to Anthony Bourdain

Listening to hard-ass-chef-turned-writer Anthony Bourdain in the flesh, I realized that his spoken words were every bit as tasty as his written words. Bourdain is the author of Kitchen Confidential, a breathless romp through the culinary underbelly of New York. He is a great story-teller, with an easy-going style that is a well-tossed mix of high and low-brow. He throws around haute-cusine terms as easily as cracks about methodine clinics. He is also the master of the professional put-down, a foul-mouthed crusader against food-infidels, the vegans.

One recurring theme was the humble origins of distinctive and enticing national cuisines. "Why," he asks, "do most of the great chefs come from the poorest regions of their countries?"After a wonderful digression, he finally answers, "because in the poor regions, you don't have access to ä wide variety of foods, you haven't got much to play with - you are by necessity, creative." I like that, poverty is the driving engine of gastronomical creativity.

And of course, being a celebrity chef, Bourdain attracted a large number of aspiring chefs to his book reading in a normal SF bookshop. Looking conspicuous in their tidy whites, these young cooking apprentices came to worship a cooking icon, laughing heartily at all the in-jokes. Yet, Bourdain was firm with these young apprentices, where he couldn't resist pointing out the reality to these fresh-faced Escoffier-wanabes. "You know, I've had many cooking-school graduates come through my kitchen. They'd given up everything - a good steady job, a comfortable life - to pursue their dream of being a chef. And then they come to my kitchen. And at the end of their first night, I can see their dream drain right of their eyes. It's tough work."

But what elevates his prose from the merely witty, is a deep appreciation of being human and alive. An example. During question time, someone lobbed him a question that he surely must get all the time, "What would you eat if your only had one more meal?" To which he replied, "I have two choices. 1. Braised bone marrow and bread. and 2. A really good tuna sashimi [sic]." Then he lists a series of fascinating anwsers that other chefs have given, "[some great chef]...would be content with baguette and cheese.". But then he adds, "but you know, in real life, the most commonly requested last meal is steak and potatoes."

"Hardly anyone eats a bite of that meal."

He that Giveth, shall Taketh Away

I came across this arresting quote

"In the same way that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the Internet will give it back."

Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup.com in Open Source Politics

Worshipping at the Shrine of the Beat

San Francisco, they say, is the literary mecca of the United States, or at least, that of the Western Pacific seaboard. And deep in the heart of San Francisco, admist the tourists and seed of North Beach, lies the holy Kaaba of American literature, City Lights Bookshop. This is the place where the Beat Poets gathered, condensed, and poured forth a unique stream of writings.

Alas, the most famous of the Beat Poets have passed on, Kerouac, Bukowski. Yet there are some that are left. The other night, I went to my first reading at City Lights. It was advertised as a gala event, a poetry recital from Gary Snyder, one of the surviving Beats. Surprisingly, this, was the first time Gary had been invited to read at City Lights. His poetry is suffused through with the terse and concrete quality of Zen. Indeed, Snyder explained that he spoke fluent Japanese and had spent 10 years in Japan. Yet, his is not a blind devotion. When asked about the haiku form by a young lad (who wanted to know because, he, the young lad wearing a hat and waistcoat, had written many haiku's in his past, but that now, he just stopped and wanted to know why - don't make me puke), Snyder answered that a haiku doesn't really work in English, the play of grammar in haiku is unique to the Japanese. Nevertheless, he admires the concision of haiku's, and that, he brings to his poetry. His concerns are epic, mountains, volcanoes, life, death and the burning towers of new york. I was almost brought to tears.

I had not realised how popular the reading was going to be. When I arrived, the door had just closed as there were so many people that they would have spilled onto the street. Having nothing better to do, I hung around outside. And sure enough, some weak-willed folks walked out before the event started and so I managed to be one of the last to sneak in. I squeezed into the hordes of people crammed into that bookshop, sandwiched between the books, listening to the Poet. It was so tight that my leg was starting to go dead from my awkard stance. I could feel the breathing of the person in front of me. I dared not move for fear of falling over someone. But at some point during the recital, during a moment when I got lost in the poetry, I realised that I had achieved communion with the fibrous vastness of the American imagination.

Election Fever reaches Boiling Point

I have been granted the fortune to be in the United States during an election year. As a citizen of the world, we get to see, from the outside in, the United States go through its 4-yearly epileptic fit known as the election for the POTUS (President of the United States). I remember being in Australia staring numbly at the TV screen gamely trying to remeber the names of the 50 states. Now I've almost got all the States memorized, their names associated with bits of political trivia (No republican pres has won without Ohio). From within, you can see the full treatment, the constant buzzing of the commentary, from talkshows to newsshows to newspapers.

Of course, USA is a b-i-g country, and where you are will determine what you see. Here, in San Francisco, one of the two poles of American liberalism (the other being that pit of sin - NYC), one gets a skewed view. Most folks around here are self-identified liberals, and people seem acutely embarassed by their POTUS. Most are politically blinkered and believe that Kerry will definitely win because they can't understand how anyone could vote for Bush. Others are defeatist simply by extrapolating from the target audience of American TV programming.

Just today, we had an impromptu politics discussion, where someone volunteers the information that although Dad and sis will vote for Bush, he and his mother will counteract that with votes for Kerry. Unfortunately, with the subtelties of the electoral college, votes in the solid blue Democratic chunk of California will make little difference. It could very well come down to the Jewish retirees and blacks of Florida, or the steel workers of Ohio.

