August 30, 2008
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also posted:
Chapter 26 |
All through the Seventies I was ambitious to start a new paper, less polemical than the Voice, more commercial than Other Scenes and with some of the elements of London's sarcastic Private Eye as well as the political and cultural elements of Britain's literary weeklies. The underground papers whose anarchistic style had promoted a more personal type of journalism, had nevertheless by this time, phased into “alternative journalism”, too narrowly political or small-town parochial to have widespread appeal and I believed that a good New York weekly could become a national paper. Because of my background, Other Scenes had always been more international than local, frequently carrying pieces by my friends in Greece, England, Japan, India and Australia. "The underlying theme of the paper", my proposal read, "will be the 'backstage' of everything: what goes on behind the scenes in publishing, why advertising accounts change hands; why one record hits platinum and another doesn't, where the payoffs go. The media itself, together with all aspects of pop sociology, are subjects of great fascination to today’s public and these will get plenty of attention. Politics will not be ignored but treated with a rather more cynical view than that taken by our competitors. The paper will take an intelligent person's worldview of things: bold, provocative and ready to give the shaft to certain people and institutions that well merit it but which for one reason or another seem to escape criticism and examination. Mostly, though, the paper will be witty, treating current affairs with good humor and wisdom, offering a vision of the brighter side of life".
The proposed 36pp tabloid, with two colors and good graphics would appear on colored newsprint (buff, pink or green) which "will make the paper stand out and be talked about". My budget allowed a $15,000 initial sum for the purchase of a Compugraphic typesetting unit and about the same amount for editorial and office expenses, including. eight editorial salaries ranging from $150-$300. The ambitious plan was to break even within one year with a circulation of 50,000 and a total expenditure of under a million dollars. My first priority would be to define the audience by selecting the 400 'names' that I believed readers would be most interested in, and build files on each of these. Obviously there would be many more but this was a start. In my vision the paper would be an exciting one, full of motion and life and every subject transcending its base in such a way that instead of departments catering to specific tastes, everybody would want to read everything. And profiles, so often the evaluation of one writer, would offer a multitude of opinions solicited about the subject, many of them inevitably contradictory. Among the projected columns were Mack the Hack, gossip from the taxi trade; Matchmaker , a column that arranged blind dates between readers whose letters were published; Sixty Seconds , brief telephone interviews with otherwise inaccessible personalities; UNderneath , gossip from embassy cocktail parties and that (largely ignored) international community beside the East River; RagtradeTales and Power Struggles dealing respectively with the garment district and Wall Street. Other plans were to commission comic strips about the day-to-day adventures of the ubiquitous Sylvia Miles and Jack Finnegan's cult novel Time and Again, and run a series of pictorials on what's above the ground--the buttresses, cornices, gargoyles and eccentric architectural features rarely seen by the pedestrians of a city where nobody ever looks up. The plans for this paper, of course, never came to fruition but I’ve always appreciated maverick publishers and after underground papers morphed into the “alternative press” there weren’t many trailblazing eccentrics to be found. One such, however, was Bruce Anderson whose broadsheet (“the country weekly that tells it like it is”) accompanied its logo with Joseph Pulitzer’s dictum that “newspapers should have no friends”. Bruce, however, had admirers, some of them in his tiny northern California community of Boonville, but a surprising number in other parts of the country who regarded the Anderson Valley Advertiser as “the toughest little weekly in America”. On my way north I drove through Boonville (whose most famous local son is the chef Thomas Keller who owned the French Laundry here) and chatted briefly with Bruce in his barn-like office. The feisty editor has opinions about virtually everything, especially the roman a clef by local writer Bill Barich which he felt was a cut above most contemporary fiction by “a bunch of candy-assed, English-department bushwah or, worse, Politically Correct arguments delivered by bloodless cartoon figures or, worse yet, prolonged whines about low-intensity victimization”. The abysmal standards of American education are a frequent target of his ire. “What most teachers offer is the subliminal message of ‘Be like me, keep your mouths shut, your head down, your noses firmly in the buttcrack of whatever drone happens to be in charge of the campus’. Every week the Advertiser devotes three full pages to letters and some of his readers are as articulate and angry as himself, being prone to rants about the local sheriff’s “overt buffoonery, incompetence and just plain bad judgment” or noting the wine-growing region’s “peculiar blend of phony liberalism, fake feminism, unfounded police bashing and general naiveté”. Anderson became such a thorn in the local council’s side with his constant allegations about back-scratching and “palsy-walsyism” that they had him jailed a couple of times, once for contempt of court when he declined to tell them the source of a document that had shown them in a bad light. He was philosophical about it all. “I irritate them to the point that they want me out of the way” he shrugs. On another occasion, he’d gotten into a scuffle with the County Superintendent of Schools who slandered him as “a 10th-rate McCarthyite”. This one cost him 35 days in the clink. Looking back, he reflected: “I feel I should have held out for at least third-rate” he said.
