Yangon, Burma

The English facilitating opportunity in Yangon met his needs for five months. He and four other teachers were downsized by Mr. Money, CEO when he lost a building lease.

Let’s have some language fun in Utopia. Open your head heart mouth. Dream big draw big.

Create a new photo book, entitled Street 21 documenting Yangon, Myanmar.

Until nationalism in 1962 English was taught in schools.

Bye-bye British. Now it’s Burmese. Many people here speak the language of noble barbarians. Hello, what’s your country? God bless you, said a smiling man.

Everyone is friendly gentle and kind. Buddhist nature.

Myanmar has seven states and 135 ethnic groups. 55-60 million.

His Yangon neighborhood reminded him of China in the 90’s. Tight narrow dwellings.

He lived 114 steps up from ground Zero. He salutes sunrise. Crows say hello. Caw-caw, look a stranger. Their wing music is soft. Feathers glide through air with the greatest of ease.

Train whistles, click-clack music street sellers sing dawn food wares, bird songs.

Two yellow bamboos, one green bamboo and a red and white flowering thick-stalked plant in green and blue containers absorb balcony sun.

Joy is growing, nurturing a small garden. The weather is cool and mild through March - then big heat for three months followed by the rainy season. Sky tears.

He takes a taxi to work/home for $1. Horrendous traffic jams. I’ll race you 10’. Ok. Creep and stop. No motorcycles are a quiet blessing. Banned after an assignation attempt.

Get to the verb. I am a camera. Hunt, freeze, shoot.

Have ink will travel.

Bleed words.

It’s not about you.

It’s ten claws scratching at twenty-six letters.

This is a letter.

He traverses 114 steps, open the large lock on the sliding gate, passes through life, slides it locks it and walks down the street passing men frying dough, tea drinkers eating noodles, women selling fruit and veggies from bamboo baskets, people staring at cheap phones asking relatives are you still alive, where are you, when are you coming home, I miss you as he passes through a narrow alley with 3-4 story apartments, balconies spilling flowers, grateful sliding gates, passive dogs and pedestrians.

The path leads past wooden and bamboo homes where people cook outside corrugated bamboo shacks, bath from large cisterns, kids play, women cook/sell street eats, people chat, walking to the large local market overflowing with colorful nutrition. Fresh cut flowers in 1001 varieties for sale are ubiquitous. Home décor. Bouquets say hello. Women wear sweet smelling white flowers in their hair.

He reaches the small local train station.

Red brick, oval shaped entrance. Barred ticket window. Friendly man helps negotiate a ticket into city center. 200 Khat (20¢).

Four tracks, discarded cars lie on abandoned ways. People burn trash along tracks. Bamboo shacks. PSP mansions. Women dry sardines on pavement.

Waiting seats are iron-rails glued to cement pedestals. Men spit out red betel nut juice. Betel sellers are everywhere. Big business. Cheap buzz. Cancer of the mouth.

Push and shove to get on. Get going. Get real. Get out.

Get is the joker word in English.

The southbound engine pulls six yellow and brown cars packed with humans going to work, school and town.

Women balance watermelon slices on heads selling red juicy slices, men hawk DEMOCRACY newspapers and boys proffer water.

Down the line they jump off and grab a train going north. The majority of passengers stare at cell phones. The real world is boring enough as it is.

Traveler hits the bricks doing documentary street photography, exploring narrow streets filled with Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Chinese, Burmese, street stall food smells, buyers and sellers, meat, fruits, vegetables, hard survival jingle-jangle life. Pulsating vibrancy.

He feels alive here.

Every week he visits a new barber in town for a head shave. Indian. Chinese. Burmese. Travel taught him to trust a man holding a straight razor against his throat.

Sitting meditation.

This is the perfect place to gather raw poetics about the human condition.

A lapidary man has an extensive operation cutting/polishing stones from a jade quarry. He explains qualities and examples of mounted ruby, blue sapphire and jade pieces. A huge business considering northern slave mines, Chinese demand and international markets.

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Traveler smells like garlic after preparing his lunch of sardines, broccoli, spinach, pasta, carrots, tomato, avocado, garnished with oregano, curry spice, saffron and olive oil.

Teak chopsticks will travel.

He eats in the upstairs staff dining area with female Customer Service Officers. They bring rice, small bags of spicy add-on juices and portions of pork or fish in shiny round aluminum stacked containers. Mommy makes my lunch, they murmur.

They shovel it in with aluminum spoons. They talk with their mouths full. Traveler shares veggies. Hot green Nara tea is delicious. Leaves float on the surface.

One CSO girl said, the CEO is mean and selfish. Yes, said traveler.

The other native teachers devour fast food from the hamburger joint at the nearby shopping center while sitting at their desks staring at computers or yakking. Exciting. 

Teachers fly to Bangkok every seventy days on a visa run. HR provides holding company business documents for re-entry into the gravitational field. Forms, a smiling photo and a clean $50. Old money is not accepted. No creased, folded currency. So it goes.

Longyi is the traditional sarong-like apparel for men. He discovered a fine silk cotton blend in Mandalay at a weaving village way back when. Ventilation.

Needle leads thread. Threads lead a conversation.

Weaving A Life (V1)

Happy Meals

Immediately after 9/11 world children scrambling through dust pawed soil looking for energy cells. Emergency air raid sirens exploded. Everyone scrambled into bombed out buildings.

"Hey, check this out," said a hungry refugee, "I found a case of Democracy. The Republican label says it spreads easily."

"Is it crunchy or plain?"

"How do I know? It’s just plain old Democracy."

"I hope it’s better than that old rancid Freedom Sauce. Let’s give it a go. Democracy is a good idea, in theory."

