El Camino, halfway through.

I just figured out how to get on here, after forgetting my password...here is a copy of the emails I have sent detailing the amazing journey Chip and I have had so far. More later.

Chip and I are currently located in Puente de la Reina. This was our third full day of hiking, and each day continue to get better.
After two full days of travel (plane, bus, train, and very little sleep) we landed in St. Jean Pied de Port, part of the French Pays Vasque, or Basque Country, rarín' to go. We stayed there one night, and walked around the tiny French hamlet in the free afternoon we had. Chip had a nearly uncontrollable urge to buy souvenirs, but I reminded him that we had little room and a lot of cities to go. SO the next day we woke up bright and early, 630, packed up, and set off in the darkness...

and let me tell you...it was amazing. The scenery was all red, white, and green, just like the Basque flag. Right away we began scaling a mountain that, well, didn´t end for 15 miles. Ouch. It wouldnt have been so bad, except for the fact that a) it was raining the whole time and cold, too and b) we ´made the mistake of thinking that cooking a lunch on the top of hte mountain would be great. We sat, staring at the water that was NOT boiling, until a kindly old French man came up, declared us ´desperate´´ and gave us some bread. But then we began descending and were slightly cheered by a Narnia-esque wood forest, steamy and warmer.

Roncesvalles, across the border in spain, was nothing but a church, albeit a beautiful old stone one...we slept in a room with 100 beds, but it was clean and cheap.... we set off the next day and passed through several tiny Basque villages, lunched on chorizo, cheese, bread, granola...whatever we could find, really. We stopped in Zubiri, a mile short of that nights stop and made friends with a lady who drove us to the only open bar in town and then proceeded to take us two miles to pamplona so we could get an edge on the next stage and spend more time enjoying the city.

I don´t want to take anymore of your time...next was pamplona, and highlights were the overwhelming feeling of nostalgia, the Fiesta in the suburban town of my friend, Eduardo ( a mini sanfermines, sans bulls), a day trip to san sebastian...then we did about 12 miles today.

More updates probably in a week or so...we are having so much fun, amazed by the variation of scenery and also all the things we have already seen and learned. WE are about to be in the heart of the La Rioja wine region, continuing along in Pais Vasco. Please pray for us. We miss you....as much as we can ;)
´
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Hola, again, everyone...
Marti and Chip here, with a short update. We took a small break
since the last time we spoke in order to tend to some tendonitis. We
spent a few days in Estella, nicknamed La Bella, and had various fun,
which included meeting a witch doctor, cooking beans and meat under
an ancient bridge like homeless people, and carrying handicapped
spanish ladies-that-might-be-serial-killers up their apartment stairs
and doing their chores for them.
So then we had to get back to the trail.
The landscape has been so so beautiful...one second we are walking
through lush vineyards, picking grapes off vines, the next,
desertlike (would be boring if it wasnt so breathtaking) terrain.
Sadly we have lost several of our hiking companions due to different
speeds, agendas, etc...the older british couple, Ian and Rose, that
we used to throw back cervezas with...Lucy and Rob, the korean girl
and welsh guy, with whom we romped around the cities...but the beauty
of this trip is that the surprises never end.
Chips birthday was the 26th, and we took a day off in Burgos, a large
city of about 100,000. The cathedral there was huge and amazing. I
have to pause here to say we had the best dinner EVER at a two'fork
restaurant...lamb, eggplant, and emmental lasagna, ham croquettes,
and sirloin with ham iberico (the expensive, acorn fed pigs meat from
spain ). MMM so good. I advise doing the camino when you are very
wealthy, but I guess that is contrary to the point. We are slowly
getting into the rhythm of things, learning how to balance meditative
walkingtime with chatty, singing, picture taking walking time. It is
amazing, being stripped of all the distractions you guys are in the
midst of.
Now we are in the province of Castilla y Leon, where the towns are
markedly more ghostly, the landscapes more similar, and the churches
stil breathtaking and old. Today was on the verge of rain, which
made the walk that much more beautiful, passing through the ruins of
an old convent. Ok. Enough.
We miss you all. Long vacations rule.
love,
marti y chip

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Hard for a pimp?