I took a trip to Italy to stay with my friend Angelo Quattrocchi, whose own underground paper, Roma fatta, Roma sotto (‘Rome high, Rome low’) existed contemporaneously with all the rest of us. He was living on a farm in Tuscany and when we drove to the beautiful nearby village Roccastrada the dream re-emerged as strong as ever. I envisaged taking in a Canon copying machine, with its interchangeable color cartridges, and settling there for a few months to report on local events. We'd entice other Italian writers to contribute essays and put together the continuing saga of rural life that--we were sure--could be the world in microcosm. Well, maybe someday. For a time, there were endless pages and pages more of these ideas, but of course nothing came to fruition. An incompetent business man, I have never been any good as a salesman-- of ideas or anything else--and this was no exception. Instead, I turned to a more affordable dream, a weekly cable television show. Manhattan Cable was devoting three channels to public access, one used by the city to promote its civic meetings and two others open to anybody who cared to produce live programs, or tape them from a small studio nearby. The cost was a mere $50 per half hour. It was always lively in the early Eighties around Metro Access, the cramped studio owned by Jim Chladek from which public access shows fed live into MCTV. Robin Byrd, clad in a net two-piece bikini, was queen of the sex shows and while usually featuring strippers shrewdly confined her own bare-all to one show a year. Chladek himself did a Sunday midnight show (right after me) with absolutely no frills just sitting on camera answering technical questions. Sometimes Midnight Interlude, the nude interview show on Channel J, would be on a rerun with the studio phone number and eager viewers admiring the swinging couples would call up and interrupt Jim. The workhorse of Metro Access was Willy Hohauser, a pony-tailed teenager who often produced two shows simultaneously in the twin studios--issuing instructions and advice, operating cameras, putting on tape, answering the phones, taking out the garbage, whatever. Nothing seemed beyond him. Because I needed a collaborator I sought out Joanna Walton, a quick-witted American whom I'd once met in London. I envisaged a show based on the proven formula of a couple in which the wise-ass woman always had the last word (Blondie & Dagwood, Sonny & Cher). Joanna, later killed in the Lockerbie crash, was one of the smartest women I had ever met and we did half a dozen shows together until she felt it was too much of a commitment. After that I tried various guest co-hosts, one of whom was Jerelle Krauss, an art director at the Times. She brought along her friend Jim Turrell, a conceptual artist who did amazing things (in galleries) with light. Unfortunately none of them could be demonstrated here and Turrell himself was so abstruse and inarticulate that the entire show was a nightmare. I did learn two lessons: (i) how necessary it is to keep absolute control of the placing of inserts such as slides and tapes because Jim kept popping them in after he'd finished talking about them; and (ii) that however brilliant somebody might be, it might not make good television. An artist after all shouldn't be expected to be adept at explaining his art, or he'd be a writer or an actor. I had been in the habit of passing on to my guests the advice of Quentin Crisp to people about to make TV appearances: "Decide what you want to say, and then say it no matter what the question is". In this instance, however, the advice proved to be inappropriate. I introduced Jerelle to Elyse, a low-echelon advertising type, who co-hosted shows on which our guest was advertising hotshot Barry Day (who brought along hitherto unseen foreign commercials years before it became fashionable to do so) and they got along fine possibly because they were in agreement that I monopolized the time too much and hardly let them get a word in. Sadly it was true, I conceded, and suggested that they would just have to be more aggressive about interrupting. I do talk too much which is probably why I am so drawn to Appolonius of Tyana's aphorism, Loquacity has many pitfalls; silence, none.
