In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.

According to a great number of articles in the press, one of the most difficult things to understand was the methods used by the financial industry – the phrase “fiendishly complicated” is often used to describe the kinds of trading that went on.  Don’t believe it.  In fact, it’s reasonably easy to understand what they were doing once the jargon is cut out.  It’s the language that’s complicated, and as we’ll see in a later article, deciding what to do now that we’re in such a deep hole is also complicated.  The supposed complexity of the financial markets feels very much like an attempt to camouflage or ignore the simple fact of greed, and the willful ignorance it lead to that generated and perpetuated the crisis.

For example, here are a couple of quick definitions:

Sub-prime mortgages are mortgages that were given to people who, in reality, were very unlikely to be able to afford them.  In The End, Michael Lewis cites the example of a Mexican strawberry picker in Bakersfield, California, who, despite having an income of $14,000 and not being able to speak English was given a mortgage of $720,000.  Some may cry foul at picking the worst possible example, but even if he’d been given a mortgage of $100,000 (more than seven times his salary) it would have been reckless for the lending institution to lead him to believe that he could afford it.  In this case, some may consider that it was up to the strawberry picker to realise that he couldn’t afford it – but who is more likely to know whether a mortgage is sustainable, a bank (who has all the customer’s details) or a customer?  And where does the moral responsibility of banks lie when selling mortgages, if not in lending responsibly?

Mortgage-backed securities are lots of mortgages bundled together (mostly sub-prime) that are sold as an asset.  Basically, this means that someone buys all those mortgages in a single lump, and gets the income from them.  If anyone defaults on their mortgage, the owner of the mortgage can sell the house.  If you believe that house prices are going to rise forever, which was a belief that many of these financial deals were founded on, then this would give a guaranteed and rising income.  If, however, interest rates go up, people start defaulting on their mortgages, and house prices plummet, organisations who own these securities are stuck with something that is also plummeting in value, and no-one wants to buy.

Almost everything that happened is, in fact, that simple.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The End takes in a enormously readable broad sweep of the crisis, from its origins to the endgame.  Written by Michael Lewis, who also wrote an exposé of 1980s Wall Street, Liar’s Poker, he starts by pointing to the fact that this isn’t anything new:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

He goes on to show, through the example of a sceptical investor called Steve Eisman, how a lack of scrutiny was actively enforced in the financial markets:

The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility [in his early Wall Street days] was Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy. “I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit,” Eisman says. “I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put a sell rating on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could pick the one you thought you should.” He was pressured generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn’t Steve Eisman’s style. Upbeat and Eisman didn’t occupy the same planet. A hedge fund manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund manager started to laugh. “He’s sort of a prick in a way, but he’s smart and honest and fearless.”

“A lot of people don’t get Steve,” Whitney says. “But the people who get him love him.” Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn’t worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. “The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst,” says Eisman, “was after Lomas said they were hedged.” He recited the line from memory: “ ‘The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.” A few months after he’d delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

(Another quick definition: hedging is the same as hedging your bets.  You bet big on one result, e.g. a stock price going up, and less on the opposite outcome, e.g. that a stock price will go down (”shorting”).  This way you cut your losses if the deal doesn’t go as expected.  This is the strategy that “hedge funds” got their name from, although the term is applied to a companies with a wide variety of strategies – if they still exist.)

The End follows Steve Eisman’s path through the industry, where he was doing what everyone should have been doing – scrutinising the viability of these financial models.  The more he investigated, the more he realised that the whole system was rotten – and unlike many analysts who said they’d seen the crisis coming, but funnily enough hadn’t seen it clearly enough to put their money where their mouth was, he made a great deal of money by “shorting” companies who were dealing in that market. (”Shorting” is effectively making a bet that a company’s value will go down.  The more it goes down, the more money you make).

An interesting part of this article is when Eisman and his colleagues realised that they were in some ways actually fuelling the crisis.  Companies who Eisman was shorting were happily taking his bets that they would fail, and using it to prop up their faltering mortgage-backed securities.  Although Eisman is the hero of Lewis’ story, and is presented as someone who was incredibly angry about how these companies were playing fast and loose with other people’s money and homes (his “vindication” is that he made lots of money from them), did they stop when they realised that they were helping to fund it?  Well, no.  But at least they had the decency to feel a bit sheepish about it. Right?

The disconnection between people dealing in these financial instruments and people outside the financial sector was shown beautifully in a prescient post-Northern-Rock article from January 2008 by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, Cityphilia, which is also worth reading for a very clear introduction to the kinds of financial deals that were being made.  Lanchester writes about a friend of his, Tony, who works (or perhaps “worked” might be more appropriate now) in the City, London’s financial district:

Not all City types are vile, obviously. My friend Tony isn’t vile. We have many interests in common and chat easily about all sorts of things. But I’m sometimes made aware of a significant gap between us. It’s a philosophical and practical gap, and it is to do with money. Tony will complain about the price of things – about parking permits, or the cost of the Playstation 3 he’s promised his son – but I’ve begun to wonder if this is a purely formal acknowledgment of the value of money to other people. Tony’s ‘basic’ is £120,000 a year; in a good year he earns a bonus of £500,000. In a very good year he is paid a million pounds. He is polite about this but the details slip out nonetheless. He bought a second home on Ibiza and I was commiserating with his complaints about the usual things (builders, local regulations) until the cost of the house was mentioned: £1.4 million.

A fundamental economic gap of that type does open up a distance between people, however many other things you have in common. He happened once to mention what he (as a head of department) pays new recruits, straight out of university: ‘45k a year, with a bonus of between ten and twelve grand guaranteed.’ I pointed out that in many cases that would mean these 22-year-olds would be earning more than the heads of department in the universities they’d just graduated from. He shrugged and laughed. ‘It is what it is,’ he said. Also, the bottom-performing 10 per cent of people in every department at his firm are sacked every year. He expressed surprise at my surprise. ‘That’s standard,’ he said. ‘I thought everyone did that.’ The moments when I realise Tony and I occupy very different spaces always turn on money and the assumptions built into our attitudes to it.

Lanchester goes on to consider quite how huge the scale of the problem might turn out to be, given the sums invested, although he mistakes opacity for complexity:

Derivatives, in their modern form, are the most powerful and the most complicated financial instruments ever devised. The third crucial thing about them is that they are everywhere. In 2003 the total size of the world economy was $49,000,000,000,000. The total size of the derivatives being traded was $85,000,000,000,000. In other words, derivatives today are worth far, far more than the total economic activity of the planet. More than $1,000,000,000,000 of derivatives are bought and sold every day. Every single thing that can be traded through derivatives, is. In the words of Warren Buffett, the greatest living stock market investor,

The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). At Enron, for example, newsprint and broadband derivatives, due to be settled many years in the future, were put on the books. Or say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem – at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.

Many companies which look as if their business is to do other things are in reality in the derivatives business – Enron being the best-known example. Buffett is a derivative-phobe, not least because he prefers to know what’s going on in the companies he invests in, and derivatives make that effectively impossible:

No matter how financially sophisticated you are, you can’t possibly learn from reading the disclosure documents of a derivatives-intensive company what risks lurk in its positions. Indeed, the more you know about derivatives, the less you will feel you can learn from the disclosures normally proffered you. In Darwin’s words, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’

The mention of Enron is a sobering reminder of how people can get away with what eventually turn out to be stupid ideas – ideas that people fall for because their greed makes them want to believe in them.  The film Enron, The Smartest Guys In The Room, is a fantastic dissection of the rise and fall of what at one point was considered “the most innovative company in the world” and is highly reccommended viewing.  Made in 2005, the film now seems eerily prescient:

Click here to view the embedded video.