Free Improvisation is Free for a Reason

There is a reason why Free Improvisation is free. Because there is no way I will ever pay money to see free improvisation again. I'd never seen any before and I managed to finally catch some last night.

Free improvisation is well, free. No rules. Dance, dialogue, happening, it's all there and it's all very serious. Se--Ri-Ous.

I now understood why there are divisions in art. There are dancers, and singers, and actors, script writers, and comedians. Some people can dance well, some can write well, some can improvise well. But it is impossible to do all these things well at the same time. I saw a man and a woman, clearly on the other side of 40, frollicking around the stage like two 5 year olds, making blubbering nonsense noises, throwing bodies around in big motions, tell a pointless story, and destroy a microphone. Frankly, I would have preferred to watch 5 year olds do the same things. At least they would have done it with joyous childful abandon.

You know that a piece of theater is bad when the artist halfway through his "routine" stops to tell the audience that this is, in fact, an improvisation. Duh! As if we couldn't tell that from the half-arsed unstructured mess that we had just witnessed.

Film Art as Insult

Last night, I watched some of the worst art films of my life. It was at the "Cabinet of the Muses", an inter-genre festival organized by Berkeley-heads and took place in a theater here in the Mission. We had sat through some okay poetry and an interesting dance piece. And then there was film.

With a measured pace, our projectionist, a thin emaciated man, with a gaut face, and displaying delicate manners, took command of the room. He spoke passionately of the three films he was going to show us, and informed us that he had planned half an hour of film pleasure. Little did we know that it would be half an hour of his hideous celluloid slapping us in the face until we had submitted ourselves to the will of film art.

The first film was "based" on some Gertrude Stein writings - "The Making of Americans". It starts off okay, a slow sweeping camera movement over a tableau of objects, some with obvious American resonances. This then cuts away to the torture. It doesn't start off as such. Imagine the scren is cut into six boxes. In each box is a woman. Each woman thus repeats a phrase, some kind of pathetic sociological pusing like, "More and more, americans repeat themselves". Then for the next 15 minutes, we watch these women say this, in different combinations, in different ways. For the first 20 seconds, it's kind of amusing, then you try to search for a pattern - maybe there's some kind of rhythmic pattern, but 20 seconds later, you realize to your horror - there isn't. The film maker couldn't possibly have that much imagination. We sit through the most mind-numbingly boring 10 minutes watching these women repeat themselves. Suprisingly, there was moderate applause at the end - probably due to the Gertrude Stein references.

Film two was a very average film, not shockingly bad, but incoherent - some hokey dialogue scratched onto the film as text, played over some background imagery. References to spermicidal creme and vaginas provoked laughter in the adolescent teenager dancers from the dance piece earlier in the show. After the end of this film, the organisers turned on the lights lights thinking "golly gee - let's start the break and give the audience some mercy" But no. Our film projectionist quickly barked out in a haughtingly hurt tone, "No. The films aren't finished yet. There's one more" I could hear the audience groan as the lights were dimmed once more.

Called Photoheliograph, this last piece is one of the worst things I have seen, and I have seen some pretty bad things. It starts off with 5 minutes of black and a humming track. Then there is a few more minutes of black with some slivers of color. Then a horrendously lurid pattern writhes on the screen - something with the attractive patterning of vomit. We were privileged to witness this for a few more minutes where the pattern changed in an epileptic-fit-inducing manner. Finally, it ends and there is relief.

Life as lived watched

I haven't been watching films recently but in the last 5 days, I have managed to watch a film a day. When you do this, you lose somewhat your grip on the reality of your own life. You are awake, let's say 16 hours of the day, and a movie is say 2 hours. Assuming that 1/2 the time you a zombie, then for the last 5 days, 2 out of the 8 hours of my waking time was absorbed in a fantasy world. that's a quarter of my waking time.

Here's a rundown:

Friday night, I went to see the "Yes-Men", a modern update on the theatre of the absurd. A bunch of jokers leverage their satiric web-site of the WTO by accepting invitations from humorless conference organisers that mistake the fake web-site for the real thing. They are invited to the conferences where they have carte-blanche to say and do things to an audience that the Yes-men have not one iota of respect for. The highlights include a gold-lame suit and some not-so-hidden freudian imagery. unbelievably funny.

Saturday night at the nearby Dolores park, I saw the ever-popular "Harold and Maude". Come to think about it, it seems to be ever-popular mainly with the womens. This is a classic film about the romance between a 20 year old boy and a 80 year old woman. Kind of like a "As Good as it gets" in reverse. Apart from the over-acting and the look-at-me-I'm-being-so-rebelious tone, the Cat Stevens soundtrack managed to beat me into submission. Now, I'm a bit of a sentimentalist and will go for a well-placed acoustic guitar song somewhere just after the climax of a good story arc. But surely there can't be 20 different arcs in the one story. Or can there? There was a Cat Stevens song, regular as clock-work every 10 minutes. A plaintive rhythmic strumming of chords and then the soothing sounds of Cat Stevens poetically summing up what you had just watched in the last ten minutes since the last song. Although our young protagist manages to get it on with our octogenerian friend, all this is shown quite discretely in a very buorgeios kind of way. Oh, what some of these new-wave violent-femme french directors would have done.