My old friend Caroline Seebohm helped me put together half a dozen book shows in which one-minute reviews were interspersed with brief author interviews and this led me to transfer my earlier ambitions of producing a sort of "backstage-of-everything" newspaper into the medium of television. I planned to put together a show with brief segments about books, advertising (with Barbara Lippert, who had appeared on a couple of shows), art (with Mary Boone who declined to meet with me to discuss the project), travel and the subject of television itself (Nick Yanni, a friend, who hosted his own popular weekly show on public access). So long as the show was produced at the public access facility it could have been put together for about a grand a week--peanuts compared to the cost of a 'professional show"--and eventually find a sponsor and a regular spot on one of the local channels. Lacking the necessary commercial savvy, however, nothing came of this project either, although part of this is due to the fact that "professional" television had too much at stake at that time to concede that programs could be produced cheaply. They invoked the stultifying phrase "technical standards" to dismiss everything that didn't involve big budgets and/or a union crew which is why television has always been so expensive--and so lacking in new ideas. Let's face it, I was claiming in those early days--the Eighties, the simplest kind of television involves only one person with a camera and somebody willing to transmit it, and although I'm not suggesting that all programs be produced in this way nor do I believe that elephants have to be hired to appear in every opera. I have never had much sympathy for the sulky panjandrums of the arts whose demand for ever-higher budgets structure the belief that creative people are incapable of improvisation and imagination. And although critics often deplore viewers' attention spans, why should this not be an advantage? A good information-packed show could be paced as fast as a three-dot column with items succeeding each other in quick fire succession, something in the manner of Walter Winchell's radio bulletins only in the form of a pictorial collage. The type of show I visualized would have two or three segments of three or four minutes apiece with the remaining one-sentence items packed together in fast streams. What Made Simon So Sullen? might well have been the title of tonight's show" I noted in my diary of Sunday, April 26,1981. I had invited Simon Watson-Taylor to appear, because in all the years I had known him we had never discussed his rather specialized literary expertise. It quickly transpired that this was not going to be the occasion, despite the fact that when we'd met before the show, he'd sloughed off any preparation on the grounds that he had plenty to say. Once the show began, though, he wouldn't explain the book Ubu Roi or patarealism, for which he was famous, dismissing it as “all that old stuff". Nor would he respond to my attempts to draw him on Alfred Jarry (whom he'd translated into English) or discuss the naked, nubile ladies at Goa in India whom he'd earlier enthused about. All that was "sexist", he claimed. Worse, he kept interrupting the conversation that Elyse had going about advertising and in general acted egotistical, patronizing and negative. It was the first show that I erased immediately afterwards; it saved twenty bucks every time I recycled a tape. After a while, I decided to change my approach to the John & Joanna Show and instead of presenting conversations for viewers to watch, I started to do the show alone with the camera fixed on my upper half, and another fixed camera behind me focused on the desk at which I was sitting. This second camera, the core of a chromakey setup, enabled me to change backgrounds at will by merely placing a picture in front of it. This wonderful invention allows all kinds of trickery. One Sunday night, Donna Hennes took a crowd of people down to Battery Park to celebrate the Spring Equinox--which happened to be 11 minutes into my Sunday night show. This, she claimed, was the only time of the year when you can stand an egg on end. So I said, “Okay folks, well, there she is and we’ve got an egg here and we’ll try it”. And at the exact moment, sure enough, the egg stood on end. (The earth is supposed to be equilibrium at that moment--but, for whatever reason, it works). Handling what appeared on chromakey (i.e. projected on a blue screen behind you) from the studio itself, gives the presenter enormous control over the show and Willy's only task in the control room became one of merely supervising and occasionally, at my cue, to run videotape behind me--or instead of me. I would advise my listeners to pay close attention to what I was saying when I ran tape because, I told them, that if they concentrated on the picture they'd miss what I was saying whereas they'd see the picture peripherally anyway. Often I'd go out and do video tape specifically for this dual purpose such as crossing on a Staten Island ferry, videotaping from the top of a London bus or of colorful balloonists ascending into the sky. Visuals that needed no explanation. Next, I tried superimposing information--telephone numbers for various 'causes', say--on