For a bit of light relief, and a link into the idea of managing risk, here’s Andy Hamilton on BBC Radio 4’s comedy panel game The News Quiz, talking about why “innovative” and “banking” are two words that shouldn’t really be put together (for non-British readers, Ladbrokes is a large bookmaking and gambling company).

[See the full post to listen to this audio file]

A good way of looking at the laissez-faire attitude to these financial trades was that the risks were not managed properly – the people and organisations who traded in these instruments did not sufficiently understand the risk of these trades (if they did so at all).  The enforced lack of scrutiny in the markets characterised by Steve Eisman’s early days on Wall Street effectively means that they were blinding themselves to the risk.  Even ratings agencies, whose job it is to tell companies how risky an investment is, were giving AAA ratings, the highest possible, to mortgage-backed securities which consisted of sub-prime mortgages.  An interesting article in the Economist, which perhaps unsurprisingly has continued to be a cheerleader for unregulated markets, is the view of an anonymous risk analyst – someone who is employed by an organisation to advise on whether the risks inherent in a deal are too high.  In Confessions of a Risk Manager he or she describes, yet again, the bias against caution in these institutions.  An interesting aspect of this article is the way that it highlights the fact that the willful blindness to risk mentioned many times above is caused by greed:

In their eyes, we were not earning money for the bank. Worse, we had the power to say no and therefore prevent business from being done. Traders saw us as obstructive and a hindrance to their ability to earn higher bonuses. They did not take kindly to this. Sometimes the relationship between the risk department and the business lines ended in arguments. I often had calls from my own risk managers forewarning me that a senior trader was about to call me to complain about a declined transaction. Most of the time the business line would simply not take no for an answer, especially if the profits were big enough. We, of course, were suspicious, because bigger margins usually meant higher risk. Criticisms that we were being “non-commercial”, “unconstructive” and “obstinate” were not uncommon. It has to be said that the risk department did not always help its cause. Our risk managers, although they had strong analytical skills, were not necessarily good communicators and salesmen. Tactfully explaining why we said no was not our forte. Traders were often exasperated as much by how they were told as by what they were told.

At the root of it all, however, was—and still is—a deeply ingrained flaw in the decision-making process. In contrast to the law, where two sides make an equal-and-opposite argument that is fairly judged, in banks there is always a bias towards one side of the argument. The business line was more focused on getting a transaction approved than on identifying the risks in what it was proposing. The risk factors were a small part of the presentation and always “mitigated”. This made it hard to discourage transactions. If a risk manager said no, he was immediately on a collision course with the business line. The risk thinking therefore leaned towards giving the benefit of the doubt to the risk-takers.

(My emphasis)

And what were the business networks doing while this bubble was inflating (and even while it was bursting)?  Asking tough questions?  Yep, just like The Smartest Guys In The Room showed they asked tough questions of Enron:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So what was happening was this.  Banks were giving mortgages to people who shouldn’t have had had mortgages, because they could charge them high interest rates, and even if they defaulted house prices were rocketing so they’d still make money.  Those mortgages were sold on in batches to other companies as investments, and the income they generated was either from the mortgage payments or sales of defaulted houses.  These investments were rated as AAA investments by the ratings agencies, reinforcing the feeling that they were totally safe, which increased the amount that people would pay for them.  This enabled companies to ignore their risk managers, some of whom were having qualms about the sums being invested.  However, as interest rates were raised by central banks trying to control inflation, house prices started to stall, and people started defaulting on their mortgages.  As this happened the value of the investments – i.e. what investors were willing to pay each other for them – started to fall precipitously, and as they did so it started to become clear that they were worth a great deal less than people had paid for them.  This meant that fewer and fewer people wanted to buy them, until the market in them collapsed entirely and they became effectively worthless.  The banks suddenly owned lots of nothing.

And here’s how it affects the people who haven’t got millions of dollars in bonuses to tide them over.

In the next article in this series, we’ll look at how the financial industry reacted to this, and why, unlike something simpler like a steep rise in oil prices, the financial markets simply collapsed in the face of it – they knew not to trust each other.

Foreclosure photo by Joelogon.

What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs.  Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience.  But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself.  There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake.  However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.

A comparison might help to explain my optimism.  When we first moved to a village near Frome, Somerset, in the early 1980s, it was a bit of a desert – a supermarket had opened up in the centre of town, which had put family butchers and small shops out of business.  Everyone wanted in on this new phenomenon of cheap convenience, but over time it just wasn’t enough.  The town now has two family butchers, a fruit & veg shop, a weekly farmer’s market, a bustling café and a fantastic delicatessen amongst many other things.  Most of these are luxuries – particularly the café and delicatessen – and Frome is by no means poor compared to other towns.  But I think people eventually felt the emptiness of a shop dedicated purely to cheapness and convenience – people’s needs to feel part of a community, to know that more of their money was going into the local economy, to be offered something new by a shopkeeper, reasserted themselves.

Reading is definitely going to change, and there are lots of issues to contend with – many of which are talked about on the excellent if:book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book.  Some are very basic – the Kindle, for example, only has a black and white screen, so can’t show anything with colour pictures.  However, I recently surprised myself by reading an entire 400-page book on my iPhone on the train from Edinburgh to London (the fantastic Your Name Here available for a suggested $8 as a PDF from Helen DeWitt’s site) and didn’t feel frustrated by the small screen or having to cover part of the text with my finger to scroll.  The current form of deep context will perhaps disappear – but, particularly given the possibilities for audio, video and image opened up by the internet, I’m confident that something else will develop to take its place.

Other interesting sites:

My Own Private Alexandria
textsound
Project Gutenberg
Stanza for iPhone
Readability

Splash image by Nic McPhee

The portrait of Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, reminded me of a piece from the notebooks of Geoffrey Madan, a well-heeled London socialite with many artistic friends.  (Harold Macmillan, in his introduction to the notebooks, described Madan as having “something of the look of those young men who stand about to no apparent purpose in Renaissance paintings”).

This morning I saw a magnificent sight.  I came up to the City in the Underground rather late, about half-past ten.  At Bond Street a man got in whom I just know, and have spoken to three or four times in my life.

He wore loose clothes, a ringed and jewelled tie, a crumpled black hat.  His general presence made a most distinguished effect, suggesting all manner of romantic things: a Restoration poet, a historic French admiral, a bearded nobleman of Spain – the ideal which everyone would like to think his own great-grandfather  attained, to adapt a famous obituary phrase.  This strange being was in a state of high tension.  He lay back looking half strangled, as it fallen from a great height, or praying to be supported in some heavy trial; darted a glance away, focussing a distant passenger and slowly dropping his chin; glared round with the queer look of a man swelling with laughter and longing to share it with someone else; or groaned aloud in pain.

