By J.J. Tindall

My Gods

My Zeus and Hera reign
Atop the White Castle Tower,
A marvelous urban summit
Of light just south of Sears Tower.

Read More

Posted on February 28, 2011

By David Rutter

1. Chicago Voters, WTF?
Sure, people in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia face off against bombs, paid assassins and machine guns just for a chance to determine the course of their daily lives. That freedom/democracy thing seems to excite most folks who don’t have it. But Chicago?
Nah, not so much.

Read More

Posted on February 25, 2011

By Brett McNeil

Third of a three-part series.
–
Part One: The blood of the Madurese tastes like cow.
Part Two: If we like beer, maybe we’d like some women?
–
This is Indonesia writ small: Externally conservative but also wide open and available, especially behind closed doors. It’s corrupt and yet the corruption offers enough freedom of movement and wiggle room – rules meant to be broken, bribes that grease skids and line public servants’ pockets – that it works, for now, for enough of the country’s growing middle class and even the upper levels of the poor.
The rich already have their perks guarded and guaranteed by the government and police; it’s down here in the middle register, where the strictures of Muslim conservatism meet the licentiousness of street life and somehow meld, that the social and financial pressures of an expanding export and unmistakably import-consumerist economy are quietly, privately bled off.
I’m not saying that middle class Indonesians are all visiting massage parlors for rubdowns and quickies, or that they’re smuggling beer to dry towns and selling it for profit.
What I mean is that there’s enough slippage here built into the system – and it’s definitely a highly regimented, hierarchical, formalized system of government control of jobs and information and access to both, with millions of people either plugged into the system or trying desperately to get plugged in – that Indonesians are able to get what they want or need, more or less, regardless of what the rules say.

Read More

Posted on February 24, 2011

By Brett McNeil

The second of three parts.
–
Part One: The blood of the Madurese tastes like cow.
–
The women of Madura are not only physically beautiful, with softer, rounder facial features than their high-boned cousins on Java, but they are said to practice a kind of superorgasmic, dick-milking squeeze during sex that reduces all men to quivering heaps of baby talk, marriage proposals, and, for the Christians, religious conversion.
This is common knowledge and fairly open conversational game among men across Java and maybe even all of Indonesia, where heterosexual sex and its availability is a constant topic of giggling guy talk.
(The availability of sex here is still a mystery to me; my adult male friends front like practiced Lotharios but I get the very strong sense that they’re mostly all very schoolboyish and unpracticed in the dirtier sexual arts. Pornography, while available, especially on the very porous Internet, is officially banned here and during a recent college debate-club exercise I listened as the students and their instructor argued whether soft-core T&A horror movies of the Cinemax variety constitute actual porn. Many said yes. Any skin, any necking is porn. It’s not polite.)

Read More

Posted on February 23, 2011

By Brett McNeil

First of a three-part series.
For about three seconds, as a pair of yoked and frothing bulls bore down with their teenage jockey skittering sideways behind them, I forgot all about the heat and the mud and the welts forming on my ankles from the previous night’s hotel bed bugs and I just got the fuck out of the way. Fast.
Me and maybe 40 other camera-toters and rubberneckers crowded into the north end of a weather-beaten cement stadium in the sweltering, rain-soaked East Java island of Madura.
We just turned and ran, and as I made my break I thought specifically about avoiding the kind of inexcusably silly death or near-mortal injury that occasionally turns up in the international news briefs. American man trampled at foreign bull race; Had no business being there, now confined to breathing machine.
The bulls came charging past the finish line and into our ranks, veering hard right as a group of local men stepped up and collared the animals, then helped the jockey drag them to a relatively quick halt. A perfectly normal end to the race, it turns out, and the joke was on us. Irritatingly high-pitched laughs all around.
But, really, if you’re going to watch bull races you need to watch from behind the finish line. All of the action’s down here, including most of the gambling.
And if you want to watch bull races at all, you need to travel to the flea-bitten, sun-scorched, gritty little Maduran capital of Pamekasan during the last week or two of October. It’s the only time and the only place on earth where this happens.

Read More

Posted on February 22, 2011

By J.J. Tindall

ARTERIAL

Willows on the lake weep always
but all trees weep in winter.
Hearts hanging in reverse, denuded,
x-rays of arterial globes,
street by perfectly straight street.
Like the oldest cities on earth,
this one’s a grid,

Read More

Posted on February 21, 2011

By David Rutter

1. Albert Pujols, WTF?
Every person with Cubbie Blue in their little corpuscles wants owner Tom Ricketts to pluck Albert Pujols from the Cardinals and then, at the very least, soothe those lingering bed sores from the Lou Brock era. How sweet it would be.
But how much sense does it make for Cubs fans to lust after Pujols, who is, by acclamation and evidence, the greatest player of this era?

Read More

Posted on February 18, 2011

By Brett McNeil

A couple weeks ago I got word that my savings had been wiped out in a financial fraud engineered by an unscrupulous and not especially creative hedge fund manager turned thief. If you’ve read my recent Indonesian Journal missives, you know the details.
When the news of my destitution reached me, I was living in Central Java, Indonesia and working for $1,000 per month as a Fulbright English teacher. My stipend put me well below the U.S. poverty line but in Indonesia a cool grand per month is very decent money and I was living relatively large as an expat – regular cross-country travel by air, dining out a couple times a day, frittering away money on clothes and handicrafts and air-conditioned buses, zipping around on an almost-new Yamaha scooter.
I made a pittance but I was still pulling down more than three times what my Indonesian civil servant counterparts in the English Department earn during a six-day work week, one that features long days and sometimes three-hour high school classes. I didn’t plan on saving much of my Fulbright money while abroad – in fact, I intended to spend most of it sightseeing – but I expected to come home to a nest egg that, according to the last fraudulent statement from my now-jailed fund manager, was edging toward six figures.
That financial cushion is what allowed me to pack up my stuff and rent out my house and set off for a year’s adventures in Southeast Asia. When it went up in smoke, I had to confront a harsh reality: I was fucking broke. Whatever my level of exchange-rate comfort in Indonesia, I would be facing some tough bills when I got back home in early summer and, earning $1,000 per month, I wasn’t going to have the money to meet them. Not unless I returned and started working for real money as soon as I could.
So I made a hard decision and headed back – in the language of overseas posts like the Fulbright or Peace Corps, I early terminated.

Read More

Posted on February 17, 2011

By Team No Limit

“I told you to keep your cameras out!”
Held over the weekend in Rosemont.

Read More

Posted on February 15, 2011

By Brett McNeil

This has been a rough week in Indonesia, especially for religious minorities. While the rest of the world watches to see whether widespread grassroots protest can or will yield real political change in Egypt, Indonesians find themselves wondering how to address a recidivist and religiously motivated backslide that threatens the future of pluralism in this undeniably multicultural and putatively tolerant nation-state.
Last weekend, Islamist zealots attacked and killed three members of a religious group considered apostate by hardline Muslims. Then, on Tuesday, Islamic fundamentalists rampaged through a Central Java city and burned three Christian churches.
The torching of the churches and a Catholic school building in Temanggung, a city about 30 minutes from Magelang, came after a local judge sentenced a Christian man to five years in prison for blaspheming Islam. The sentence was the maximum allowed under the law but protestors were unsatisfied. They sought the death penalty – the defendant last year had distributed leaflets critical of Islam – and when it wasn’t handed down, they set out from the courthouse to the churches and, in full view of local police, burned them to the ground. One of the targeted churches is where my principal and his family worships.

Read More

Posted on February 11, 2011