Sunday night, "Maria Full of Grace" was a Columbian movie I had wanted to see for a very long time. I managed to go by dragging my only Columbian friend and his entourage with me to the cinema. It's the story of a Columbian woman who becomes a mule - a human drug carrier. This film is the type of film making I most admire. Nothing flashy, no special effects - just a taut story, grounded in highly believable characters, revealing a real world that ostensibly exists but is just out of sight. No need for artificial plot devices, absurd elements, or edgy characters to make it interesting. The movie moves a measured naturalistic pace so that you can truly experience the nerve-racking middle of the film. And I think the scipt-writer judged the tone of the ending perfectly - not too down, not too up, a sort of unresolved hope.

Monday Night, I saw the delirious "Angels in America: Part One". Adapted from the Tony Award winning play, this was an all-star HBO production. Some guilty delights - Al Pacino playing a wheezing, duplicitous homosexual politician and Emma Thompson in a cameo as an Angel (of death?). The film is a sprawling look at homosexuality and aids. The conceit of the film (which works wonderfully) is the seguing of magical realist elements into the world. The writing is top notch and gives the actors plenty to showcase their talents in the full three hours. I eagerly await the next 3 hours of Part Two.

Tuesday Night, at my french film course, I saw "Le Gout des Autres", a sly comedy of manners involving a variety of characters floating around the world of art. Le gout, or taste, is the tenous thread that runs through the movie, whether it be in art, in people or in interior decoration. The film poses questions about how we use taste, the funny moment when you decide that you really really like something or someone. An irrevocable act that cannot be changed as you watch your life veer off in pursuit of it.

Cyber-Geek Fashion Police

Mercy on ye who use not gadgets of the ORTHODOXY. I learnt this painful lesson at work from J, our resident hi-tech junkie. J spends much of his disposable income on the latest hi-tech toy. He has not just a phone, but a flip-screen fully-featured computer. A flip of the screen reveals a full qwerty keyboard underneath, albeit one for tiny little hands. When he talks into his phone, it looks like he is talking into a palm-pilot . He can telnet to our servers at work 24/7. And he does. He was the first to buy an iTrip, a Powerbook, an iSight and he's probably going to buy an iLife.

Last but not least, J has a iPod. Or at least I assume that he has. But considering that he probably carries his Powerbook everywhere, he may treat his laptop as a very large MP3 player.

I had recently arrived in our lab and penniless from travelling, I had bought a cheap-ass hand-held radio. Listening to my radio with my headphones on, I passed by J's office. As is his custom, he glances up to see who walked past. On seeing my radio, his face passed through a series of expressions, from puzzlement, to approval, to disbelief, and finally to disgust, with a little slight upcurl of the edge of his lips. "Is that a.. a.. a.. radio?" he asks. I answer yes, and he just shakes his head like a father discovering that his son is gay for the first time.

Later, I managed to fish out of him what had gone on in his head. "Well,", he explained to me. "First, I saw that you had a music of device of some sort -evident from the earphones trailing out. I looked a bit closer and then realised it was a radio receiver. Now that couldn't be because that's just so wrong. [puzzlement] So then I thought you couldn't be that sad and so it must be an MP3 player with a retro design [approval]. I look a bit more and then relief that it really was a radio [disbelief]. That is just too sad. [disgust]."

The Apple Powerbook is art - it's official

What is art? An eternal question that I came to closer to answering the other day when I visited the SF Museum of Modern Art.

I visited SFMOMA for lack of something better to do on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The last time I was there, I was sorely disappointed mainly because I had just spent two afternoons roaming the glorious Metropolitan Museum of NY city. SFMOMA was a country-fair rock garden in comparison. That was a bit unfair as this time around, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. SFMOMA is a respectable museum with a reasonable number of the usual suspects: a couple of Picasso's, some Monets and a Mondrian or two.

So I wonder around and finally get to the section called the Art of Design and Architecture. Arranged in a sombre room are exemplary articles from the last few decades of American manufacturing. These are objects that have exceptionally beautiful design, and some of them are. Others are just bad acid trips from the 60's. And there, in the halcoyn holy shrine of Modern Art sits an Apple Powerbook, sealed by a thick clear plastic box, clearly to protect it from the ravages of Age. An unkind friend suggested that as Apple is a company based just outside San Francisco, an indecent donation to the SFMOMA may have helped the curators see the art in the Powerbook.I, on the other hand, believe in the purity of the Ideals of Art.

I fully expect to see an iPod enshrined, the next time I visit SFMOMA.OMA.

The All Devouring Mouth of American Consumption

Ever since I've arrived in the US of A, I've been buying non-stop. It's an insatiable hunger that cannot stop. You see everyone around you with the latest toys, constantly teasing, parading, whispering about what you are missing. They demonstrate those fancy transparent windows, the fine ergonomic design and even ... dare I say it ... the austerity of it.

And finally you crack. You go downtown searching that image that has burned in your brain after seeing thousands of subliminal commericals. You know where to get it. Nothing can stop you because it is your fundamental right as an American citizen (or at least as a legal alien) to buy. And they make it so easy for you - cash, check, visa, debit, mastercard. Just slide that piece of plastic mouths that sales clerk behind the counter. They dont say it directly - no they are nver that crude. It's in the sparkle in their eye, the slouch of their posture, the slight up-turn at the edge of their smile. Just give me your card and we'll all take care of you. Yes. It's really that easy.