the screen as I was talking about one thing and showing tape of something else. My whole idea was to see how much information I could convey simultaneously without it becoming un-assimilable. This concept had come to me at the New York World's fair some years previously when I attended performances in the IBM pavilion where an entire wall of screens would sometimes display different images and sometimes all the same. With a bit of practice one came to realize that the eye can absorb many different pictures at once--just as it did in everyday life. One day I chatted with Clarence Greer, coordinator for Manhattan Cable's Public Access department and thus the man deputed to handle the couple of hundred producers on channels C and D. He felt that MCTV was no longer so embarrassed about the outspoken and sexually explicit content of some of the programs, and was grudgingly willing to admit that some subscribers signed up specifically because of access and the looser style of television that it allowed. Al Goldstein's Midnight Blue produced by my old pal Alex Bennett was at first reviled by the cable company and then used by its salesmen as a lure to customers to sign up. My own view was that although the cable companies had only reluctantly accepted the mandate of providing access to anybody, nevertheless, it was a cheap, easy and unprecedented way in which the 'man in the street' could communicate his/her opinions and it was a pity that inertia, laziness or greed (i.e. the inability to see an immediate financial return) had kept participation so minimal. Often the callers to the open- mike shows were as entertaining as the hosts. "What do you call a dog with wings?" one asked tonight, and without waiting for a reply, cruelly riposted: "Lynda McCartney". Once I had acquired a video camera I used the studio less and less, teaching myself how to edit in the camera by putting together a show in consecutive segments and doing no post production beyond dubbing the VHS (and later, 8mm) tape onto a 3/4". This had some disadvantages, but also had the virtue of keeping all my interviews short because whatever went onto the tape was the show, with no opportunity for expanding or cutting later. I learned to start my interviews in the middle without an initial warm-up. Over the years and travel to a score of countries I gradually began to do a kind of jump-cut edit at the time that I bumped up the tape to the 3/4" format which was the only one that public access channels would accept. Film producer Richard Rubinstein, who'd commissioned my Occult Guide to South America and a friend since our Ibiza days together in the Sixties, acceded to my request for sponsorship. My intention had been to expand on what I was doing--casual comment on camera with lavish use of chromakey together with lots of tape, gimmicks and--most essential--"production values". Unfortunately Richard saw it a different way and wanted to make a conventional talk show host out of me. He hired a producer, built a set, even bought me some decent shirts and jointly we agreed on our list of interviewees, among them Steve Allen, Alger Hiss, adman Barry Day, George Romero and Stephen King. Most of the shows were pretty dull and predictably Conversations With Wilcock sat in the vault unsold.
Once I started to take my camera on the road, to set off “on location” a wealth of opportunities presented themselves. On my next visit to England I visted one of my favorite friends, William Shawcross, the celebrated journalist who has been a sympathetic supporter of my activities. William, son of a former attorney general, is the author of books about Cambodia, Dubcek, the Shah of Iran, and various “warlords and peacekeepers”. In recent years he has earned plaudits as a superlative war correspondent visiting most of the contemporary trouble zones and turning in pithy reports. When I was having lunch with him one day at his London apartment, he got a call from the Daily Mail asking for 1,000 words on some event of the day and almost before finishing his meal he had drafted the report and within an hour would be emailing it to the newspaper, just the kind of knowledgeable and instantly reliable writer on which the London tabloids had come to rely. Our paths first crossed when he was working on his biography of Rupert Murdoch and hired me as one of his researchers about the already notorious Aussie publisher. I did interviews for the book in Australia as well as in England and the U.S, and stayed at William’s Tudor mansion in Sussex which, as you might guess, was suitably historic outside although vastly comfortable inside Next I traveled five hours by train and half an hour by taxi to the remote fishing village of St Mawes in Cornwall-- Britain’s “last colony, (whose) foreignness is palpable” wrote columnist Jonathan Meades—and the site of the classy Hotel Tresanton which William and his wife Olga had converted into a five star getaway. Olga, the daughter of Sir Charles Forte whose former company operated Britain’s most extensive hotel chain, eschewed “corporate standardization” and converted a decaying old hostelry into a locale that attracted the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Dame Maggie Smith, Kate Winslett, and Prince Charles and Camilla.