The carriage was half-full.  A woman rose to get out at a station.  He started and stared in horror, lifting both hands with delicate fingers, and crooning a song as if to calm a child.  Then he fell back, with forehead deeply lined, a flicker of splendid hands, and a magnificent eye very wide open.  Two or three people recognized the Governor of the Bank.  In the inestimable English tradition they smiled faintly, assumed all to be somehow for the best, and let it go at that.The train scraped round the rails at Bank station, and emptied itself.  Last but one, out of the carriage, strolled this enigmatic figure.  He struck out now in some odd rhythm, half-jaunty, half-defiant; bent idly down to peer all round an empty carriage; then slid past a group of people at a double pace: only to halt for a leisurely and mournful study of an advertisement on a wall.  At the end paused again, gazing nobly into the distance, like some fine old Swiss guide watching the signs of a storm.  Soon he strode on and mounted the escalator, alone, like the bridge of a ship, striking a glorious pose – portrait of an admiral in China seas:

Even in the presence of an enemy fleet,
Between the steep cliff and the coming wave.

I thought of the Treasury saying, that the Bank of England acts like a commander in the days before strategy was thought of.

He had no ticket at the bar; and the same instinct which would not stare in the train, would not ask a question as he left the platform.  As well demand a passport from a Czar.  But the ticket was found at last, by its imperial owner, stuck in the band of his soft dark hat.  Sill the drama continued; a chuckle, a tormented backward glance, a sudden scrutiny of forbidden entrances.  At the top, one last proprietary gaze at the vulgar novelties which press on the old symbolic temple of Threadneedle Street.  The traffic was in full flow; it was instantly reined back as he approached: three men saluted.  But the mysterious grandee had already slipped and sauntered out of sight, chin in air.

March 1932

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s also a 1964 clip from the BBC where Martin Luther King predicts a black president in less than 25 years.  Only a few years late…

Published in 1987, his landmark Memory for Forgetfulness expresses the plight of the refugee under siege.  This book is an eyewitness account of the peak of shelling in Lebanon during the civil war, called Hiroshima Day. Comparable to Slaughterhouse 5 or Murakami’s The White Sky of Hiroshima, Memories for Forgetfulness is a coherent exploration of a life that is already forfeit, a life of isolation, injustice and alienation.

When he died in 2008, discussions were held with Israel to bury him in his home town.  He was buried in exile from that home village so that he could be where all Palestinians can visit.  His remains rest in Ramallah at the heart of the disputed West Bank.

What follows is a short excerpt where Darwish recalls going out into the city streets under bombardment.

I was touched somehow with enthusiasm.  The occupation extended over space, the sea, Snobar mountain, the first storms of anxiety, the way of Adam exiled from paradise.  Many are the ways of unending exile.  My country never came back to me.  My body never came back.  The air raids rain down hymns spreading out and conferences of the living dead in blood like light burning the cold question:  what am I looking for?  I fill myself with gunpowder because of repressed and compressed anger.

Missiles enter my body through my pores, leaving in all safety.  What strength!  I don’t feel the hell spreading through the air wile I’m breathing hell and sweating hells.  Yes, I sing the burning day.  I want to sing.  I want to find a language that will change language into steel for the soul, an anti-air defence language… shiny silver insects… I want to sing.

I want a language to support me while I support it.  I want a language to bear witness to me bearing witness to this language that we have the power to overcome this cosmic isolation.  I walk on.

I walk to see myself walking, taking firm steps, free even of myself.   In the middle of the road, the exact middle, with the barking of a phantom airplane overhead.  She spits her fire, and I don’t notice.  What am I looking for?  Nothing.  Maybe the determined hard headedness that hides the fear of being alone.  Or maybe the fear of being alone.  Or maybe the fear of being crushed under rubble is what drives my footfall, striking the sleeping streets.  

I never saw Beirut sleep so late.  For the first time I could see the sidewalks cleared of people.  For the first time I could see the trees.  Clear trees with roots and branches and leaves that never brown.  Is Beirut beautiful in and of herself?  There had been movement and speach and congestion and ll the mercantile traffic hiding away something from view, changing Beirut from a city to a given fact, a signification, a phrase, a sign.  She used to publish books, disseminate media and host conferences and colloquiums on cures for the world’s maladies, and she didn’t pay any attention to herself.  She was busy flexing a sarcastic tongue over the dust and oppression all around.  She was a free workshop, and her walls encompassed the entire modern canon.  

There was a poster factory.  Beirut was the first city to modify poster production into daily newspapers.  Her ability to express patched together variety, death, chaos, freedom, exile, exodus and peoples.  She was filled with and commissioned for (fawada) every known form of expression and found in posters a way to comprehend the burden (fawada) to express the quotidian.  ”Poster” even became a common phrase in tales and epics designating a specialty.

Faces on walls.  Fresh martyrs released from life and published.  The dead repeating the results of death.  One martyr covering the face of another martyr on the wall.  He takes his place until another martyr buries him and then rain.   Slogans inflame slogans which are exchanged and ranked according to sentimental priorities and global daily needs.  

Whatever happens in the world happens here, buy involuted and ideal currents.  An argument between two intellectuals in a Parisian cafe becomes armed conflict her.  

This is because Lebanon has to belong to and keep up with everything new, and every revived old thing, and every new movement and every new theory.  Film revolutions in quick succession.  Video for immediate implementation.  The new leader and new star are candidates of new leader and new star in their respective fields..  They jump over walls with pictures and words  They salivate over bitterness behind a consciousness trading itself in.  To stars their ages, riegns are shortlived.

No, the public here is sensitive.  In fact, there is no public here, for the race is run in the American style even if their goals are hostile to America.  There are always representatives here from every new realization and every new melody and every new enthusiasm: from the coquetish yearnings in the chest of a young woman in tight jeans indicating leftist excesses, to the one in a viel covering face and hands indicating fundamentalism, to the grasping of every fading sign of Karl Marx in his Orientalist catalogue indicating gusts of eastern wind.

Here is a central ontological transformer for everyone who is out of the race.  It was popularized as an employment service for a people busy securing foodstuffs and water, busy burying their dead.

I am walking through streets that no one walks through.  I remember before walking through streets that no one walks through.  And I remember someone who was not with me saying:

Him:  Stop this oratory and come with me.

I:  Where to?

Him:  To see this man.

I:  What does this man do?

Him:  He is going to his house.

I:  But he keeps retracing his steps.

Him:  That’s just how he walks.

I:  He’s not walking.  It’s much better that that:  he’s dancing!

Him:  Watch him carefully.  Count his steps.  1,2,4,7,9 steps forward.  1,2,3,7,8 steps back.

I:  What’s that prove?

Him:  That he is walking, and this is the only way he knows how to get home.  10 steps forward, 9 steps back.  He still advances one step.

I:  What if his mind wanders and he miscounts?

Him:  Then he will never get home.

I:  Are you trying to tell me something?

Him:  Not at all.

Translation:  Lelyn R. Masters

??? : Do we have to use my real name?

Lelyn : We don’t have to use your real name. What name do you want to use?

??? : Spartacus, that’s my stage name.

L : Tell people a little bit about your background.

Spartacus : I’m from Chicago. I’ve been in Egypt four years. I own a language management company. I’m here with my three girls, ages 21, 11 and 6. It’s been a trip. The two youngest are home schooled, and the oldest is fluent in Japanese. She lived in Japan; she’s going back this year to open a branch of our office. Pimpin’ international. I’ve quit more jobs than most people have interviewed for. I’ve been teaching for about 20 years. I’ve lived in six countries. I speak five or six languages: life is a trip. I don’t know what else to say.