Hustle and Flow is a movie about DJay, a pimp from Memphis, Tenn. who dreams of making it big in the music industry as a way out of his crime and oppression-filled life. The film explores power dynamics in various industries and relationships and how they affect individuals and their dreams.
The film is very entertaining, and the base-emotion-provoking scenes and tensions are there. However, should one watch the movie with his or her intellect in tow as well…then, that is another story. The problem with Hustle and Flow is best addressed by its own official Web site’s summary of the plot: “DJay’s metamorphosis affects his entire house, as the women in his life Shug and Nola find ways to contribute to the creative process.” This statement clues the viewer in on the intentions of the writer/director, Craig Brewer. It seems clear that Brewer aimed to create a compelling story about the hardships of the Southern pimp, and how he is saved by art and aspirations. This is further confirmed if one pauses to consider that DJay is the protagonist, the main character for whom the story is told, for whom the viewer cheers and cries.
But hopefully one stops right here and protests, “find ways?” Find ways? Anyone who watched the movie using their eyes and ears should have noticed that the women did not “find ways” to help DJay. They made DJay. They were everything from his financial backers to his back-up singers. This summary exemplifies the non-issue the film makes of gender relations. Through the use of the socially-accepted construct of the pimp and the ho, the film gets away (in most people’s view) with the failure to comment on DJay’s treatment of women.
The film romanticizes the pimp-ho scenario that dates back to the 1970s, taking advantage of the fact that much of its potential audience probably has never even seen a real prostitute, and thus will not be appalled by the unrealistic representation in the movie. The choices in wardrobe, soundtrack, and setting play on blaxplotation, seen in such films as Superfly. However, it is still useful to examine what this movie is saying about race and gender.
The Southern setting of Hustle and Flow gives it the advantage of an air heavy with heat and history: history of slavery, patriarchy, and civil rights issues. It is ironic(in a way that Brewer never addresses) that in a movie about a Southern black man striving for freedom, he is given the career of slaveowner, albeit with a modern twist. Nola and Shug certainly have the “freedom” to leave, but their freedom is rendered null when the other option means (more) physical endangerment as well as the severance of the only emotional ties these women know. Instead, this movie glorifies DJay’s position as pimp and ultimate patriarchal figure. Brewer’s film could have been a telling commentary on the position of black women in society.
Instead, it weaves itself tightly into the fabric of the Southern patriarchal quilt. Shelby, the ‘cracker,’ reinforces the movies ideology with the help of another anti-feminist, Malcolm X, saying: “You got to get what you got to say out, by any means necessary…every man has the right."
Frankly, the movie is insulting to women. It is filled with instances of DJay giving tokens to his women, who are more than happy to take whatever he has to give them, which was most likely bought with money they earned. The only time Brewer approaches an honest, double-sided look at the situation is the scene with Nola and Djay, when she says, “I know when you’re messin’ with my head, ‘cause I let you." There may have been a glimmer of hope for the oversimplified female characters in the movie at this point, but it is extinguished as the viewer is re-caught up in DJay’s efforts, and climaxes with the women dancing to his song ( a song about violence against women) when it plays on the radio. Even more telling, and even more problematic, is Shug dancing to it with her baby girl. Thus the cycle is passed on down generations.
The subjugation faced by DJay is the central conflict of the movie, yet he reflects that same oppression on his hoes. Perhaps that is the lesson one can take away from this movie, although it may not have been Brewer’s intention: oppression, be it in the form of racism, classicism, sexism, or other, is cyclical and will continue cycling, thwarting dreams right and left, until it is addressed directly. It is hard to see past a movie in which women are portrayed as weak and groveling, to an unrealistic degree. It is hard to see past a movie whose secondary characters are women whose “contribution to the creative process” of their pimp compromises their dignity, safety, and happiness.

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more than words

Are actions just actions? Do the things that happen to us everyday simply happen, or do they leave prints, marks, pocks, holes, or lumps on our soul? If not our soul-maybe our mind, our heart? I am talking about more than just the effect of memory on us.
One African-American studies theorist claims that a "bottom-line blackness" links every black person, but not just sociologically- physically. Such that a black man, seeing a black woman raped, would feel a physical effect in his own body that a white person couldn't experience. Not to say a white person would feel nothing; just a different feeling, one that comes from a different place.
If everyday actions don't have an effect on us, what about the milemarkers of our lives? Specifically, marriage. The holy union between a man and a woman is more than just words, more than just a civil law. While non-Christians may protest that they have no more use for "religious" marriages, I refuse to believe that marriage is something that has been reduced to just a convenience, tradition, or legal necessity.
Vows of marriage link two souls, forming a connection, a union, that is not just of man. How much is life cheapened when marriage can be viewed so trivially, as something that can be called off with the touch of a button. I hate billboards that advertise cheap divorce rates. Marriage is as close as many people come to Jesus Christ. Something dies when you get married, but this sacrifice that scares so many people promises abundant blessings, as one of my friends reminds me. After this sacrifice, there is a rebirth. Just as Christ rose from the dead, a new spirit rises up between husband and wife. When they go on to have children, this spirit is manifested tangibly. It's amazing. It's important. It's unchangeable, even if it is broken from our human view.
Love. Is amazing.

