Where is Matt right now?
DECEMBER 23, 2011 - Today I'm learning to dive at Fun and Sun Dive and Travel on Malapascua, Philippines (http://bit.ly/vAoQjP). In three days, we be swimming with thresher sharks. Merry Christmas to me :)
With three books, Steven Crook is one of Taiwan’ best-known English writers (and my former editor). In this interview we discuss his career, Taiwan’s best sights, and how travel apps are changing travel writing.
This piece, originally written for, but never published by, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies has been one of the most popular pieces on this website ever since I first posted it, and has received many compliments.
Hunter S. Thompson
The theatre was dark and reeked with the stench of a hundred overfed accountants gorging on chemical drenched popcorn and syrup water. I’d been assigned to review No Country for Old Men for Rolling Stone, and was already a week past deadline, but had abandoned the assignment partly because when you eat as much mescaline as I had it’s very hard to focus on a predetermined task, and also because I realized what a fleecing the operation was. Fifteen dollars for a ticket. Eight dollars for popcorn. Four dollars for soda. This wasn’t art. It was a twisted perversion of the American dream, a herding of overweight suburbanites into giant pens with flashing pictures on the wall to stupefy them into paying outrageous prices for sickening foods.
I had brought my lawyer, a large hairy Samoan, and I explained this to him as we waited to purchase a package of Mentos, which is the only thing that will calm him in the throws of a powerful mescaline trip, but the mescaline was already batting his mind around like a squash ball. He kept looking around and talking about an agent and the ‘incident’ on his last trip to Batangas. Suddenly he muttered something about “the banana man” and ran down the up escalator, leaving a trail of sweatpants wearing housewives on the ground. I slipped into the theater.
The movie had started, but I was distracted by the raincoat-wearing pervert in front of me, who looked like the police sketch of a local pedophile. I was trying to get into position to snap his neck without drawing attention when I saw that a man further down in the theater kept turning to look at me. He was old and reptilian. Was this the agent that my lawyer had seen? Paranoia gripped me. Did I have any outstanding warrants? Was he an assassin? Or worse yet, a Republican? It was clear that I had to make a run for it and come up with an excuse for not finishing the article.
I ran out the emergency exit hoping that it would sound the alarm and empty the theater, but the alarm didn’t go off. There was a fire extinguisher in a glass case on the wall. I broke the glass and the alarm screamed. I sprinted back into the theater using the fire extinguisher to create a smokescreen. I thought I was in the clear, but as I ran up the aisle the agent leaped in front of me like an orangutan and punched me in the face. I awoke to my lawyer explaining to the theater manager that I was autistic and threatening to sue him for discrimination against the handicapped if he didn’t allow us to leave.
He pulled me to my feet and dragged me out my Cadillac, which we drove at top speed through the city, onto the interstate and headed for Vegas, where I had a friend who could give us some queludes to bring us back to our senses so that we could figure out who the agent was, and what he wanted.
Jack Kerouac
Neal and I had been planning to see No Country for Old Men because Neal and I always dug Cohen brothers movies and how they created such funny-sad characters that mirrored the funny-sadness of life, but when we were in the Royal having a beer before the movie Neal met a this beautiful little thin-hipped waitress who was almost finished work and decided to boost a car and drive her out of the city and make her in a field – Neal apologized profusely because beneath his animal sexuality he’s really a golden hearted angel and I told him that it was OK and bought a bottle of port to keep me company and hid it under my raincoat but that was a bad idea because I got too drunk waiting for the movie to start and couldn’t see clearly or understand the story so I started meditating on this crazy cat behind me who was moving around and mumbling a crazy dark monologue about pedophiles and agents and he kept getting more and more agitated like a tortured dark theater ogre until finally he stood up and bounded down the aisle on great long ogre legs and rushed out the door – then the fire alarm went off and he rushed back in shooting plumes of white foam across the theater while running up the aisle – but then suddenly a man stood up and punched him, which I hated because I hate to see anything hurt, and can’t even bring myself to kill a mosquito, and because I came to think that he was a of mad angel here to save us all from ourselves so I ran out of the theater and kept running for two blocks before realizing that I’d left the port in the theater and that I didn’t have money to buy more and that even after encountering a wild angel of the night, when your wine is gone and you’re alone the city is a desolate place – so I sat down on and cried into my knees wishing that Neal and the waitress would pull up in a car blaring bebop on the radio and carry me off into the hopeless American night.