Jack Silley, owner of the Falmouth Docks and a celebrated yachtsman and William’s godfather had fashioned the hotel from a cluster of old houses in the 1940s for his visiting sailor friends, but by the 1990s, when Olga Polizzi saw its potential, it was looking dilapidated. After 16 years experience of hotel management working for the Forte chain, she was determined to eschew “corporate standardization”, casting aside the inevitable piped music, coffee-makers, tasseled lamps and trouser presses which are the usual fixture of traditional English hotels. What she put in place were a cinema, bar, sitting room, children’s garden, playroom and conference facilities. Sitting on the wooden-decked terrace of the restaurant, diners gaze across the bay to the lighthouse whose image is reproduced on all hotel stationery and towels. Unless you want to sail on Falmouth Bay, windsurf or go fishing, there’s blessedly little to do in St. Mawes except hang out in one of the pubs but first stop on my walk was to videotape the circular fortress nearby, built by Henry VIII to repel invaders who might have been tempted to drop anchor in the wide bay. As a general rule, I avoided visiting museums for my program partly because I’d seen so many during my years of writing travel books, but mainly because they are rarely photogenic. One exception, however, was a visit to Eden Prison camp in Yorkshire in which, during World War II, captured German prisoners were incarcerated but now—for an entrance fee—offered tourists a chance to study the experience. A local coal merchant, Stan Johnson, bought fenced-off POW Camp 83, restored the huts and guard towers and reopened it to tourists. At its peak the camp held more than 1,000 prisoners in double rows of bunks, 64 to a hut with other huts devoted to kitchen, hospital, laundry and recreation hall in which prisoners built a stage. In addition to entertainers and playwrights, among them were doctors, dentists, tailors and cobblers. There was even a magazine, Pflug Schar (Plowshare) which commented slyly on the occasional romances that bloomed between local girls and prisoners. More than 800 marriages of such couples took place throughout England, the first one of which was at Eden Camp. On the whole life was pretty cushy for prisoners, most of them picked up by truck each morning to work on nearby farms. Discipline was lax and there were plenty of chances to fraternize. One former internee, Eilers Cremer, recalled; “I’d put a kit bag on my bunk, cover it with a blanket, put an oilskin over my prison uniform and go under the wire. Easy. Next morning my girl friend would drive me back in time for roll call. I thought a lot of this place and it’s good to see it brought back to life”. Cremer, who stayed in England after his release, eventually married another English lady and now lives in York where he works as an engineer. Prisoners were treated well, he says. “We worked hard but local people were good to us. Occasionally slipping us a packet of fags (cigarettes) when we were out on the farms. Later on, as things wound down, we were even invited to Sunday lunch and Christmas parties”. All this didn’t sound at all like what I had imagined life as a prisoner of war to be but it must have been true because after the war an astonishing 20,000 prisoners chose to stay in Britain. As I arrived to visit the camp I was told that five former prisoners had been tracked down and invited to the camp’s reopening. Project director Ron Beamish told me: “It’s true the camp brings back dismal memories for some of the older visitors but we try to explain to people what it’s like before they come. We’re not glorifying war here, just bringing it back to reality”. He added that at least for children he hoped it would be an educational experience. Youngsters could explore an army assault course, climbing nets, swinging along horizontal ladders and negotiating a narrow escape tunnel on their hands and knees. “We did a trial run for seven to nine year olds and they loved it. In fact they reacted better than the adults. The camp brings history back to life. Teachers say it is better for their pupils than 1,000 hours in the classroom. We’re not on a Star Wars budget here. We’re not using computers, but simple gadgets engineered to produce the right impression. We’re freezing moments of war and adding life to them, presenting the stay in a 3-dimensional way and asking people to come and eavesdrop on history. I think that’s something it’s very important for the younger generation to know about”. BY THIS TIME, I had been taking my video camera with me everywhere, clocking up something like 700 half-hour shows which, technically speaking, would definitely be classified as ”amateur”, although once that had been taken into account were pretty interesting. To start with I was loath to run any segment longer than 30 seconds and even my interviews rarely exceeded a minute or two. I was anxious to proselytize. I told my friend Stan that I’d like to turn everybody into a video producer. Stan: Then they’ll become celebrities and beautiful women and handsome men will seek them out. What they will become, I emphasized, is immortal. Uh, huh, immortal, wow that beats being a celebrity. How would making a video make you immortal? If somebody films you or you’re in a film, I explained, it’s sort of a limited immortality, it’s being around after you’re dead. It might be for a small amount of time, or for a hell of a long time. Look at films that were made a century ago; they’re still around. So by being on film, you’re buying yourself at least a century’s worth of