Of course, shopping is not a uniquely American phenomenon. It has been with us glorified apes since we could exchange symbols and hence abstract symbol value from sticks and stones. But it's the inventive quality of it that astonishes. The advertising. The buorgeoning mail-box enticing you to buy. I subscribed to the New Yorker, and for that I am inundated with leaflets from the San Frnacisco Public Library, the Sierra Club, the New York Times. The marketing machine makes great plays - it's not all a running game. In America, cable tv is cheap. The catch is that every one of the 70 odd channels are basically non-stop commercials - except of course for the public channels like CSPAN.

And so here I sit, with a laptop, an iPod, a mobile phone. I could not imagine life without these essential items.

The Music Factory

So I go to the weekly beer hour at work and end up meeting this guy, James. A typical story, scientist seeking fame and glory wakes up one day to realize that he has no life other than his precious Farscape. And so, seeing life drifting by, he resolves to pick up a bass, join a band, play music, and wash that science right out of his hair. That was a couple of years ago.

Two or three bands later, James is in San Francisco. New job, new city, new apartment and in desperate need of a new band. After a timid posting to www.craigslist.org, James hooks up with a couple of soulful real-estate agents and before you know it, they are jamming and doing gigs, occasionally. Along with thousands of bands in the Bay Area. If there is one thing that defines San Francisco entertainment, it is the music scene. So far, I've seen punk bands (one of which was from Boston) retro 80's, girl punk, diy garage, english screamers, electronica and countless bland dj's. I live with a room-mate who played drums but now runs a tiny music label, my other room-mate is a graphic designer who makes snazzy band posters bands (http://www.urbaninks.com/). It turns out that all their friends are musicians. Venues here are plentiful with many triple acts (and as Meatloaf says, "2 out of 3 ain't bad"), and when me and my roomies go see some local band, I find that the bass guitarist/keyboard/drummer was once the room-mate/girlfriend/bassists/sex-slave for another band that they were in. I guess it's some kind of travelling singing salesmen problem. Or at least real-estate agents in James' case.

So I get talking with James, and feel itchy to play. (Disclosure: I was in a crappy high-school band, spending way too much time searching for that killer guitar pose, and strumming stairway to heaven in front of an imaginary pre-pubesent teenage female crowd). James' band, it turns out, is a cover band, and they're serious - i.e. practicising the same songs until they get it perfect. Well, I just wanted to play/improvise and so before you can say, are-you-a-try-hard-musician, we've organised a jam at James' rehearsal studio.

I arrive at warehouse in an industrial. It is a large box building, a no-frills warehouse. We go inside and the inside has been converted into about 30 or 40 cubicles, soundproofed. Each one, a little enclosure, an egg, an embryo. Some kind of cosmic music chicken has layed little square white eggs where future bands of America are incubating. Incubating is the right word because it's hot in that little studio, sound-proofed and black, it is a perfect heat trap.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've mucked around with music equipment - there's a whole drum-set, mikes, stands, amplifiers. Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with my cheap-ass folk guitar that I brought in Brussels. We try to mike this up but it makes such a weak sound, that it is all but inaudible when someone bangs on the drum. But I am back, making music and dreaming once again of adulating audiences.

Walking around the inside of building, one can hear dulled leakage of sounds from all the other cubicles, leaking like distilled dreams, the desires of the musicians barely contained.

The Greatest Magazine in The English Language

One of the pleasures of living in the USA is the chance to get the New Yorker at a ridiculously cheap price. True, I am living in San Francisco, pretty much the city most diametrically opposite to New York, both in geography and in culture, but there does not exist a magazine to rival the New Yorker. Here, there is the very lame San Francisco magazine. The San Francisco magazine is aimed at the the gap-dressed, yuppie upper middle class, with stories about best places to eat in the Marina [please insert your very own favorite waterfront upwardly-mobile tourist neighbourhood], and fashion tips for golf. Blah.

I don't how they make money, but if you order The New Yorker by subscription, you can save half the cover price, making it a ridiculously low $28 a year.

What makes the New Yorker great? The New Yorker gets that balance just right, between whimsical funny pieces, theatre and movie reviews, superbly written non-fiction articles of a decent length, poetry, and always a meaty piece of fiction. Especially since they changed editors a couple of years ago, who decided to focus more on current affairs. There are more serious magazines out there, but it is tiresome to read, week-in, week-out, their po-faced political analyses. I was reading my New Yorker the other day at work, strolling nonchantly down the hall when a collegue trundles over and asks to borrow my copy of the New Yorker. I say, "sure, great article today". "Oh, that's all right, I only read it for the comics"

An Army of Tori Amoses

I must confess that my favorite genre of music is that of the single female singer&songwriter. And so it goes that some of my favorite artists are Tori Amos and Ani Difranco, both of whom, you may notice, are American. Don't ever say that America is a cultural vacuum because virtually all of today's modern music comes from this big shaggy dog of a nation. Such talent does not rise up in a vacuum. For every Tori Amos found by the recording industry of America (who are flailing about in their last throes of death by suing their customers), there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of could-have-beens.