Ernest Hemingway
I sipped gin from the flask that Ezra had given me and I hid it under my coat whenever the usher walked past. The gin was cold and biting and helped to pass the time while I waited for the movie to begin. After a while the theater became dark and quiet. The movie began. It was No Country for Old Men by the Cohen brothers, who always made fine movies, so I expected to enjoy it.
The story followed a man who killed people for profit and fun, a cowboy who discovered a bag of money, and an idealistic policeman. The story was interesting and I liked it although it wasn’t much like the brothers’ previous movies. The writing was refined and the cinematography was good.
The experience was all very good except for a man several rows behind me who kept talking and moving around. I kept turning around to glare at him so that he would be quiet. Eventually the man stood up and ran out the emergency exit. A moment later the fire alarm went off and the man rushed back into the theater screaming “fire” and shooting a fire extinguisher into the crowd. I had been enjoying the movie a great deal and this made me very angry so, when he came near me I stood up and punched his face. I could tell he wasn’t a boxer because he had no legs. He fell down and shouted for others to attack me because I was an “agent” and going to take him away for “water boarding”, so I punched him again and put him out.
After that the movie was postponed until the police could come, and I had an appointment with Gertrude for aperitifs at the Royal, so I left. I can’t say much about this movie except that the beginning is different from anything that the Cohen brothers have made, but it’s probably as good as anything that they’ve made, and it may attract lunatics, but it’s probably worth seeing if you’re not afraid to box a lunatic.
Scratch Magazine June, 2004
Music has long been used by the poor and oppressed to lift spirits and communicate messages of social change. From the African-American slaves of the deep south singing soulful, subtly rebellious, gospel hymns, to Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine belting out “We gotta take the power back!” over grinding guitars and machine gun bass kicks, politics have always been an undercurrent in Western music.
These days bands from most genres, like punk (Propaghandi, NOFX), metal (Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down), hip-hop (Spearhead, KRS-One), and turntablism (Dj Shadow, Cut Chemist), combine politics with music. But for the first part of the twentieth century political music, music with a message, was pretty much limited to the folk music scene.
Unions and Acoustic Guitars: The Folk-Protest Music Scene
Five artists were key in the development of the folk-protest music scene in North America. As Jerome L. Rodnitzky, author of Minstrels of the Dawn: The Folk-Protest Singer as a Cultural Hero, put it, “Woody Guthrie did it the earliest and most convincingly, Pete Seeger did it the longest, Joan Baez did it most artfully, Phil Ochs tried the hardest, and the young Bob Dylan did it best.”
The first North American compilation of folk-protest music was contained in the “Little Red Songbook” compiled by the Industrial Workers of the World in 1904. The songs of the book were written to inform the working masses about issues of unionism and socialism.
The songs of that Little Red Songbook inspired a thirty year old, political-minded author and newspaper columnist named Woodie Guthrie, to start writing his own songs of change in 1942. American music would never be the same.
Guthrie traveled the country with his signature acoustic guitar boasting a sticker reading “This Machine Kills Fascists” playing heartfelt songs of social change to working-class audiences. By the end of his career Guthrie had written thousands of classic socialist folk-protest songs including the famous This Land is Your Land.
Although Guthrie was a popular artist, and a cultural icon, he wasn’t a star. Subsequently, he never got the opportunity to deliver his message to the masses. He would, though, get to meet the man that would.
In 1962, while Guthrie laid up in a New York hospital with Huntington’s chorea (the disease that would cause of his 1967 death) a young musician and admirer, who was quickly building a following among the coffee house-goers of Greenwich Village, visited Guthrie’s hospital bed. The visitor was a 21-year-old Bob Dylan.
Dylan was influenced enormously by Guthrie. His straightforward, talking style, songs like Song to Woody and Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, and an enormous collection of covers of the old rebel-rouser’s protest anthems, are tribute to that. But Dylan was something Guthrie wasn’t. Dylan was a poet.
