --- government", and we tolerate it because we understand the dynamics of representative government; we can't reward our politicians for the things they do for us if we don't know about them. But infrastructure projects are different from street food deregulation. Highways are static and predictable. By the time they break down, the politician who built them can expect to be comfortably retired. Street food vending, on the other hand, is an unpredictable, organic process. From day one, parking officials will clash with vendors. People will get food poisoning. Vendors will battle for turf. So a politician who wants to deregulate street food has two choices - they can do it quietly, thereby distancing themselves from any potential bad press, or they can try to take credit for it while taking care to minimise potential bad press.

Toronto a la carte is a perfect example of government choosing option B. The entire tortuous process participants were subjected to was a transparent attempt to defuse future embarrassments. One can imagine the bureaucrats in charge of the program carefully brainstorming everything that could possibly go wrong with the operation of a food stand and then implementing protocols to prevent it. The one PR nightmare they didn't envision was the one that actually happened, namely, the stifling of the program under the weight of their own incompetent regulation.

The lesson to be learned here is clear. The marketing of multicultural street food is an area where the government needs to step back and give private enterprise the room to do what it does best. City Hall should try this: Issue a bunch of licenses. Make vendors subject to the same health regulations as restaurants. Set some parking restrictions. Then sit back and let Toronto's diverse, entrepreneurial population do the rest. Yes, some people will get sick. Vendors will brawl over turf. A black market in permits will emerge. But, at the end of the day, the city will be better. Then, and only then, does City Hall get to take the credit.

The Border

This is the Burmese town of Miyawaddi, seen from the Thai town of Mae Sot across the brown and trash-clogged Rim Moei river. The two towns are distinct in name only. In practice, the river is a porous boundary, and the people and societies on either side are bound together in a complicated relationship of dependancy and dysfunction. It's a small-scale version of what happens along the border of the US and Mexico - both parties maintain the trappings of a border while simultaneously benefiting from its permanent rupture. Put a rich country next to a poor country and the poor will relocate while the richer profit from that relocation with the inexhaustibility and inevitability of a physical law. Look at these tracks worn in the no-man's-land of the riverbank by people making unofficial crossings. If I wanted to milk my metaphor I'd say they're like the trails that raindrops leave in obedience to gravity:

But unlike gravity, the process has its regional quirks. Take the Thai/Myanmar Friendship Bridge that connects the two countries:

Thailand drives on the left, Burma drives on the right, thanks to a unilateral decision made by General Ne Win in 1970. The internet thinks that the General took too literally a soothsayer's advice to 'move to the right' (economically), and while this is consistent with the General's well-documented stupidstition (to coin a portmanteau) I think it's more likely that left-hand driving was seen as a legacy of British colonialism. Thanks to sanctions and Burma's economic backwardness, most vehicles in the country remain right-hand drive, so buses have to discharge their passengers in the middle of busy roads, and drivers have to veer way out into oncoming traffic in order to overtake. Also, drivers have to switch lanes on the bridge, an operation that gets accomplished with two traffic lights and surprisingly little chaos.

"Let us all participate in realising the drug-free zone." This sign faces back towards Burma like King Canute. The four commodities that surreptitiously cross the river here in massive quantities are drugs, guns, gems and people. Walking along the riverbank I see a Burmese man openly selling a baggie containing two ya ba pills to a ragged, itching junkie. Ya ba (also known as 'Nazi Speed', supposedly because it was devised by German chemists in WWII to give stamina to their soldiers) is a mixture of meth and caffeine sold in round, brightly colored pills. Ya ba and and heroin are both substantial contributors to the Burmese GDP. The junta can put up all the bridge signs it wants, but it's an open secret that they tolerate and profit from the many labs that flourish in the east of the country. What they don't tolerate, however, is when the ethnic groups do it. In the lead-up to the "elections", the junta is trying to neutralise Burma's multifarious armed ethnic groups by inducing them to integrate into a so-called 'Border Guard Force'. Some groups have acceded, but the most bad-ass, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), continues to hold out. To fund their arms purchases and strengthen their position in advance of the inevitable government crackdown, they've ramped up their drug production to the point where the Thai Army estimates something like 400 million ya ba pills will cross the border this year, most of it from factories in Wa territory. Only about 1 percent of that will be intercepted, and the rest will be consumed by Thailand's wretched amphetamine junkies. The cops here have a wonderful tradition of holding press photo-ops where malefactors are posed like hunting trophies beside the incriminating evidence of their crimes, and the resulting pictures are a fascinating document of the Thai drug problem - dejected, skeletal Thais in shorts and flip flops, squatting beside some sad pile of aluminium cookwear looted from an empty house.

But the most obvious illicit cross-border traffic here is people. In the photo above, a ferryman pulls an inner-tube full of people across the river, in full view of the border guards lounging at either ends of the bridge. This goes on all day, as people cross for work, to see family, to go to school, to visit the clinic, to flee repression, or just to buy cheap Burmese cigarettes. Seeing this actually happen is shocking in the same way that it would be to see someone abruptly levitate. We take the inviolability of borders for granted like we take gravity for granted. When we see them so nonchalantly violated we are reminded that lines on a map are nothing before the forces of war, poverty, drugs and commerce.