L : You’re from Chicago, um, you’re an African American woman.

S : Sometimes.

L : When you want to be.

S : (laughs)

L : Sometimes when you don’t want to be.

S : I am who I am. I’m always me. People try to pigeon hole me. “Oh, she’s got an afro. She’s pretty. She’s got a big booty.” My name is still Spartacus.

L : What was your life like in America?

S : Damn, I don’t know how to answer that. What was my life like? It sucked.

L : Well, how old were you when you got married.

S : Eighteen. I was in love!

L : What did he do?

S : To me? Or…

L : For a living.

S : He was in the Airforce, and now he’s a cop in Chicago. But he’s a professional asshole.

L : When did you get to Egypt?

S : The first time I came was in 2001. I came with the French boyfriend. I was here for eight months, as a tourist. I was just getting the lay of the land. I needed a break. I had just come from the Dominican Republic and Chicago again. I taught at a university in Chicago for three months, and figured out that I was not cut out for living in the States and reinsert myself into this shit we call living. So I took my youngest at the time and I moved to France. From France I moved to Egypt in 2001. I was here during September 11.

L : Where did you live?

S : I lived in Dahab, on the Red Sea, in the desert. Hanging out with Bedouins and fighting cats for chicken. You ever been to Dahab?

L : No.

S : They have more cats than people in Dahab. I bullshit you not. So if you’re sitting in an outdoor cafe, you’re sitting on the ground. The cats will just come and snatch your food off your plate. They were that bold. So, anyway, as I said I was fightin’ cats in Dahab.

L : So what was it like on September 11?

S : I was terrified. I was at the beach. You know, I watch TV, and I think all Muslims are fundamentalist freaks, all tryin’ to kill us. I’m here on vacation. I hear a bunch of cheering, and I thought it was a soccer game at 8 o’clock in the morning. That’s how smart I was. I was like: “what the hell are they doing this early, whatever!” One of the owners of this shop told me to come into this secret place. He said “Madam you have to come with me.” I’m like: “get your hands off me, shut up and get me a drink.” I’m at the beach chillin’. He’s like: “no you have to come with me now.” I had no idea. So I get upstairs in this freakin’ tower where we used to watch movies, and the room is full of white people. I never saw so many white people in one place: it’s Egypt! I make a point of not talking to them, because I’m in Egypt and I don’t want to be bothered with Americans. So, I’m like what, and they’re all crying. I still didn’t get it. Then I saw the TV, and one of the towers fell. I said “it’s not time for the movie! Why you showin’ the movie so early?” I’m the dumb person in the room. But the news was in English, and then I got this feeling like “oh shit” something is going down. The guy was talking about the towers and blah blah blah. Man! That was one of the scariest points of my life. I really thought it was a Jihad. And people were cheering and they thought it was funny. They were saying “America’s dead!” I was thinking: “you have got to be kidding! Of course this happens when I’m here.”

The whole town was in the streets : “America’s dead!” Anyway, I took my daughters; we all went to an internet cafe. Everybody was doing everything at the same time. We had Swiss, French, German, but only a handful of Americans including me and my daughters. There were a total of 15 or 20 foreigners. I was black, so I could blend in. And I told my daughters: “Speak Spanish. We don’t know them. Stay away from the white people.” So we took stock of who was there, who had their passport, who needed to go back to their room. The Americans organized everyone else. That was the first time I felt like an American, and I was 34 years old. The first fuckin’ time! I was like: “Oh, you done come to our house trippin’? It is on! Wait til’ George Bush get on TV.” And so anyway we ran to the internet cafe. The whole town was lined up outside the internet cafe. There’s no back door, so we were like “it’s going down.” And I read too much and watch too much TV, so I’m thinking about the mass murders. We’re standing there lookin’ like if ya’ll are gonna do this, let’s do it. Fuck it, let’s get it on. And they didn’t. (laughs) But in that moment of waiting… It probably wasn’t that deep, but in my mind… You know how you get so scared all you hear is your own breathing and your heart beating in your ears? We stood there facing them, and they were facing us. Just waiting. I just knew we were going to be hacked to pieces or something.

It didn’t happen. We cussed they ass the fuck out. I was going to take the bus back to Cairo, which is a nine hour trip. A friend of mine who was a Bedouin said: “don’t take the bus. I just got back from Cairo. They’re dragging British and Americans off the buses, taking their passports and beating the shit out of them.” So I had to stay. And one of my friends had a ticket for the next day. We had to pay 200 pounds Sterling, Sterling, to get from Dahab to Sharm. Let me tell you what the hell that was like. When you think desert, you think sand dunes. That’s where the fuck we were in a black and white taxi! My life sucked. It was like 200 degrees. I was scared. I didn’t know if I could trust this fool. So one of us sat beside him, and the other sat behind him so we could put his ass in a choke hold and drive off in his car. Man it was… no one was talking. There was this bus that had broke down with three Australian chicks on it. They were the only white people on board. Everybody knew what had happened, and everyone was trying to get out. Everybody on the bus was just standing there, and there were these girls with all their stuff just going “oh shit!” We drove past and they just screamed at the taxi “please stop!” I said “don’t you dare stop.” But then I thought, if that was me, what would I do? So we went back. We picked them up. There wasn’t enough room in the car, but we had to do it. I couldn’t leave them out there. They looked scared.

We got to Sharm, and we stayed there for two weeks. One of the proudest moments of my life as an American, it was some dumb shit but whatever: when George Bush came on TV and declared war on everything that thought it might want to be a terrorist. I remember everything about him, the suit, the hair, everything. He was the most presidential that day. When I heard him speaking I yelled: “that’s right, we’re coming to get your ass!” I forgot that I was in a Cairo cafe. (laughs) That I shouldn’t have been in because I was a woman. I said “yeah!” Everyone in the cafe looked at me like… I said: “in about twelve hours I want to hear you say ‘America’s dead.’ We’re gonna get your ass.” Man! It was my first time feeling patriotic. And, lo and behold, soon after that…boom. So anyway, that was the most terrifying moment of my life, the first time I was in Cairo.

L : And then you left.

S : Yeah, I left, and I went to Italy.

L : That’s were you had your car accident.

S : Train accident!

L : Oh yeah…

S : I had a train accident, and uh, that was a damn trip.

L : So, fast forward, how long was it between then and when you got back to Cairo?

S : Six years, five years. I got back in 2004.

L : Why did you come back?

S : Because there’s a market for what I do. Language management. I teach business protocols. I mean, there’s no customer service here. These people need training to compete. The GATT (General Agreement for Tariffs and Trade) provisions needed to be implemented by 2005, and I knew that. It means everyone has to change the way they do business if they want to compete in a global economy. So Egypt had to come up. I was studying it for two years, while I was recuperating from my accident. I couldn’t walk for two years. I didn’t have shit to do but read. I built my company while I was recuperating. I targeted this region. So I did extensive research. It’s cheap to live here. I have three kids. Well, four, but only three with me. I just thought, it’s easy. I don’t have Willy Lump the drug dealer hanging out on the corner trying to sell me a bag of weed. There are no school shootings here. I don’t see Chester the Child Molester riding down the street trying to snatch kids.

L : Generally it’s a very safe city.

S : It is.

L : Amongst the big cities in the world, this is the safest.