So where are these could-have-beens and should-have-beens? As the mainstream music publishing houses implode, just below the radar, a massive parallel universe of independent musicians has emerged. These guys don't sell their souls for the possibility of being a star. They control their own music, happy to make a little money, and play at small venues. Of course, until just a few years ago, the dream of selling your music yourself would have been a quick route to destitution, unless you are Ani Difranco. There's just so many fans you can reach without the helping hand of a large music company, with all the compromises that entails.

But as the technology juggernaut has barrelled forward, music distribution has changed irrevocably. Of the things I have stumbled onto, the most mind-boggling has been the web-site www.cdbaby.com. These guys sell the works of some 64,000 artists from around the world, though most are from the united states. On their site, you can download a sample of the music of all the artists, trying before buying. But most importantly, cdbaby makes sure the artists gets $6 - $12 of the price of the cd, and that the artists gets paid weekly. A successfull artist selling their cd's on this site will be able to eat.

I've been browsing this site since I discovered it about a few weeks ago. It's been a joyful experience where the only link between you and the artist is the music - no hype, no advertising, no pornography inducing you to buy. What you buy is what you hear.

The sublime irony with this new system is that to navigate your way through the world of 64,000 indepedent-minded artists who have bucked from the mainstream, one is utterly required to categorise these artists in the most meticulous way possible. It is just not physically possible to listen to everything. So to make the browsing process possible, one must narrow down the search to one's favorite genres. And even after I've narrowed down to a list of artists in the same genre, I find that I sample only those cd's where I like the cover and the blurb written about each artist.

In the end, I found myself skimming the blurbs, looking for key-words. Whilst the quality of the writing fluctuates from blurb to blurb, in the end, most of the blurbs ends up making comparisons "...if you like Tori Amos and Ani Difranco...", "she has the sweetness of early Metallica, with the banshee soulfness of Michael Bolton", "...if David Bowie was an androdgynous alien from outer space, implanted with the left lobe of Brian Eno's brain, you might get something like...".

In the end, one cannot escapes one's taste and I found myself scouring the solo female artists in folk, pop looking for artists, inspired by, sounds like, similar to, influenced by but sounds completely different from ... Tori Amos. And boy, did I find them, hundreds of them. So now I know where the army of proto-Tori Amoses can be found if I ever need to unleash a strike force of quirky emotional banshees of song and piano onto the world.

The Educated Ethnic Mosaic

So the PC police gave us a new name to describe the mixed ethnicities around us: the ethnic mosaic. Formerly known as the melting pot, the old term conjured up horrible pictures of cultural assimilation, which pained the more sensitive in our caring community. And so in came the term Ethnic Mosaic, which brings in National Geographic images of happy diverse communities, living together, somehow stronger and richer in harmony. And nowhere is it more Mosaic in the United States than right here in San Francisco.

So I look around and apart from the invisible whites, I see asians, a flood of hispanics, and a handful of blacks. Of course this varies greatly depending where I am, from the predominantly hispanic quarter of the Mission to the Asian enclave of Chinatown. But for the overall picture, it's best to turn to the US census,

"Of the 2000 population,
- an estimated 217 mil (77.1%) were White,
- 36.4 mil (12.9%) were Black or African American;
- Asians and Pacific Islanders numbered 12.7 mil (4.5%);
- and the American Indian and Alaska Native population was about 4 mil (1.5%);
- 35.3 mil (13%) were of Hispanic origin.
The Latino or Hispanic population rose nearly 13 million (or 57.9%) between the 1990 and 2000 censuses. In 2000 one half of Hispanics lived in California and Texas."

Now America has been lauded as the land of spectacular opportunity where you can suceed by pulling up your bootstraps. Now, I am working at a cushy research institute, though not the highest pinnacle of success in the United States, it's still an achievement of sorts [insert rant about the utility of a phd]. The ethnic mix at this place makes a good litmus test precisely because science is supposedly blind of all human weaknesses, and can only be seduced by The Truth.

The first thing I notice is there is nary an african-american or hispanic around, although there are spanish speakers around, who come mainly from Spain. But as I look a bit closer, I realise the security guards are mainly black, and the cleaners are hispanic. As I looked even closer, I also realised I'd made a mistake lumping postdocs and grad students. Most of the grad students fall under the white category, well-bred, healthy shiny good-time American kids, with a a surprisingly high number of asian-americans. But once you pass the barrier into the post-doc territory, there are very very few native americans. Here at my institutions, there are a lot of Europeans, Italians, Eastern Europeans seem to dominate, but I hear there are a lot more Asians across the Bay. So this begs the question, where did all the American grad students go?

I don't really know what to conclude from this. As race has been proven to be *not* a genetic property, such disparities must be social. So social as to be all but invisible.

We're Number Two

So I am working at a top US research university. How do I know? Because everyone around me says so. Not long after I arrive, I overhear this conversation.

"We're number two."

"I'm not sure about that."

"Well definitely in the top five"

"I can accept that but top two, no. Yes top five."

Well, I am glad to be at a top five place. But then I think a bit and realise that I don't know exactly what this place is the top of. Research institutes? Universities? Medical universities? I had this image of researchers swarming around the campus, like some kind of bee-surveyer, zapping random students with an instrument to measure top research potential. Perhaps they base the ranking on how many students they zap, with double the points if they zap faculty memebers.