Mae Sot Folk Art

That last post was a little heavy, huh? I thought as a palate cleanser I'd post the shots I've been collecting of some of the folk art that adorns the businesses of Mae Sot. Firstly I'm an enormous fan of these robots made of car parts outside the mechanics on the way to my muay thai gym:

Predator:

This giant crab and prawn are made of old tyres, and adorn the gardens of a seafood restaurant:

And this thing advertises a shop selling (surprise) blue plastic jerrycans:

Warriors

Cockfighting is shocking in its brutality. Usually when animals fight it's in short bursts of pantomime violence, and it's over the instant dominance is established and the beta male slinks away. Cockfighting is different. I’ve never seen anything which so seemingly validates the Skinnerian behavourialist model of animal psychology. The cocks are like small, vicious robots whose kill-switch has been flicked. From the second the referee releases them they are fixated on killing each other to the exclusion of all else. They never run. They fight without pause or interruption until one is incapable of going on, either because it's so injured and/or exhausted that it can no longer stand, or because its dead. It’s no wonder that cockfighting has long been associated with the martial virtues. The Athenian leader Themistocles supposedly watched a cockfight on the night before his vastly outnumbered forces were to do battle with the Persians following the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae. Legend has him declaiming:

Behold soldiers, they do not fight for their nation, nor for their Gods, nor for their idols, nor for their liberty; only pride animates them to fight, so far as neither would like to suffer defeat, and you - compelled to defend so much - would you not do likewise?

Do a bit of research and be astonished at what a central part cockfighting once played in Western culture, and by how thoroughly this fact has been scrubbed from our collective memories. Cockfighting enthusiast Julius Caesar introduced the sport to the British isles, where it proved so popular that a permanent cockpit was later installed in the Palace of Westminster. The English delighted in astonishingly brutal cockfights, including the 'battle royal' where an unlimited number of fowl were made to fight until one winner remained, and the 'Welsh Main', a 16 bird tournament to the death, held over an afternoon. These diversions only ended during the reign of the killjoy Queen Victoria, who issued a decree banning the activity. Across the Atlantic, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson were all avid cockfighters. Abraham Lincoln once refereed at a cockfight, a duty he supposedly discharged so well that it earned him the nickname 'Honest Abe'. And Ben Franklin championed the adoption of the fighting cock as the national bird, losing out by only one vote to the American Eagle(!). Cockfighting, though expunged from our collective consciousness today, nonetheless lives on in the phrases 'to raise one's hackles', 'to turn tail', 'to be cocky' and even, possibly, the word 'cocktail'.

So what changed? The rise of Victorian hypocrisy, for one thing. I love the irony of the greatest imperial ruler in history getting exercised about cruelty to chickens while her soldiers were wading through rivers of blood in the process of subduing half the world. It's an irony that endures today, when otherwise intelligent people can denounce bloodsports with a straight face, over a meal of animals who arguably endured worse tortures than anything a fighting cock has to put up with. And I can't even begin to make sense of the bizarre polarities of squeamishness and apathy inherent in a culture where Michael Vick goes to prison while Dick Cheney and assorted other unrepentant torturers of humans get top billing on Fox. Perhaps one way of looking at it is that we've systematically devalued the currency of 'honour', in favour of a murky philosophy of utility - after all, we need to eat chicken and protect ourselves from terrorists, and who cares how those goals are accomplished, provided the wet work is done in the dark? Cockfights, on the other hand, are frivolous, and we won't accept the infliction of pain unless its to some concrete higher purpose, in which case we'll seemingly accept it no matter how trivial, stupid or wrongheaded that higher purpose might be. Sometimes I think we've retained all the bad aspects of Victorianism (moral and sexual hypocrisy) while discarding all the good (ideals of honour/dignity/virtue). We can no longer even conceive of the possibility that there might be something to take from this bloody morality play. So each time I've attended a cockfight here I've made a conscious effort to recognise my initial revulsion for what it is, not the physical manifestation of some deeply rooted moral disgust, but rather a conditioned response that's culturally specific to my Western middle-class existence. If you can overcome that reflexive revulsion then you start to understand why Caesar and Themistocles and Washington could see two birds fighting in a ring as epitomising martial courage in the face of death.

Anyway, here is the sign for the Mae Sot cockpit:

Fighters:

Before the fight:

This is the stance the cocks automatically adopt - staring into each other's eyes, hackles raised:

The gentlemen on the little pink stool is the referee. If one of the cocks goes down, he will place it back on its feet in front of its opponent, then ruffle both their tail feathers to encourage them to fight. The books in everybody's hands are betting books, and the little arena is filled with permanent uproar as bets are placed and odds adjusted:

Intermission. The guy on the left is holding a bundle of lemongrass, which he dips in water then rubs against a hotplate on top of a charcoal brazier. The pleasant-smelling smoke helps revive the birds.

Workspace. Clockwise from top you see a cloth in a bowl of water for cleaning the bird, a bowl with a feather in it which is used to clear congealed blood and feathers from the cock's throat, lemongrass in a bowl, and the charcoal brazier:

Plunging the cock's throat with the feather. A lot of the trainers carry this same feather behind their ear. The trainers will also suck blood from their fighter's nasal cavities, a practice that was implicated in the transmission of bird flu.

First aid kit. The yellow liquid in the cup is oil, the spoon is used to feed the bird broth, the thread is to sew up the bird's face:

Sewing a wound:

End of the fight - people call in their bets:

The victor:

Note: Despite an unfortunate emphasis on Freudian psychobabble (hint: they're called 'cocks') I'm indebted to 'The Cockfight: A Casebook' by Alan Dundes, incompletely available on Google Books.

Phonetic spelling fail