S : I’ve lived in many big cities around the world, and this is the safest I’ve felt. People piss me off, but I don’t feel unsafe. Egyptians have limits. There are some things you don’t do. I can get down with that. The economy is conducive to what I do. They need me. I’m here. And we can still eat and live in doors, and we can go out.

L : But what happens with Egyptian men?

S : It depends on what they want. They usually think I’m a prostitute. Because I’m African. Most of the Sudanese women here are prostitutes. They make them prostitutes. That’s the only job they can have. For someone who was a civil libertarian and an activist my whole life, I moved to misogynist hell. No, misogynist and racist hell. I mean this is the worst fucking place on earth. Seriously, I’ve gotten into more fist fights because Egyptian men think that they are destined by God to subjugate my black ass. So my nickname is either Sharmuta (whore) or Aswad (nigger) or Hamar (donkey). And they wonder why I beat their ass. In 2001 it was funny. I almost went to jail the first time. This guy punched me. Now, I’m 6′1″, 200 pounds. I’m a big woman. You’re gonna hit me? And then what? And the fool was short. So he missed, and he hit me in the chest. I beat his ass like he owed me child support. I broke his nose, and cracked three ribs. I almost threw him through a plate glass window, but I didn’t want to go to jail.

L : This was in Tallaat Harb (a large and busy intersection in Cairo)?

S : Yeah, right in front of Groppi, the most famous restaurant in Cairo. And of course, Egyptians watch everything, and so hundreds of people came around, mostly men, which scared the shit out of me because I’m from the land of bumrushing. I’m from Chicago. Once they get you down, they bumrush you. That’s what we do. So you got the police there aiming their rifles at me, not him because he’s the one that’s bleeding. Everyone saw him hit me, but because I’m just a Sudanese whore it’s alright for him to hit me. I whooped his ass. “Where are you from?” I said “I’m from the earth.” “Where’s your passport?” I said “Yo’ mother’s got my passport. If you’re man enough to get it, come and get the motherfucker.” You know? I’m a woman walking this earth, and you’re all dogs. None of you are Muslim, because you let that man hit me. You have to protect me, because your god tells you to. So what is it about me that tells you that you don’t have to do this?

L : They still thought you were Sudanese at that point?

S : They were convinced. I said: “yeah, I’m Sudanese, and you just got a Sudanese ass-whoopin’, get the fuck on!” The police were going to arrest me. I said: “the first one of you man enough to do it, put the cuffs on.” I thought my ass was kicked anyway, so whatever. And you know I had timed how long it takes to get from Tahrir to the embassy? That was the first thing I did. I wasn’t going to make it that day from Tallaat Harb. So the men here are convinced… I mean, they treat their own women bad. But at the same time, it’s weird. I don’t see women suffering the humiliation of child support court. That was the most humiliating thing I ever went through. What, you get me pregnant in the back of a Chevy? I can’t tell you what that felt like. Here is someone that you’ve built your life around, and they’re treating you like some ho that wants her change. You know what I mean? I do not see women here doin’ that.

L : But you got away from the cops in front of Groppi?

S : Oh yeah, I left. I told them to get out of the way and I just walked.

L : So they realized that you were American?

S : I think they must have, because I was actin’ a fool. I started screaming in English. They said “whoa, Hia Amerikia.” Everyone just did this uniform “back up.” Then I really snapped. Oh, it’s not that you respect me, you’re scared of that white man that’s gonna come behind me. I was more pissed then. You can’t respect me as a human being, you respect that white man who you think is on his way.

L : How many fights have you gotten into since you got here the second time?

S : Oh man, I get into three fist fights a week.

L : Is it always guys hitting on you?

S : No, they’re just rude! The electrician threw the bill in my face. I kicked his ass and threw him down the stairs. I can understand that people are pissed, but just because I’m a black woman I’m beneath him! The rule is my house is Chicago. Welcome to America. Telephone man, kicked his ass stuffed him in the elevator, told him that if I saw his ass on the street I was gonna beat the shit out of him. The neighbors were like: oh my god, she’s a savage. I had to beat the hell out of the Bowab, both of them. No, I beat their ass. One taxi driver, I almost broke his legs trying to pull him out of the window. The fucker yelled at me. When I first got here it was hard. I hit them in their mouth. They want to yell at me? I understand they’re men, they’re stronger, but to me it’s worth the asswhoopin. I did not come 7000 miles to be fucked with. I came here to build a life. I respect people. I say “Salam Alaykum.” I do what they do. You are going to respect me. But for some reason, they have some preordained psychosis to where they’re not going to respect me because of the color of my skin and my gender. I am obligated to kick their ass.

L : They’re also pretty sex starved.

S : They think they are, but they’ve never had it so they don’t know. This country is inundated with two-pump chumps. So how would they know? 80 percent of men here have sex with other men.

L : It’s a way of advancing in society.

S : It is. But you see the concept of sexuality or sexual orientation is a political construct of the west. There is no such animal in Africa. There is no “homosexual” or “lesbian.” People do what they do; they don’t have to define it like that. The whole homosexual/gay thing came with westerners, and I think it’s a mistake to classify people like that.

L : There’s a lot of things that go on in secret.

S : Of course, Cairo is a fascinating city in that everything here has another side to it. If you listen to the nuances of the conversation, there is always something else going on. And once I learned that, life got a lot easier. This is a country of compulsive liars. They lie just because. The shit doesn’t even profit them. We were talking about America the other day, and how awful it is. I said “you’re right, but it works for us. We are whoopin your ass because it works. Our psychosis works for us; yours doesn’t work for you.” Here’s a woman with dirty feet selling Kleenex for 25 piastres (ten cents) and she’s got two babies on top of her head [a common sight in Egypt]. And she’s wearing all that shit (Niqab, Higab, etc.) in 200 degree weather! So, where are the men she’s wearing that shit for? They’re not respecting her. They don’t respect her enough to have a clean street for her to sell her Kleenex on. There are too many religious people here for the streets to be this dirty. The women work too hard, for the men who treat them like dogs. I always ask them: “what are you wearing that for? Where is the man you’re respecting? Because, see, you are in a Microbus with ten bags and two babies. Where are these men that you’re wearing this for? Everyone has their own thing, and I can dig it. But it has to be reciprocal. Women are chattel in Africa. Like I said the first time I met you, the best thing that happened to me was slavery. I don’t want to be from here! This is some sick shit. Every African woman my age I see looks like she’s got somebody’s foot where she don’t want it. They look ten or twenty years older than me. They are downtrodden.

L : Except for the rich families.

S : But even in the rich families, people have to take shit just to be rich. They live by the leave of their men. She just ain’t scrubbin’ floors and ho’n for a living, but she’s serving her father and her brothers. And she will marry whoever the hell they tell her to. So it doesn’t matter if they have money. They still don’t belong to themselves. You can’t even live by yourself. I got a friend she just moved out; she’s 35. What’s up?! But I tell women, “you are the problem because you keep doin’ it.” And they say “well, you know…” And I say “no I don’t know, because I’ve had to fight for everything I have.”

L : What is the size of the feminist movement here?

S : What is feminism? No, there is no resistance here. No, because they want to be kept. There’s another side to it. They don’t want to go to work. They want to be pampered. They want to have the maids and the nannies. If you want that, you have to put up with this asshole on you for two minutes. Because they’re lazy. I tell em’ all the time. The first thing they say to me is “you’re beautiful, why don’t you get married?” I tell them: “Why should I get married? I don’t have to get married to have sex.” They say: “but your life is so hard!” I say: “my life is a lot better than yours. I work for a living. My children are healthy and happy. What makes my life hard? I have to work, so what?”