So I think further on what might be the criteria. Is it based on research, or numbers of publications, amount of grants? Or perhaps one can measure that intangible of intangibles - prestige. After all, the conversation that spawned this conversation was entirely based on self-perception. Now I have to say at this point that I am working at a medical university even though I am doing basic science. Where, you might ask, does one put a basic research laboratory at a medical university? Easy, in Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Nevertheless, I suspect that they were talking about medical university.

But then I think to myself, perhaps the first guy was right, and we really are number two. But if we are number two, then who's number one? This question I have not yet ascertained exactly. But I have a sneaky suspicion it's John Hopkins University in Baltimore. If that's the case, then it's okay with me because I've been to Baltimore and I do not ever ever want to live in Baltimore.

Nevertheless, this obsession with rank is very important in the United States. There is a higher density of university in the United States than anywhere else in the world. There are some 2000 institutes of higher education. And given the exorbiant cost of sending your son or daughter to some of these places, you want to know that you're getting your monies worth. Hence the existence of publications like the annual issue of US News, College Guide, where all these institutes are given a concrete irreducible number. And in such a supermarket, brand recognition is everything.

The American Lexicon

Some new words I have learnt in America:

ghetto : when something is cheap and nasty. I wonder if my colleague who uses this word has actually lived in a ghetto? Has the black-white divide in this country become so transparent that a word - used formerly to describe jewish enclaves but used for for predominantly african-american and hispanic enclaves of very poor people - has become a universally identified with a degraded state of existence?

mad prop : something that works, something that is good. I cannot fathom where this word came from.

getting digits : a verb describing the act of trying to obtain a telephone number from somebody.

Straight Guy Dancing in a Gay Bar

San Francisco, gay capital of the world, where a man having an intimate conversation with a man in a bar can mean a lot more than a shared interest in the same baseball team. So the other night, I trooped off with a posse of my new friends from work. In particular there is my friend A, a sophisticated 23 year old male from West Virgina who somehow managed to develop a Euro-trash accent after spending a year abroad in Germany. A was recently been seduced by F, a feisty 29 year old Italian woman, no doubt falling irresistibly to that faux-european accent of the younger A. They were, as they say, an item.

Anyway, we arrive at this nightclub, confusingly called Cafe, which is smack in the middle of the Castro. Cafe is your typical gay bar/pick-up joint/dance club. And we had gone there to meet with some other friends, who, it so happened, were gay. We mingle and dance to the music - ranging from obligatory 80's kitch to some heavier trance beats. It's an intensely packed place in the middle of the dance floor, hot flushed bodies writhing to the beat, and this being a gay bar, any young male may, and probably will, be propositioned. And not even male. When we arrived and found our friends, one of them, a tiny indian girl was doing this dance with two tiny gay men (I presume), which I shall describe compactly as a Double Gyrating Sandwich.

My friend A, is an experience junky, or so he says, and at some point in the night, a striking gay asian man, G, with cutting cheekbones and washed blonde streaks slither from out of the crowd and sidles up to A. A enjoys the attention and excited by the homo-erotic charge starts to dance intimately mano-o-mano with G.

Meanwhile, F is dancing just adjacent pretending that this is not happening.

As hand reaches over hand, caress over caress, movements whirl into an intricate foreplay movement. The motions intensify until A has bent over backwards on the ground, knees bent, back of the head touching the ground, and G is lying prostrate over A in some kind of grinding motion.

At this point, F leaves the dance floor.

They dance some more, and when the novelty of watching A dance with G wears off, I wander off in search of F. She has moved to the opposite side of the dance-floor, dancing with our other friends.

By and by, A returns, wearing a stupid grin on his face and finding F, who does not. F does not look happy, a look of intense approbration marring her normally joyous face. For the next 20 minutes, A turns on the charm, melting the approbation right off her face. In the end all is well, but I could see the barest whisps of doubt behind those feisty Italian eyes.

Drugs drugs drugs

So I've been reading Katherine Greider's book, "The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off Its Customers", or to be specific - ripping off American Consumers. This book fills an enormous gaping hole in the literature - a compact, well-written expose of the extortionist known as the pharmaceutical industry. What better way to blackmail the consumer with the threat of death? I can't think of a better way to boost the bottom-line of my profit margin.

Lest you believe the industry's self-justifications that the cost of $10,000 for a single dose of drugs for dying AIDS victims, are simply to recoup costly R&D, Greider dissects these claims and puts it into a well-focused perspective. After all, the pharmaceutical industry is the world's *most* profitable industry, outstripping even weapons manufacturing. And most of the cost of a drug is spent on marketing. Selling directly to the consumer is but the tip of the iceberg. There are almost 100,000 salesreps out there, making good money by bribing doctors, and manipulating them into prescribing the most costly drugs instead of cheaper alternatives.

This was driven home to me the other day. It was the first time I went to my Primary Care Physician, the doctor assigned to me by my work's health insurance plan. Walking into the office, I noticed an air-hostess, or at least, I thought she was - tall, beautiful, well-groomed in a business suit, hair tied in a bun, and pulling a luggage suitcase on wheels behind her. As I was in there to make an appointment, I was quickly out of there. As I entered the elevator, the air hostess lugged her suitcase in after her. As the door closes and the elevator goes down, I look down into her suitcase, and realise that she was not an air-hostess. it wasn't a suitcase, but a shopping cart full of drugs.