immortality -- unless somebody erases the tape. In a manner of speaking, anybody who is on film is immortal. Right from the beginning I realized that it wasn’t necessary to think in terms of perfect editing or even taking out all the glitches. One of the first things I learned from watching Warhol make movies was that if you want to do something, you just do it. You don’t need to read books or take courses, you just do it. What the audience would like to see on the screen in front of them is something interesting. They care less about whether it’s technically perfect or done by professionals, than whether it’s interesting enough to retain their attention. Professionals in any field need for everything to be “faultless”. Because their definition of what creative art is, and what’s acceptable to the world, is something that is familiarly slick. Everybody who doesn’t believe that, is a fan of stuff that seems more natural.. They begin to accept that maybe the ‘mistakes’ aren’t necessarily mistakes. I think it was George Braque who said “Things merely are…” When I moved away from live shows, I realized I couldn’t afford to do television the way professional television was done. And the only way would be to do 28 minutes, edit in the camera as I went along, and that 28 minutes would be the show. I kept a log of everything, and every time I put the camera off I’d know what I had so far and when I picked it up again and I’d tape something that was very different. I found it very similar to writing my column which usually consists of short items, one after the other. The traditional 3-dot column has somewhere between 12 and 30 items in it, depending on whether your items, in this case segments are a few words or two sentences, a few seconds or a minute or two. In either case you must choreograph these items in such a manner that they go up and down and up and down and level out and start off again—like rushing down a river. When you put together a show, the simplest thing to do is to follow that format and think in terms of getting lots of short things which in turn compels you to think of what order these things are going to be. These can vary from a 90-second interview (very close up, with the face filling the screen) to something that’s five seconds, like a license plate. You don’t just show a license plate for 5 seconds; you have to go from something onto the license plate so the whole thing is 5 seconds. And, apart from the things you happen to notice while continuing your visual diary, you’ve got to include certain ingredients. It might be an animal or animals, a sign with visible words on it in any language or a signpost: something that can be absorbed by the viewer in three seconds. You’ve got to have yourself on camera at least at the beginning and the end. With a camera you can hold at arm’s length looking into the miniature screen you interrupt several times during the show to make a comment. This basically acts as punctuation. The most useful tool you can have is the simple capacity to fade, which unfortunately in modern cameras is now so complicated and so hidden inside the cameras inner workings that you can no longer just merely fade out of a scene by pressing a button and fade in the same way. Now you have to literally open the screen go to the menu, pick out the fades, decide which one you would want and then fade. All of which is ridiculous if you are trying to edit a scene. A simple fade is invaluable when you’re editing as you go along because that serves as your punctuation. And if you do actually do some primitive editing later, it’s obviously much easier to cut into and out of a fade rather than into straight picture. Once you have a pattern for your show, all you really need is either titles on the camera or a card you can carry around with you that has a title on it, on which you focus at the start of the show. Also, remember that if you interview somebody, you don’t start by asking who they are, getting all the background and then starting the interview. You go right into the center of some kind of controversy, argument, something they’re obliged to comment on unrehearsed. It’s best to provoke or challenge them with your opening statement and then just wing it from there. Unless it’s absolutely fascinating, never do an interview for more than a minute and a half. Always do close-up with an occasional pull back, but nearly always literally close-up, forehead to chin basically. Another valuable thing is what Jackie Gleason used to call traveling music. Supposing you’re in Granada and you’re going to Seville then I take eight seconds of blurry stuff from the train. right? It’s only relevance is to show you’re changing locations. Click here for the remainder of the interview Malaysian Diary
As the Malaysian Airlines jet swoops over the hinterlands of Kuala Lumpur, the terrain is filled with endless acres of palm oil trees, a legacy of the British occupation and for years the bane of healthy eaters who eschew its chloresterol product for lighter oils. But now Swedish scientists have shown the practicality of its conversion into diesel. The Brits turned over the country to the Malaysians themselves in 1955 and I am here, along other visitors invited by the tourist office, to acclaim Independence Day, celebrated every August 31. From my very first day I observed a country that is sleek, modern, clean and bustling in a way that made most American cities look downright old-fashioned. Supermarkets stock everything: British and U.S. items, Malaysian, Chinese (the population is about 35% Chinese), Indian (10%), Filipino etc. “All of