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pushing awareness

"Afterwards we go out for coffee. I have never been 'out for coffee' before."
-Push by Sapphire
A life without thought or freedom. Living in the center of the universe, without ever leaving the burrough. Watching letters swim before eyes while a man, your father, rapes you.
These are the struggles of Claireece Precious Jones. This is all part of Push, a novel that rips you and your insides out of their comfort zone and into the invisible world of so many unseen. This novel is written from Precious' point of view and chronicles her story of becoming literate. Sapphire, an African-American poet from New York, creates this dramatic structure to introduce themes of race, gender, and memory that pull into question accepted societal norms.
With a distinct voice that remains consistent throughout the novel, Sapphire creates a victim. The narration is chopped into bits by flashbacks and memories, recreating, in a narrative form, post-traumatic stress syndrome: "The air floats like water wif pictures around me sometime. Sometimes I can't breathe." Neither can the reader, pulled as he is between visceral scenes of incestual violence and hopeful classroom scenes, set in the light and airy 19th floor.
Precious' relationship with her mother is one of physical, emotional, verbal, and sexual abuse. The layers of years and years of pain and suffering form a complex parallel to slavery, and the effects of slavery are manifested in Precious, a single person. Although it is a 16-year-old illterate's journey, Precious' road to enlightment drags the reader along too, mercilessly forcing lessons upon him that he didn't even know he needed. Stereotypes that are not even acknowledged are questioned, such as when Precious goes from yearning to be beautiful ("I was like a white girl, a real person, inside") to realizing that womanhood is more than skinny model-perfect exterior beauty.
The racism, sexism, and classism issues brought the surface in this novel are difficult. Difficult to acknowledge, process, and learn from. But they couldn't be more necessary.
In the words of Sapphire: "You gonna hafta push."

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Los Estados Uniteds

We are not immune to history. The status quo is only temporary. That in mind, I propose one version of the future:
2050: New Orleans, among several southern cities such as Houston and Miami, has a majority Hispanic population.
2076: The first Hispanic-American president elected.
2100: This population continues to move northwards. Changes are seen-things along the lines of Spanish-speaking schools alongside English ones, a shift in demographics, with whites fleeing the suburbs and re-entering the city, leaving their suburban homes vacant.
2190: Whites hover precariously as the national majority.
2250: The white race has converted into a ruling elite that holds the minority, with Hispanics the majority, and African-Americans still trailing whites in numbers. One unforeseen result: whites and blacks have finally united now that they are linked by a common fear.
2350: Civil War II.
2400: The history books read like a science fiction novel, or they would to us. The United States, after the rebellion by the Hispanic-Americans who were outraged at their continued oppression, has changed rulers, the majority now the ruling class as well. The new official language is a hybrid of Spanish and English, known as Spanglish.
The country is now known as Los Estados Uniteds.
It really could happen. Do you ever think about the future?
m*

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New Orleans: The Prodigal Child

Cities are the product of their inhabitants. The DNA of a city is a complex combination of varying socioeconomic strata. The charm of a city, let’s take New Orleans as an example, is a sum of different parts. Pre-Katrina New Orleans’ charm was found in both its po’ boy’s blues AND its affluent Mardi Gras balls. The city is the offspring of its inhabitants- the rich and the poor. The city is the child; its inhabitants are its parents, who are charged with taking care of it.
Today I babysat New Orleans, driving through Gentilly, the 9th Ward, and Lakeview.
Newsflash to the world: NEW ORLEANS IS NOT BETTER.
New Orleans is still a very sick child. The patriarch of the family, the white upper-crust of Uptown, and the mother, the poor blacks of the flooded East side, have split up. They had their problems through their long marriage -- from the days of slavery to the mobs of the early 1900s – but they managed to live together in a turbulent sort of “peace.” Then the tempestuous Katrina swept the rug out from under them, exposing what had been swept beneath all those years – the dust of racial and social discrimination and strife.
Nagin has said “New Orleans is back.”
Bush has promised “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”
As I drove through streets, deserted save the odd car every five minutes, these statements were exposed as the lies they are. Unless the largest reconstruction effort the world has seen consists of a few crews in plastic body suits trying to clean thousands of homes with a few trucks and port-o-potties.
The poor of the city, a majority of African-Americans, who could not evacuate were swept up and battered, by nature and by their own national government. Eight months later, they are trying to show a happy face, like a battered wife, pretending like everything is better. Everything is not better, and the child has been left by both parents, to fend for itself. When the bustle of the French Quarter is put in relief against the silent state of the flood-damaged part of the city, the busy sounds of tourism, jazz, and the French Market have an eerie, forced quality.
A walk through the French Quarter could convince anyone new to the city that things have gotten better, even close to normal. Stores are open, tourists are stumbling around drunk, the smell of urine is strong on Bourbon- but to those familiar with the city, something is off. There is a feeling that you can’t put your finger on, a sickness, whose symptoms include occasional lumber-boarded windows, a dirty line that stretches horizontal across the entire city, and a vague feeling of malaise.
The city’s father has turned the other cheek- some say believing the problem no longer exists, others say waiting for an “ethnic cleansing by inaction.” Its mother is drowning in her own problems, too busy and too weak to be able to lift up herself, much less her ailing child.
The seeming hopelessness of it all has me wanting to scream. To scream so loud that the whole nation wakes up sweating and runs to the aid of this abandoned child. I think Jesus and George would both agree: no child left behind. Not even the sinful, poor, dirty ones.
New Orleans is an orphan, and the whole nation is waiting to see who will step forward and take charge.
Every passing week leaves the city less and less inhabitable. Nobody deserves this.
We can’t wait.