Fresh tatoo

My room-mate came back with a new tattoo yesterday. It was a cover-up job - a more professional, better designed pattern - to cover the folly of a drunken kitchen hack-job. The tattoo was this intricate mechanical/organic heart organ design over the left upper part of the arm. When I first saw it, it was covered with a piece of cloth and plastic. Pus was seeming from under the plastic and a ring of blood was starting to form.

Tatooed Love

I am sitting in a bus, watching a young couple. Clean cut, well-raised, most probably operating on a high level of personal hygiene. She, with bobbed blond hair and a goofy smile. He, strong-jawed, short hair, in pastel toned clothing. The perfect middle class couple. Except for a matching pair of tattoos on the wrist of the right hand. The tattoo was essentially a word, something like "PRISNTJ". I'm guessing it might have been something in a Nordic language.

Under-dressed in San Francisco

The other night, I went down to a small punk concert with my room-mate. It was located in a small gallery, a couple of connected rooms and a tiny claustrophobic performance room. The concert consisted of a small number of punk bands, ranging from as far as Boston, the other side of the continent.

Everyone had a tatoo, and a piercing.

Certainly, this was fringe material, which attracted a fringe crowd. The crowd was a kaleidoscope of anti-fashion fashion and exaggerated individuality. In many cases, the audience appeared to have considerably more time in dressing up than the performers themselves. Velvet jackets were prominent, throwback school uniform looks. Lots of latex. And tatoos and piercings.

Except me. I was shamed. Both my room-mates have tatoos. Why didn't I have one? Was it enough of an excuse that I had only just moved here? Since then, I've kept my eyes peeled and have noticed the near ubiquity of indelible body decoration in this city. Just why is it that tatoos, formerly the domain of Hell's Angels and ex-convicts have crossed over to the fashion conscious.

It may have something to do with authenticity, an idea that one of the few non-tatooed American friends of mine had suggested. San Francisco is a city where one is pressured to be non-conformist and individual. But then it becomes ridiculously easy to be wild and crazy when it is expected of you. No one bats an eye-lid if you roar down the street with a pink mohawk in a nun's habit. Yet, this permissiveness takes away from the effort involved in being an individual. If one is expected to be wild and crazy, then one is immediately a little tame. As such, other methods are needed to show the world that you really mean it. Hence direct bodily mutilation.

We the Healthy

I have now been living in California for two months. I have exercised more in the last 2 weeks than the last 2 years combined. My poor aching bones. The fitness fever - it surrounds you, it embalms you, thousands upon thousands of fitness fanatics with their talk of carbs and aerobics and running and power and rock climbing. It's inescapable due largely to do the excellent stridently sunny weather and the the large green open spaces. Then there is that surface venner of good Californian smiley feeley West Coast cheer. Cheering you on to self-actualisation, to spirituality, and to good wholesome exercise.

For a city known for its back-breaking hills, San Francisco is a bike city. Down from the hills, there are large regions of flat, bikable plains. There are many bike shops, and like everything else, bikes are fashion accessories. There are bikes that are stylish expressions of the self. Curvy metalic mobile sculptures, with their Easy-Rider handlebars and their earthy low centres-of-gravity. Well-marked bike lanes criss-cross the cities, ferrying socially-aware bike-riders from one hot-bed of activism to another. Yes, biking is a green form of transport.

On weekends, people from work go mountain-biking, rock-climbing, recreational (?) running, ultimate friss-beeing. If you don't sweat or hit the zone, you're not having fun. For me, I have fallen victim to the soccer fever. Every week on a Monday and Wednesday afternoons, we descend onto the pathetic patch of green outside the building to play this quintinsensually un-American game, even though it is. Soccer is played big time in primary and high-school, but there is no professional league. More importantly, it's a popular game for girls to play. So it's a wonderfully mixed gender game we play.

Spelling Bee

I was bored one night, and I stumbled onto the broadcast of the annual National Spelling Bee that's been going on since 1925. Of course, it was broadcast on ESPN, the sports channel. Held at the Grand Hyatt, Washington DC this year, I watched a procession of young children, aged from 9 to maybe 15, all sitting in the chairs behind a stage wearing a huge garish yellow sign stating school and district. Each child, in turn, was called up to the front of the stage where a Matt Damon look-a-like would utter a very obscure and useless word. The child will then, depending on temperament and recognition, look shell-shocked or gloating, and proceed to ask one of a number questions.

"Can I get alternative pronounciation"

"What is the definition of the word?"

"Is there an alternative definition?"

"What's the pronounciation agaiun?"

"Can you give me th origin of the word?"

"Use the word in a sentencel"

The Matt-Damon clone will then drone on and on in response to these questions. Meanwhile four other judges sitting adjacent to the stage will check that Matt-Damon and/or the children have indeed pronounced the word quickly.

For the child that has no clue, the child will stall by asking the question again. It is a weird atmosphere where the whole hall is silent, allowing the child complete focus on his performance. Then the child will attempt to the spell the word. After completing the spelling, the child will wait anxiously for the absence of the bell. A clear ring sounds failure.

Choose your cheque

So here I was, in the bank, ready to open a bog-standard bank account - a relatively easy thing to do. the nice friendly banker had gone through the details and when he got to the point where he explained how checks work as I had never had a checking account before. "Oh americans love checks." I nodded as we went through the details, and then he said, "while i'm doing the paperwork, why don't you choose the design you like". With that he handed me this large folder and proceeded to do his paperwork.