Asia is here” is one of the country’s slogans, and it’s true. Almost everybody speaks English—mandatory in the schools—an 30 different ethnic groups mingle without noticeable friction in a way that America once lauded as a melting pot. One of Malaysia’s official schemes is the Silver Hair Program which encourages people of capital (at least $50,000 plus $20,000 in annual income) to retire here to take advantage of high living standards, the lowest cost of living in Asia, a warm, sunny climate and good air connections with the rest of the world. Saturday: Up at an unearthly 5:30am to secure our VIP seats, along with 5,000 other guests, at the Merdeka Parade. Spectacular event with elaborate floats, a cheering section—decked out in colors to collectively represent the Malaysian flag, swaying ululating in tune with the bands—an aerial flyover by jet planes, and 12,000 colorfully garbed, flag-waving marchers who take at least an hour to pass by. As guests we’re all wearing identical navy blue shirts to present a uniform appearance. After lunch, a city tour includes a look at the glittering Petronas Twin Towers—at 1,483 ft., the world’s tallest buildings—from whose 73rd floor international competitors will again skydive next month. Inside, a glorious atrium soars up six floors, all lined with classy restaurants, a food court offering dozens of cuisines, world famous shops and a branch of Japan’s great Kinokuniya bookstore as big as a football field. By late afternoon we’re back at the airport for our flight across the South China Sea to Borneo, the huge island to the east that Malaysia shares with Indonesia. Sunday: The country was in an uproar today because a group of Malaysians visiting Indonesia had been arrested for not carrying their passports while in a hotel lobby. This was widely regarded as being payback for Malaysia’s ongoing campaign to deport illegal immigrants (mostly Indonesian and Filipino). Illegals are the subject of indignant letters in the papers every morning, but what catches the foreigner’s eye is that these impoverished immigrants are usually given a few strokes of the rotan (cane) before being shipped out. One politician has just declared that this punishment should also be inflicted on husbands who desert their wives. Although bleeding hearts are astounded that such practices still exist this pitiless writer thinks it’s punishment that the U.S. should import—not for helpless illegals who aren’t doing any harm, but for people who commit violent crimes. A dose of their own medicine would be not only cheaper than jail time but also probably more effective. Monday: After a two-hour drive from Kota Kinabalu we reach Mt. Kinabalu itself, studying from below its 13,455 ft. peak which only occasionally emerges from drifting clouds. It’s a popular two-day climb but we merely visit the museum, have lunch and stop at a couple of roadside markets on the way back at which I get my first look at the spiky durian. This famous fruit, which mercifully is not cut open, is so notorious for its foul odor that many hotels won’t even allow it on the premises. “Smells like hell, tastes like heaven” is the verdict of Malaysians, who readily savor a flavor that the Columbian Encyclopedia describes as “banana, caramel and vanilla with a slight onion tang”. Tuesday: Here in the northernmost state of Sabah the biggest attraction is the Sepilok Orang Utan sanctuary where the cute simians gather in a clearing in the jungle (in which hides the world’s largest flower, the rafflesia) each day at feeding time (bananas). Then it’s on to the vast caves where the nests of little birds are harvested to make birds’ nest soup (an expensive delicacy, if you like bird spit). Finally, after a long bumpy drive, we reach the river on whose banks sit a charming lodge at the edge of the rainforest. At this glorious oasis in the wilderness we are invited to stay overnight but I have the misfortune to be with a group of travel agents who express horror at the idea of staying in a room without air conditioning. (Travel agents and travel writers should never be mixed). So it’s back to Sandakans. Wednesday: Much discussion on the return to KL about Penang’s edict that only Muslims can make policy for that state. “Even in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world policies are made based on the ruling government ideologues,” declares Mentri Besar. “So why should it be different in an Islamic state?” Malaysia, though officially a Muslim country, applies Muslim law relatively benignly but what worries some people is that at least two of the country’s nine states are planning to introduce hudud the strictest application of sharia law, resulting in the sort of draconian practices seen in some African states—hands amputated for theft, women stoned to death for adultery, etc. The current issue of Far Eastern Economic Review, in a piece entitled “The Case for Islamic Law” quotes opposition leader Hadi Awang, head of Pas (the Islamic Party of Malaysia) describing hudud as “amazing”, something that would reduce crime because “people become terrified”. The Review comments that Pas has “painted the ruling party (Umno) into a corner and set the stage for a vicious cycle of religious one-upmanship”. Thursday: A quick round of shopping (things are really cheap) and we begin our 20-hour flight back, with a stopover at Taipei. Malaysian Airlines is terrific with first-rate food, gracious service and, in luxurious club class, seats that tip back to allow genuine sleep. Thank you Malaysia; I’ll definitely be back someday.
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