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England, England Syndrome or The Future of History

I emerged from the darkness. It stood before me, a tower of stone and concrete, a most elegant example of mankind’s eternal attempt to capture the intangible.
And all I could think was, “This is Big Ben?”
That Clock of all clocks, one of the most recognizable European monuments for any American, became for me a symbol of disenchantment. As I stood there on my first trip to England, the murky sky set the backdrop for a lesson that would only be repeated as my travels continued. The London Bridge (I recommend visiting Tower Bridge instead, a sort of willful self-deceit), the Eiffel Tower, the Arc d’Triomphe, the Parthenon…as the list grew, so did my feeling of betrayal. Every one of these monuments was not only smaller than I’d thought-each was surrounded by a thicket of tourists milling in a linguistic cesspool. Enjoyment was near impossible.
It wasn’t until I extracted myself from my prejudices (and the sweaty crowd of photographing oglers) that I was able to make some sense of the situation.

In his book, England, England, Julian Barnes creates an island off the coast of England that is filled by an entrepreneur (picture an adventurous Six Flags CEO meets Bill Clinton ) with miniature replicas of England’s most popular sights. This ridiculous miniature Disney island ends up a complete success, answering a need never before served by majestic monuments: the experience of convenience.
When you think about it, tourism isn’t as much about seeing these ancient wonders. How different is your life after a glimpse of an old clock, or a moldy church? For most, the answer is not very. No, like so much else these days, tourism is about ourselves. How seeing Monument X will make us feel smart, cultured, or exotic (take your pick). This is what is capitalized on in the satire of Barnes’ novel.
These “attractions” are the realest manifestations humans have of years gone by. We are literally taking our history and turning it into a spectacle. By turning it into a money-making endeavor, humans cheapen their own roots.

It was then I realized that perhaps the problem was mine. These temples, clocks, and bridges never proclaimed themselves to be anything more than what they are…ancient constructions of humans that, at one time, served a real purpose. They did not ask to be photographed. They did not ask to be printed on woven cotton and worn over potbellies with Bermuda shorts. No, they merely exist. It is we who impose upon them this extra responsibility. Imagine a world in which it wouldn’t be so. It’s hard, and it will probably never be. But, oh, if only…

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Today, so many things happened.
U.S. soldiers rescued three Christian peace activists in Iraq. Louisiana State University wrapped up Duke and sent them off in the basketball finals. Canberra, Australia was Wikipedia's featured article. A download-to-own movie service, the world's first, was announced by Universal pictures. A little girl bought a little book at a big bookstore.
And I started a blog.
And I hope to never use the word 'I' in it again. Probably unrealistic. Actually, I changed my mind. My true resolution is to avoid ranting and raving about my personal life. There.

I wonder if places have expiration dates, like food. If one overstays their time in a certain place, perhaps it tastes a little funny after, oh, the first week or month-- but then maybe turns sour. Gagging, dry-heaving sour. Why do people never tire of vacations? Because they are always fresh-picked, never stale, and leave a good flavor on the tongue. As soon as their consumption is finished, the dreams don their rose-colored glasses and remember in excess the good, allowing the bad to sift through, undigested. In any case, I think Baton Rouge is comparable to a fried monkey toe. The first bite is deceptive-batter, fat (the easy flavoring) and spices. Then you realize you are eating a monkey's toe, and you think 'What the hell am I doing, eating a monkey's toe?"

Yes. I live in Orteil de Singe, LA.
Does anyone have any gum?
m*

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