They opened the box, took out a jar, unscrewed the top, grabbed sharp knives, broke bread and slathered on Democracy.

"Wow! This is yummy."

"Yeah, well I got some stuck in my throat. It tastes like sand."

"It’s protein."

World tribes collected their Democracy.

"We need more energy," someone said. "We need music, news, a weather forecast. We need to know what’s happened."

"Need a clue? Take a look around you," said an illiterate person. Twin Towers, Iraqi and Syrian villages, and Afghan mountains smoldered on the immediate horizon.

"It looks desperate," said one.

"Eye, it does," said another. "It’s always darker before the dawn."

Sirens stopped and they emerged from darkness.

"We need shelter," said a family gathering leftovers from the World Bank. 65 million internally displaced people struggled toward hopeful futures. They sang, “Give me shelter. Shelter from the storm.”

"Beware those who live on dreams," said a rationalist.

"We need a committee," said a company man. "We need order."

"May I take your order?" requested a disembodied voice from a black box in a drive-thru combat zone.

"One happy meal to go," cried a distraught family trapped in a massive traffic jam. It was bumper to bumper on the highway of death between the airport and Baghdad.

Where the rubber met the road.

Their digestive systems were backed up for miles with sugar, fat, grease and carbohydrates.

"Consider the essentials will you," pleaded a small voice from the back seat trying to get a dial tone, trying to get through, trying to find a rhythm inside swirling chaos.

It threatened to swallow everyone into a black hole sucking everything into a parallel universe.

Weaving A Life (V2)

Blues Music

One day I wrote Blues Music Story on a broken green Fujian, China university board with flakey chalk.

I discussed the African Diaspora, history, suffering and slavery on farms for small money and how they gathered to make music after long hard days in the sunshine of their love.

How the blues manifested as men and women left rural villages on economic migrations for city jobs like China now. Floating people in a floating world.

How the blues expressed feelings of loss and separation from family and friends. It’s an emotional, deep in your spirit soul music.

I pulled out my blues harp and they said, “Oh it’s a cochin.”

“Want to hear some blues?” 

“Yes!”

I blew sweet slow stuff picking up the tempo blasting rifts wailing train whistles. Giving them a real sense of loss forever.

“This is called, ‘Spoonful' by Howling Wolf.”

“When you’re a wandering minstrel or a Griot - a West African performer who perpetuates the oral traditions of a family or village by singing histories and tales, considered by musicologists to be a link with the acoustic blues - or a Seanachai - a traditional Irish storyteller of myths and legends - or a magician, seer and Adept this is natural. I am merely a conduit for music. It comes through me.”

After the blues lesson we practiced making a sandwich. Assemble ingredients: bread, tomatoes, mayo, relish, turkey slices, mustard, onions and lettuce. How do you eat a sand wish with chopsticks?

Let’s eat. Asian mantra.

New music echoed. Everyone ran to a window. 

Across the street an Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three story building.

It towered above a gated Jakarta community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees, displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yo-yo’s and orphans sleeping on broken bamboo bed springs or swimming to Utopia through flooded dreams. 

In his left hand he held a shining silver chisel. In his right, a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between the Stone Algae and the Iron Algae.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. His chorale was an old tribal creation song remembering family and soft rice paddies. Wind carried his life song.

A slave girl offstage in life’s dramatic interlude using a brothel broom of thinned tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm. She created her symphony of sadness and neglect waiting to be abandoned like a vignette.

The Language Company

Draw The Dead

The Maija artist in Fujian, China accepted a photo from a grieving relative, set up his easel and studied a face with a magnifying glass.

His pencil sketched an 8x10. On chipped plaster walls were images of farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, young and old Pioneer Communist members with tight red party issued scarves knotting necks suffocating passion.

This day he sketched a stoic resigned peasant woman. She’d suffered at the hands of the Nationalists then Communists then corrupt greedy economic free market revolutionaries before facing the indignities of old age.

Old age is a killer.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung near red streaks of paint in his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed feelers together. Tasty.

An emaciated smiling ascetic friend of the artist wearing a skeleton face with paper-thin arms opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand dispersing it into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. We shared tea watching the artist. The likeness was perfect. The tea tasted acidic.

These images decorated Asian family altars and collected dust in temples. Ancestor worship and the fear of ghosts is a big deal.

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes.

On anniversary death days they meet ghost ancestors in cement alley mazes where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicarious liquids flowed into small holes.

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee addressing Asian family noise.

“It’s come to our attention dear comrades, beloved family and friends...we have a communication volume problem in the neighborhood. Silence. We are trying to enjoy a long peaceful restful sleep. Leave us be or we will return to haunt you. Forever.”

The Language Company

Dance

“We climbed up. We descended,” said Zeynep breathing through her shamanic mask.

“Is it carved from tribal memories?” said Lucky.

“Masks are symbolic manifestations in diverse cultures. Mask dance is a ritual, worn in a dance trance. Wearing a mask you become the thing you fear the most, your essential nature. Masks hide a human’s consciousness of fear.

“Dance is about process, becoming from stillness, from nothing. Shiva symbolizes the union of space, time and destruction. Dance is ancient magic. People seeking transformation wear masks representing gods or demons. Dance is the incarnation of energy from the source. We are from the source. Have courage to wear your natural face mask. The entire universe is a vast theatre. Death does not exist.”

“Humans evolved their ability to scheme and deceive behind masks,” said Lucky. “How do they manifest compassion and love without projecting guilt and shame on others while wearing their mask?”

“That's an eternal life quest,” said Z. “It requires daily practice and letting go of ego. Cogito ergo sum. They think their mask is reality. It's not. It’s artificial, an illusion, a myth, a projection of their fear.”

The Language Company

Hanoi Ethnology Museum