L : But this family structure isn’t really Egyptian culture.

S : Then what is it?

L : It’s a conservative construct that gains force from time to time, but you know like I know that people don’t really live their lives that way. They’re just keeping up an image.

S : The sick part is that they think they have to keep up an image. They’re keeping up the image of chasteness, when they’re not. They’re getting jiggy with it at four in the morning. Why are they hiding it? That’s what’s sick. If they were really serious about it, why wouldn’t they be out in the open about it? Why would you get married at 25 so you can have sex, when it’s understood between you and your wife that you’re going to have a mistress? I have so many friends who do that. They got married because their parents told them to. So now Fatima stays in the house, covered. She never goes outside. You got two misbehaved kids because they eat sugar all day. They won’t sit down; they can’t shut up. She’s harping at his ass on the phone because he won’t let her out of the house because she represents his honor. But then after work he hooks up with his girlfriend. What kind of shit is that? And they want to act like they’re normal? That shit’s not normal. They try to say “we like the American lifestyle.” But you don’t have to like it. It’s not about judgement. They try to act like they do it too, but they don’t – because they have to hide it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Private Life of Gannets, available to download in high quality from the Internet Archive.

The Private Life of Gannets can be located on the Internet Archive – such a veritable storehouse of bird footage that I chose the gannet completely at random. The film was directed by Julian Huxley and shot by John Grierson, the uncompromising Scottish filmmaker and theorist who introduced the word ‘documentary’ to the English language. In the spring of 1937 they began shooting off the Welsh coast on the island of Grassholm (Welsh; Ynys Gwales). Its name, Viking in origin, means ‘green island’ although the rock, pungent with guano and the plumage of the birds, is white in appearance. A camera captures the hatching of a chick; its physical development unfolds in time-lapse photography. New born birds are completely black, and gradually their feathered down shows increasing amounts of white. The use of slow motion reveals the operations of flight. These fowl have far forward eyes with binocular vision allowing them to judge distances with acute accuracy and they are shown diving down into the sea to skewer fish. The term “greedy gannet” arises from their voracious appetite and the species’ arrah arrah cry has made one more recent visitor to the island describe it as an avian discotheque. Today this colony of gannets still rule supreme on a terrain wholly unoccupied by humans. If they could only know this – the gannets might indeed be grateful.

In Aristophanes’ satire – The Birds – the leaders of the bird kingdom are disastrously misled by two humans into defying Zeus by building a city, “Cloudcuckooland” which interrupts the flow of communication between mankind and the gods. The aerial blockade prevents the steam of sacrificial offering rising skywards to the gods.

For the literary ornithologist this play is a delight – amongst its extensive cast are a Hoopoe, Partridge, Mallard, Kingfisher, Sparrow, Owl, Jay, Turtledove, Crested Lark, Reed Warbler, Pigeon, Woodpecker and Vulture – to name but a few.

They describe their creation thus:

It was Chaos and Night at the first, and the blackness of darkness, and hell’s broad border;

Earth was not, nor air, neither heaven; when in depths of the womb of the dark without order

First thing first born of the black-plumed Night was a wind-egg hatched in her bosom,

Whence timely, with season revolving again, sweet Love burst out as a blossom,

Gold wings glittering forth of his back, like whirlwinds gustily turning

He, after his wedlock with Chaos, whose wings are of darkness in hell broad-burning,

For his nestings begat him a race of birds first and upraised us to light new-lighted.

Aristophanes’ 2500 year old comedy, combines natural history, mythology and augury, to explore governance and corruption in the birds quest for primacy over gods and humans. Cloudcuckooland transforms from an egalitarian state into dictatorship. This theatrical entertainment, outwardly light, colourful, absurd and played for laughs has much darker undertones.

In 1920 the German composer Walter Braunfels used the play to devise an Opera, Die Vogel. On August 29th 1920 another bird was born in Kansas City – Charles Parker Jnr. Die Vogel with other works by Braunfels was banned in the 1930s by the Nazis as part of their campaign against Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music). Other than a general hostility to modernist styles this included music made by composers with differing political views and those of Jewish Lineage. It also included a strong censorship of Jazz because of its Afro – Americans proponents. However later in a perverse form of propaganda a Nazi Jazz band was devised and named Charlie and his Jazz Orchestra, recording versions of popular songs with the lyrics altered and radio broadcast to Britain and America. On both sides, music, film, art even birds were appropriated as tools of warfare.

The British were convinced the Nazis were preparing a pigeon invasion from occupied France and Belgium to deliver messages to their spies in Britain. The British trained battalions of falcons in preparation for a Battle of Britain with feathers. It never happened. The files reveal the Nazi pigeon invasion was the product of overheated imaginations.

Christopher Andrew

Looney Toons indeed, Daffy The Commando and Donald Duck in full Nazi regalia in Der Fuerher’s Face! Hawks, doves and eagles remain the cherished symbols of fighting talk.

The War is on!

War unutterable!

War with the gods!

Scan, scan the cloud-filled sky…

Aristophanes

Created before these rumblings, The Private Life of Gannets became one of many films that were to shape the course of scientific research itself, by encouraging an interest in visual communication within the animal world. Species were selected for their photogenic qualities and there was an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the image’s power to educate and inform.

Science and entertainment required that only the most spectacular and private aspects of animal life were recorded.

Gregg Mittman

Grierson was seriously committed to the fabrication of authenticity in the natural history film and more so in documenting the workings of human society, particularly that of the working class. He was a radical filmmaker. However to the contemporary viewer this observing eye can look and sound a little quaint. The soundtrack is crowded with voice-over and the sound of an anodyne orchestra playing sickly parlour music. A very English voice intones with gravity upon “the anchors and chains of wrecked ships” and the commentary, in describing the pale island, makes repeated poetic reference to the whiteness of snow. We never get to hear the sound of the birds or the rush of the sea or an occasional unearthly silence. Try visiting a different island in Antonioni’s L’Aventurra and you will hear the sound of the wind and waves crashing against the jagged perimeter of rock. You will encounter another form of seeking and looking in which the psychology and sense of place has the exactitude of an almost scientific eye. Yet the two very different films both articulate a terrible sense of remoteness and awe.

It is too easy to overlook Private Lives. The cinematography reveals a passion for expanding the language and content of the medium, within the often limiting conventions of public information films of this time. The aim? To show life and nature as it is. It is a film that wants to fly and what better subject than birds that can, not flightless things like ostriches, penguins, kiwis and chickens.

During the First Punic War, Publius Claudius, a headstrong man, consulted the sacred chickens which were not eating, which was a bad omen, he replied, “Let them drink!” and ordered them to be thrown into the sea. Shortly after that he lost his fleet of the Aegeate islands. This was a great disaster for our Republic and indeed for Claudius himself

Neptonius

In adulthood Charlie Parker Jnr became Bird. While out on the Road with the McShann Band, in the wilds of Nebraska, the car hit a chicken that had run onto the highway from a nearby farmyard. Parker suggested going back to pick up the “Yardbird” and thus his nickname came into being. Was this an augury of sorts?

Bird ate that chicken but why did it cross that road?