Now, I normally find making decisions over things that have no consequence really quite difficult. I freeze up. I had hundereds of cheque designs to choose from. At the front were the children (?) orientated designs. Have your favourite disney character. There were coca-cola cheques, nascar cheques. Have your favourite nascar driver smiling at you everytime you sign away from money. trees, nature, god, crosses. There were so many that I was so overwhelmed that I chose the most non-descript cheque possible. It was non-descript that when I later signed a cheque to my room-mate, she thought it must have been a temporary cheque. The reassuring "personal" character of your personal cheques must be masking some kind of sub-terranean river of anxiety of money.

Apple is taking over San Francisco

It's scary. Everywhere I look around me, there is a mac. Yes, they are attractive, with their sleek aluminium frame and their slim elegant design and their overt emphasis on eye-candy. Of course, the san-francisco state of mind is hi-tech and artisitic and the mac caters to that.

What is surprising is that here, at UCSF, one of the bastions of higher education, the macintosh is slowly tightening its vice-like grip. I see around me, postdocs who are toying with the idea of updating the laptops, being continually bombarded with lots of sly suggestions. "oh the mac is so much cooler". there is only so much resistance to coolness peer pressure that an average science nerd can take. the secret is the adoption of unix for the apple os x. With unix under the hood, it is quite simple, even elementary to run academic software. Plus, you can connect your iPod up.

Speaking of the iPod, the mini-iPod got released recently and news is that the first run got completely sold out. Not coincindentally, Apple finally opened an Apple store in downtown San Francisco. It is perhaps a little surprising that there hasn't been one in San Francisco since it is after all, the home of Apple but we should keep in mind that the real home is down south in Palo Alto, not the seedy shopping thrall of downtown.

The Golden Hostel Experience

I have now spent a week in a San Francisco and really enjoyed the hospitality that this city has to offer. In particular, a very drunk person one night fell sleep in the bunk bed above me and at around two o'clock at night, let his bladder loose on his generic YHA mattress, which subsequently soaked through the mattress and greeted me with a golden shower. I was at the time, half awake with fever because I'd contracted the flu that was going round and witnessed the whole watery event cascading on my body.

What happened to me at the Baltimore airport

So here I am at the Baltimore airport. I arrived early as the airline suggested and rested easy in the lounge outside, amongst many other obvious delegates of the conference from which I attended. I drift off and doze a bit, try to read, drift off again and in the end decide to listent to some music.

So I rifle through my backpack and find my discman and put on my favorite Tori Amos cd, putting the volume at a loud enough volume to drown out the deadening murmur of the airport. At some point, about 10 minutes before boarding time, I decide to stand up and stretch my legs. I scan the area and notice a newsagent. I walk into the newsagent, whilst listening to my discman, lost in a world of music.

Anyway, I am in the shop, browsing a few magazines, maybe some Linux magazines, maybe Time and as I feel the time of the boarding come, I turn around to leave.

I turn around to find that the shop-keeper had pulled in all the newspaper stands, looked the shop and left.

I panic. I try to open the gate. I start to yell outat the first person to come by. "Help! I've been locked. Find someone. Please." Fortunately it wasn't a hard door and sound penetrated through. He is a small asian businessman and looks somewhat startled but manages to find an airline staff.

The airline staff is a homely woman and as she approaches the newsagent, she doesn't see me at first, as there is a large newspaper stand.

"I can't believe it", she said. She tells me that the shop shouldn't be closed but that doesn't help me somehow. She tries to ring the manager, whilst I try to get a grip on myself. Another airline staff comes by. The try to open to security roll-a-day but find that it is secure. They discuss various thing including sticking a screw-driver into the servo-mechanism. The woman tries to ring the newsagent general manager.

I try to explain what happened and that my plane, which is just adjacent is leaving.

One of the other airline staff, a portly moustached man arrives, mumbles something about the police, rings them. "Look, there is a customer who get locked. No. This is not a crank call. We're trying to contact someone with a key".

Just 10 minutes before the plane leaves someone arrives, a short asian woman wearing a floral shirt arrives and unlocks the door. As the roll-a-door slowly unwinds up, I spring as quick I can and race towards the plane, which is no more than 10 metres away, just around the corner.

Immigration

Fear is standing at the borders of a trigger-happy country without your legal papers.

I had confidently approached the immigration counter, handed over my pass-port, even showed the nice officer where my J1 visa form was crudely stapled in my passport. Knowing that this officer was the bulwark that shielded Americans from fear, it was crucial that my paperwork be in order. It didn't hurt that I tried to appear inoffensive and safe. The immigration officer had found all to his satisfaction, and then asked for my DS-2019 form, the most important form to enter the US for us J1 visa holders.

Embarassed that I hadn't got it out, but knowing exactly where it was, I quickly rifled through the stack of papers I had accumulated in my travels. On my first pass, I couldn't find it. I looked for it again. I couldn't find it. I start to have a mini heart attack.

"I'm sorry sir, but you will have to go to secondary."

I did end up finding my DS-2019. I had forgotten that I had left it in an envelope and thus missed the envelope as I searched through my stack of documents. But too late, the immigration officer had already sent me on my way to the secondary.