Dylan also had something the Guthrie lacked: topical issues. While Guthrie sang about philosophically broad topics relating to unions and socialism, Dylan had current events to sing about that already had the attention of the American people—events like the unpopular Vietnam War and nuclear bungling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Dylan’s down-to-earth honesty and straight-talking style quickly gained him critical acclaim and in 1962 (the same year he first visited Guthrie) he signed a deal with Columbia Records. His first, self-titled album wasn’t much to speak of. It boasted only two original songs among the traditional folk and blues cover tunes. But Dylan’s second album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, would secure him a place among history’s great poets and musicians. Freewheelin’ was a lyrical protest masterpiece. It contained two of the most enduring protest songs of all time: Blowin’ in the Wind (about Vietnam), and A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall (about the Cuban Missile Crisis).
Peter, Paul, and Mary’s cover of Blowin’ in the Wind went to #2 on the pop charts later that year bringing protest music, and Bob Dylan, to a wider audience that either had ever reached before.
Dylan led the outbreak of crazy-hippy, fight-the-power protest songs of the sixties. It’s often joked that Bob Dylan wrote all the hits of the sixties–and it’s not far from true. Many of Dylan’s songs, performed by other artists, became huge hits; like Bob Marley‘s version of Knockin‘ on Heaven‘s Door (later redone by Guns N‘ Roses) and Jimmy Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower.
Dylan was not the only protest musician around during the 60’s. Many artists, even conventional ones, started writing protest songs. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? criticized the Vietnam War and Nina Simone sang about racism and civil rights while Bob Marley was in Jamaica leading his Rastafarian “movement of Jah people” with music.
The folk-protest genre faded from the limelight when Dylan abandoned it in 1965, but it did not die. More recently Ani DiFranco, a street-wise, feminist, poet/musician, has been igniting social turmoil with her punk-inspired, rough-around-the-edges folk sound, since the late 80’s, and Billy Bragg, a British folk musician described by the London Times as a “national treasure”, has also been involved in political activism through his music for over twenty years and is still going strong.
The Unlikely New Protest Music: Anarchist Punk
The mid-seventies saw the end of the Vietnam War, and the decline of protest music. As the war came to an end, so did opposition to the war (which was the most popular topic for protest songs). Also, during the 70’s, corporations started taking over the music industry and it became harder for protest musicians to get record deals. Not many corporations are willing to sign artists who’ll turn around and criticize them.
So, protest music was forced back underground where it underwent a surprising metamorphosis. The sixties exhausted everybody’s taste for folk, but there was a new political sound emerging in Britain. It was called punk.
Punk, as a genre, is probably more political than any other. These days there are lots of poppy boy-bands, like Blink 182 and Green Day, playing stupid, shallow songs about girls and beer, while claiming to be punk. But the truth is, most classic punk albums are overtly political. The Sex Pistol’s “Anarchy in the UK”, Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia”, and Bad Religion’s “Recipe for Hate” are just a few of the more popular examples.
Punk has always been synonymous with Anarchism. Nearly every punk band that ever existed has used the word anarchy at least once. Black Flag, one of the most popular punk bands of the 80’s, even named themselves after the international symbol of the Anarchist movement. Most people think anarchy refers to a state of total chaos and destruction. The same people think punks just want to get wasted and destroy everything. This is not so. Anarchism is a serious (but little known) political philosophy based on individualism and equality, and many punks seriously believe in it.
The New Millennium: Everybody’s Doing It (About Everything You Can Think Of)
Nowadays everybody’s got a different cause: gay rights, animal rights, women’s rights, human rights, the environment, corporate imperialism, the War in Iraq, the list just gets longer. Just as the issues of protest music have become more diverse, so have the artists engaged in it. U2 wrote songs against apartheid in Africa. Artists from Bjork to the Beastie Boys performed at a concert to raise awareness about China’s oppression of Tibet. Even Lauryn Hill manages to squeeze feminist messages into her pop-infused, r&b stylings.
Though politics no longer dominate the punk scene they’re still important to a lot of the face piercing, leather-boot wearing, misfits. Winnipeg’s own Propaghandi is a leader of political punk, having formed it’s own record label, the G7 Welcoming Committee, to avoid corporate censorship. The now defunct Rage Against the Machine was arguably the most vocal, and active, political act of the Twentieth Century tackling issues from economics, to racism, to corporate domination of the media.