Plato: For the greater good.

Aristotle: To fulfill its nature on the other side.

Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.

Thoreau: To live deliberately … and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Bird would not stop for anything. He wanted to play a music that “they can’t steal from us“, “they” being the white musicians who copied earlier forms of jazz and received most of its financial rewards.

His playing had such dexterity, such fluidity. In his playing, if you take his nickname Bird and you picture a bird flying through the air – in flight – he’s totally free. Even though the music is structured, his style of playing is so totally free, that he can just fly – go in any direction he so desires.

Milt Jackson

On April 30th 1941 Alto saxophonist Parker made his first commercial recording “Swingmatism” with Jay McShann’s band in Dallas. Also in 1941 an elephant flew, albeit a cartoon elephant. Dumbo’s aerial feat was immortalised in the song – When I See An Elephant Fly. The song was sung by a crew of jive-talking Crows – (voiced as blacks performers). This was not unusual at the time, amongst other crude stereotypes in the world of animation, such as monkeys or cannibals, Afro- Americans were often depicted as black birds, Disney’s unwitting racial divination.

cra, cré, cro, crou, crouou.

grass, gress, gross, grouss, grououss.

craé, créé, croa, croua, grouass.

crao, créé, croé, croue, grouess.

craou, créo, croo, crouo, grouoss.

A transcription of crow-calls made in 1806 by Dupont de Nemours

In 1945 after an unsuccessful engagement ended with Dizzie Gillespie, all the musicians returned to New York except for Bird, who cashed in his airplane ticket and stayed in California. Stranded there with a serious heroin addiction, his need for cash led him to Dial Records where he recorded “Moose The Mooch,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Night In Tunisia” and “Ornithology.”

“Ornithology” is a ‘contrafact’ – a newly written melody over the chord progression of another song –”How High The Moon” Again notions of flight, of becoming airborne, are never far from reach. Contrafact gives birth to improvisation.

arrah arrah

bebop bebop

be-babbe-debop

boo bam boo

hoopoe hoopoe

baba-baba-BA!

The regal instrument sounds out timelessly.

King Solomon then called in the animals, birds and creeping things, one by one, to parade before the king and his onlookers, without any man leading them, and without any of them being bound by fetters or restraints. While this was taking place, King Solomon noticed that the Hoopoe bird was absent among the birds, and commanded his servants to bring unto him the bird, even if it meant chaining him. When he was eventually brought before the king, the king enquired where he had been.

The Hoopoe bird tells King Solomon of a land he has discovered in the east whose capital is called Qitor and whose ruler is the Queen of Sheba.

Lo! I found a woman ruling over them and she has been given abundance of everything; she has been given the knowledge of all things in her country, and has a mighty throne adorned with gems, pearls, gold and silver.

The bird is sent by Solomon to request the queen’s immediate attendance at Solomon’s court. The Hoopoe is a spy, messenger, envoy and diplomat but being a mercenary he too likes to fly in any direction he so desires. He hovers through Time with a pearl in his beak, flying across centuries towards the 1950s streets of New York, to 1678 Broadway, to Birdland. He swoops right inside the club and nests that pearl in the interior of an alto sax.

Down them stairs, lose them cares – where?

Down in Birdland.

Total swing, bop was king – there

Down in Birdland.

Bird would cook, Max would look – where?

Down in Birdland.

Miles came through, Trane came too – there

Down in Birdland.

Basie blew, Blakey too – where?

Down in Birdland.

Cannonball played that hall – there

Down in Birdland

Saturday morning, an empty sky.

His death, too and his deification after death were known in advance by unmistakable signs. As he was bringing the lustrum to an end, before a great throng of people, an eagle flew several times about him then across to the temple hard by, perched above the first letter of Agrippa’s name

Suetonius

On March 12th 1955 Bird took flight from a room in the Stanhope Hotel. An ornithic host gathered in the branches of a Sawtooth Oak in Central Park and sang sweet and plaintive laments. Only the Hoopoe remained aloof from the congregation – perched alone in the recesses of a Black Willow, completely mute. He was preparing to change places, tempos, time zones; ready to fly back to King Solomon, or perhaps further forward to who knows where.

Walls in Greenwich Village were covered in the graffito: BIRD LIVES.

Never again

Through my domain

Shall a god presume to stray;

The birds are on guard,

The gates are barred,

Not one shall pass this way!

Never again

Through my domain

Shall the smoke from altars rise;

In vain they’ll sniff:

For the faintest whiff:

We’ve cut off their supplies

Aristophanes

Back at the end of the day, the film crew at Grassholm are packing up their kit and waiting nervously on the rocks for the boat to the mainland, oblivious to the Gannets continuing to dive into the ocean for fish. The film must go to the lab in Soho as soon as possible. They rub their sides and stamp their feet against the chill air – never for a moment considering the possibility of taking the auspices.

In 357 AD the emperor Constantius outlawed all methods of divination including Augury.

The art may have gone the way of the dodo, yet when watching Huxley & Grierson’s film or foraging through the links below, you may discover your own propensity towards divination. If you don’t believe me – you are almost certainly in Cloudcuckooland.

The Private Life of Gannets

Directed by: Julian Huxley

Produced by: Alexander Korda

Written by: Ronald Lockley

Starring: A. L. Alexander

Cinematography: John Grierson, Osmond Borradaile

Release date: July, 1937

Running time: 10 minutes

View the full film or download a high-quality version on the Internet Archive

To visit the island of Grassholm call:

A Thousand Expeditions +44 (0)1437 721 721

Envy is at the root of much racism, against China, against America, against the Jews.

I saw the Chinese spectacle.  The Arabic commentator, in the dress of a sheik, explained to us that the Chinese were using the spectacle to intimidate the world.  It was quite interesting to me how the Chinese adapted the Greek ceremony.  It was as if the far east and the west had joined together and skipped the Arab world.

When the commentators spoke of Arab competitors they spoke of competitors from the “united Arab nation.”  They didn’t speak of them as if they were from individual countries.  The broadcast was from Dubai, of course, and there was no rhetoric of Emirate superiority in sports, the way it was no doubt spoken of in the US.  Again, the key phrase was “Arab unity.”

PanArabism is an interesting movement, often at odds with Islamists, but equally enraged at the existence of Israel.  It is in a spirit of Panarabism that Egyptians would feel personally threatened by Israel and the US, whereas these two countries are doing nothing against Egypt, but rather are giving tons of financial aid.

So actually, all this talk of Arab unity could be read as antisemitic, anti-Chinese (who are trying to intimidate us) and ultimately an expression of one thing: envy.

The Bird's Nest, Beijing

Observing the way that medal tables were displayed in different parts of the world was a microcosm of the differing perspectives on the Beijing Olympics.  The New York Times displayed them in order of total medals, which put the USA at the top.  The official Beijing Olympics website displayed them in order of Golds, then Silvers, then Bronzes, which put the Chinese at the top.  The BBC site could do either, as the strangely-named “Team GB” ended up in fourth whichever way they chose, but opted for the official table layout.  News.com.au also stuck with the official line, even though Australia stood to gain a place by using total medals as the gauge.

