bristol

Woken up by church bells, sunlight, and my two-year-old nephew patting my face:

Masi up! Up, masi! Shailja masi up! (repeat with unflagging enthusiasm until Shailja masi finally complies).

Drum and bass at breakfast, the luxury of newspapers over latte. I don't read newspapers in America - I get all my news online and through journals. My favourite British newspapers - the Guardian and the Independent - do political satire, global analysis, and cultural commentary in deeply satisfying and pleasurable chunks that the New York Times just doesn't match.

play nice, Hamas

There's hypocrisy. And there's mendacity. Then there's hypocrisy layered over mendacity. Like high-fructose-corn-syrup-brown-Smuckers-goo smooshed into lurid-purple-Welch-pseudo-grape-glop. Clapped together between two slices of white-putty nothing-bread.

That about sums up Bush, Blair, and Nato leaders on the Hamas victory in Palestine's elections yesterday:

With democracy goes renunciation of violence.

You cannot govern and call for the destruction of another country.

And so on, ad nauseum.

The hypocrisy lies in the leaders who have, over the last 10 years, intiated and visited upon the civilian population of Iraq the most comprehensive and devastating campaign of violence in history, aka Desert Storm and Shock and Awe, urging Hamas to become the collective Dalai Llama.

The mendacity beneath this platitudinous pap is the implication that the Palestinian resistance is denying itself a seat at the negotiating table, by choosing suicide bombings over diplomacy.

Fact: Israel has, over the past 5 years, repeatedly violated even the most minimal ceasefire agreements in occupied Palestine. Six million Palestinians live in a state of virtual imprisonment, subject to Israeli military control over their most basic movements and activities, curfews, destruction of their homes, seizure of their land, arrest and detainment without reason or trial, random murderous gunfire.

Yesterday, as Israel's cabinet went into emergency session over the Hamas victory, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 9-year old girl in the Gaza strip. They claimed she was carrying "a large bag, and ignored warning shots." What's the protocol for a 9 -year old in response to warning shots?

overpackitis

Affliction common to those for whom Being Cold tops the list of Acute Discomforts That Don't Really Qualify As Suffering But Make You Miserable Anyway.

I'm always fearful of cold when I travel to winter zones. So here I am, for the umpteenth time, squashing too many clothes back into my suitcase for the next leg of the journey, while a sardonic voice in my head says:

"Four sets of thermals. Four thick turtlenecks. Two hooded sweatshirts and a big sweater. Four woolly hats, two scarves, two pairs of gloves. Two pairs of waterproof boots. Did you think you were going to Siberia? Did it occur to you that scarves and gloves and woolly hats can be bought on every street corner in New York if you lose yours?"

To which my memory retorts, defensively:

"What about that time at Moscow airport in 1995? When my flight was delayed 6 hours, and it was freezing cold, and I'd left my gloves on the plane, and one hat wasn't enough to keep my ears warm? And that other time in Ohio two years ago? And..."

It doesn't really matter who wins the debate. The real issue is getting the suitcase closed, and down 2 flights of stairs without injuring myself.

word wanted

for the intense hypnotic soporific pleasure of brushing your hair when you're almost too tired to move your hand. The sound of the brush, vibration of bristle against strand, so you hear it and feel it against your scalp at the same time. All the muscles of your face relax, your spine releases, even your fingers and toes are happy.

There has to be a word.

still glowing

from the show at SALAAM last night.

Standing room only. A room so full of receptive energy and desi ambience, it brought things out of me on stage that haven't happened before. Like crying on the last part of Shilling Love.

After the show, I walked 20 blocks uptown, at 10pm, to catch more APAP showcases. Revelled in the lights and energy of Broadway, played with the fantasy I entertain each time I'm in NY:

What if I moved here? 5 hours closer to England and Kenya, 3 hours nearer their time zones, hundreds of dollars cheaper to get to the people I love. And so many rich fertile political, artistic communities here that fill me with excitement.....

Then I remember sub-freezing temperatures, and long winters, and the paucity of hiking trails. Smile ruefully and let it go.

I listened to Les Yeux Noir, gypsy klezmer from Paris, do incredible things with violins. There is so MUCH extraordinary soul-expanding music, dance, art, in the world - sometimes I feel a kind of despair at how microscopically little of it I can experience in a lifetime.

Jazz genius Ornette Coleman

at the APAP awards luncheon yesterday:

What is a mistake? Not something you need to know, but something you don't want to forget how not to do.

If you didn't have to die, what would you do?

I didn't want to be intelligent. I wanted to be creative.

There is something that has to do with sound that is as creative as being born.

Someone said to me at one of the after-parties at 1am last night:
When you listen to Ornette speak, you understand what circular breathing is.

you said it, Simone

"There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless."
- Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986)

if I could do with words

what I watched dancers do with their bodies tonight, I'd die happy. The way they sculpted the space around them. Rearranged the air with such precision of intention, such courage and beauty of motion, it left me quivering. Certain dance performances wake every cell in my body, fill me with the kind of elation that makes me hallelujah-grateful to be alive, just to experience this.

I'm talking about Parijat and her dancers in their showcase tonight. And another company I haven't seen before, Tania Isaac. Both blew me away.

2.5 million people

in Northern Kenya are facing starvation. Both the long rains and the short rains failed last year. Livestock have died from lack of food and water, wells have run dry.

Wangaari Maathai, Kenyan Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist, attributes the drought and famine partly to deforestation. The British began the stripping of Kenya's native forest cover to create arable land. It continued post-independence, when all African countries were told that cash-crop production for export was the road to self-sufficiency.

Now the land is desert. World markets for coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, sisal, have plummeted. The world wonders why Africans can't get it together to feed themselves.