For information concerning political activism the websites of Propaghandi (www.propaghandi.com) and Rage Against the Machine (www.ratm.com) come highly recommended each sporting wealth of information and suggestions for reading and action.
Most recently, Hip-Hop has developed a protest scene. Most of the popular, early hip-hop groups, like Public Enemy and NWA, built their success rapping about issues important to African-Americans. Nowadays, Tribe Called Quest, Outkast, Michael Franti, The Jedi Mind Tricks, The Dead Prez, and other hip-hop artists keep the movement strong.
They’ve also expanded it in scope. Songs like Outkasts “Bombs Over Bagdad” and The Jedi Mind Tricks’ “Raw is War 2003” show strong concern for international affairs.
Protest music is more alive and diverse now than it’s ever been, and we’ll probably be hearing even more in the future. Just like the end of the War in Vietnam ended a strong protest scene, the post 9/11, aggressive military actions and environmental irresponsibility of the US are giving artists more and more issues to get angry about. The worse things get the more artists are going to jump on board–and they’re just going to keep getting louder.
Xpat Magazine March, 2008
I’m sitting here at my desk gazing out the window, trying to put to paper some kind of goodbye letter for my last issue behind the wheel of Xpat. But as I reflect on my time working on Xpat, and in Taiwan, I’m filled with a single emotion: gratitude. So, instead of saying goodbye, I’d like to thank all of the people who helped me make Xpat what it is today.
I would like to thank:
The good people of Taiwan for providing me with the opportunity to create this magazine and for putting up with the astounding amount of bullshit they receive from the ignorant and unappreciative portion of the foreign community
The foreigners who show our host country people the courtesy and respect that they deserve
Paul Andrew for his dedication from the first moment of the first meeting at McDonald’s nearly three years ago
Cindy Loo and Chris Scott for unwavering participation and excellent work on every issue
Rebecca Xiou for bringing in translations on time, but even more so for being a dear friend
Jeremy for showing me the nature of boundaries, and how flimsy they are
My tree-planting supervisor Matt for demonstrating to me the only way to lead – by example
Kurt Cobain for introducing me to the raw emotion of artistry
Kerouac for spouting streams of saintly spontaneous prose
Cervantes for a noble and timeless hero
Dostoyevsky for The Brother’s Karamazov; if you only read one book for the rest of your life, read this one – within its eleven-hundred pages you will find the greatest story ever written and everything you’ll ever need to know
Donovan for advice and support
Garret for thinking more and believing less
Hemmingway for illustrating the importance of a clean, well-lighted place
Twain for unimpeachable integrity and spawning American literature
Hunter S. Thompson for never backing down
Vice Magazine for picking up where Dr. Gonzo left off
Dante for the Divine Comedy
My parents for making me read instead of watch TV
David Lynch for hours of brilliant confusion
My brother Ben, for buying me my first tape: Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine
Ani Difranco for doing it her way gracefully and brilliantly
Bjork for being splendid unique
The Mars Volta for renewing my love of music
Danielle for sleeping on the beach and running through rice fields at dawn
Ghandi for showing that the only real strength is strength of will, and that violence is the weapon of the weak
Buddha for being. And not being.
Picasso for painting Guernica; a morbid billboard-sized depiction of the Fascist bombing of a town by the same name, and for solemnly telling the Fascist fuckers when they asked him if he was responsible for the creation of the painting, “No, you are.”
Emily for yoga on the dance floor and friendship as thick as blood
Mickey for being an incredible animal and caring for my dear sister
Jana Mattie for showing us how fragile we all are; something we could forget no more easily than we could forget her beautiful smile, piercing eyes and unending kindness
Steve for listening during troubled times
Emilie for a year and a half of abandon and adventure
You for reading
Sincerely,
Matt Gibson
DECEMBER 23, 2011 - Today I'm learning to dive at Fun and Sun Dive and Travel on Malapascua, Philippines (http://bit.ly/vAoQjP). In three days, we be swimming with thresher sharks. Merry Christmas to me :)
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