But the fundamental problem with any table which uses absolute numbers of medals is that it ignores the most important factors that go to make up those totals: population and wealth.  Australian economist Bill Mitchell has been compiling medal tables based on GDP, population, GDP per capita, gender and other measures for a few Olympics now, and the results give a much better insight into how impressive various countries’ performances were.  Here are a few of the highlights (listed in order from 1st to 5th):

Top five taking GDP into account:

North Korea, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Jamaica, Georgia

Top five taking population into account:

Jamaica, Bahamas, Iceland, Slovenia, Norway

Top five taking GDP per capita into account:

North Korea, China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zimbabwe

And here’s where the top five in terms of the official medal table came in the adjusted table (out of the 87 countries that managed to win at least one medal):

Taking GDP into account:

China (44th), USA (72nd), Russia (37th), Great Britain (54th), Germany (61st)

Taking population into account:

China (65th), USA (44th), Russia (36th), Great Britain (22nd), Germany (32nd)

Taking GDP per capita into account:

China (2nd), USA (44th), Russia (36th), Great Britain (22nd), Germany (32nd)

There are full details on Bill’s website, including how he arrived at the calculations (using North Korea’s GDP must have been very close to dividing by zero).  There’s a sense of justice in the fact that, for example, Zimbabwean athletes are up there, given how amazing it is that they managed to make the games at all.

The political atmosphere of the games was bound to linger on and even seeped into national politics – Robert Mugabe awarded a white Zimbabwean swimmer US$100,000 for her four medals and called her “a daughter of Zimbabwe” (she must have been glad it wasn’t in worthless Zimbabwean dollars); the British cyclist Chris Hoy, who won three golds in Beijing, complained of politicians “cashing in” on his success.

But what of Tibet?  What of the Beiing factories closed to clean the air?  What of the promise that by holding the Olympics in China, the Chinese government would start to relax their iron grip on the people and start to be more open?

Shanghai Scrap, a blog written by an American writer living in Shanghai with some interesting coverage of the games, has watched as things start to get back to normal.

Although it is dangerous to draw historical comparisons, as it is easy to take them too far, this is nonetheless eerily reminiscent of the Munich Olympics in 1936, when anti-semitic propaganda, the beating of Jews in the streets and any sign of rubbish, beggars, mangy animals and so on was cleaned from the streets for the duration of the Olympics – and this despite the fact that the Nuremberg Laws, which gave a legal basis for pseudo-scientific discrimination against Jews, had been passed only the year before.  As shown with compelling clarity in the BBC documentary The Thirties in Colour, Germany became the place to go on holiday after the spectacle of the Olympics.  Holidaymakers who went after the games, however, were confronted with the full force of the Nazi’s rabid anti-semitism with Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer on many street corners.  What will travellers to China see in a year’s time?

Image credit: Shajahan Moidin

In honour of the life and work of Fassbinder, LoveHowlMuse is offering a free MP3 download of the soundtrack to The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty during the Arnolfini’s season.

Download the MP3 »

Watch the video »

Fassbinder Directors Focus season overview »

The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty will be screened before these films:

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (8th Aug)


The American Solider (16th Aug)


Fox & His Friends (24th Aug)


Fear Eats the Soul (31st Aug)

Here’s a joke about politics.  A man climbs the Kaaba during Ramadan (for Muslims, the Kaaba is the nearest point to heaven).  He won’t come down unless Hosni Mubarak (the Egyptian President) comes in person to ask him.  The authorities call Mubarak, and he arrives.  Mubarak says, “son, come down from there.”  The man says that Mubarak has to come up first.  As soon as he does, the man lifts him up and yells to the sky “take him!”

Traditionally, Egypt had local Imams they could go to if they had political problems.  The Imams had great power in the establishment.  When this model was replaced by Western parliamentarianism, it was unclear to Egyptians how they would interact with the government.  Political activism is alive in Egypt, but there is a cultural drag on it because of this history.

However, what is really stifling Egypt at the moment is Mubarak.  Several years ago presidential elections were held.  Mubarak was opposed by Ayman Nour.  Originally Nour was a stooge of Mubarak’s that they picked to put on a show of having another candidate, but he rebelled and actually tried to win the election.  For his pains he was put in prison for forging signatures – but how many signatures did Mubarak forge?  Given that there was no real opposition to Mubarak you could argue that the entire election was forged.

Egypt is waiting for Mubarak to die.

Who comes after Mubarak?  I ask that from time to time.  No one has any idea, and most people don’t care.  They don’t have anyone in mind who would be any better.  There is a real sense that the government here is irresponsible and unresponsive to the needs of the people, so people ignore the government as best they can.

On the other hand, people here get excited when you mention Obama.  Egyptians were shocked when he said that Jerusalem would be the capital of Israel.  This statement got hardline Israeli hopes too high, and alienated Palestinians before discussions ever began.  Even so, Obama’s emphasis on foreign aid rather than continued warfare makes people hope that he will bring a change to the world.  One thing is clear: a globally popular American president will certainly mean social progress in Egypt.  The psychology of it is simple – if Egyptians feel less oppressed by America, they will be more open to personal freedom.  Until then they will keep their women in one kind of veil or another.

Before I came here I didn’t have much respect for the Law, but now that I’ve tasted chaos I can appreciate things like traffic laws.  People tend to ignore laws here in Cairo.  Seat belts cost money.  Stopping for red lights costs money.  Recently, however, the government has been enforcing certain traffic laws.  The announcement was made three months ago, and the laws came into effect just two days ago.  In those two days 15,000 people have been punished for breaking traffic laws.  The leading infringements are speeding and straddling lanes.  People have been fined for not having seat belts or not having them on.  People have been fined for asking the driver in the car next to them for directions while both cars are speeding down the street at top speed.  (I have seen taxi drivers get change for a 100 pound note this way).  People are being fined for driving down the street with the door open, which is quite common for minibuses (like an SUV, but used for public transportation).  Rather than having a sign telling you where the bus is going, these people leave the door open and have their younger cousin lean out yelling the destination.

Even now the increase in safety and ease of travel is noticeable.  I personally have witnessed taxi drivers wearing seat belts for the first time, and they even have one for me.  People have slowed down.  The government has actually done something for its people, which feels strange.

People in troubled times turn to religions.  On the other hand, as Bukowski says, “There are no saints in a foxhole.”  The youth sell drugs in the streets.  Prostitution is run out of bars and from mobile phone numbers.  Many of the prostitutes here in Cairo are from Sudan.  Many a “good Muslim” has no problem paying these African women for sex.  The Muslim Brotherhood, usually so meticulous in its fight against moral corruption, tolerates places like The Africaner where black flesh is on sale.

Usually the government is led by the rich elite.  The upper layers of Egyptian society speak English & French,  and have degrees from Europe, which unlike the local degrees actually signify a real education.  They smoke hashish all day long.  They have free sexual relationships.  They have abortions and vacations in Crete.  They take their women to America to give birth so that they gain dual citizenship.  They act like European landlords who own a shitty property they somehow have to make money from.  It serves them quite well for the country to drug itself, to Islamicise itself, and to devour the flesh of young Sudanese women.

They joke about how, if riots break out, the Americans will be evacuated, the French will be evacuated, the English will be evacuated - but who will evacuate the rich Egyptians?  Instead of planning their retreat to Europe or the US, perhaps the rich and powerful should commit themselves to the well-being of their countrymen – it might make the rioters less likely to slit their throats.

[UPDATE - On 18th February 2009 Ayman Nour was released from jail on "health grounds" - BBC News]