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Swamp

Confessions of an Academic Pseudo-Giraffe
30.10.05  
Drinking for everyone's happiness
Three days ago, I ended my journey from Uganda amongst some snow, which had fallen the day before. It's gone now. The snow was somehow the embodiment of my sleep deprivation: roughly 40 mm for 40 hours without sleep, and then most of it had disappeared during the first night's deep unconsciousness.

Yesterday's celebrations honoured Timo and Anne, whose bond is now official. We had a wonderful venue for the evening party and the family occasion earlier on: a series of conference rooms, complete with sauna, kitchen, and fireplace - right at the heart of the city, by the rapids, in the old industrial complex of Kehräsaari. The sauna, the löyly room itself, sits in a little protruding wing in the building on third floor, a niche you might call it. It hovers right above the terrace of the Falls restaurant. While enjoying the heat, one has a direct view on the pedestrian bridge and the black waters of the Ratina pool. Like a womb with windows on the world.

As tends to happen in a party like this, in a culture like this, the atmosphere turned somewhat delirious around midnight. The alcohol supply never ran out. Some people turned into writers and philosophers, some into clowns or acrobats, some into army officers, or gigolos. The chairs started moving, as if by their own initiative, the music getting louder and the clock faster, the empty bottles accumulating. Inevitably, as most of us had studied in Tampere and prefer tasty rock to disposable electronic music, Doris was the place to be checked out after we hit the streets. Unfortunately, we were not alone with that idea. A one-hour queue was enough for a change of plan. How nice that this was the night when the clocks were turned back.

(Addition: I'm not talking about turning back the clocks only in the nostalgic, metaphorical sense - though, as usual, the non-literal is my preferred meaning. The clocks were actually turned back by one hour, which kept the idea of getting up before noon on Sunday just barely within the realm of realism.)
25.10.05  
Dreaming of snowmen
I’m preparing to leave Uganda again for a couple of weeks. If I remember correctly, the day I arrive in Finland, the day after tomorrow, will be exactly one year after I left for Uganda for the first time. But no circle is closing here; it feels more like a case of things opening up.

I may have a chance to see snow, first time in more than eighteen months. Be that as it may, I doubt I’ll have any time to utilise that lovely white element. I have to content myself with reading books in which people ski through the Nordic countryside. Just passed a scene like that in Mikael Niemi’s Populäärimusiikkia Vittulajänkältä (Populärmusik från Vittula); and in the scene after that everyone gathers on the bridge to experience the grand show of ice breaking in the Tornionjoki river. Rock’n roll music. Distant tunes, from where I’m standing now.

A mental note: I’m beginning to imagine a relation between traffic congestion in Kampala and coffee drinking in Finland. Something to do with naturalised collective mania, a general excess that has reached the level of ideology. Though there are huge differences too: the moment gas consumption per capita in Uganda reaches the top global level, this world will be no more.
19.10.05  
Apollo
Apollo Milton Obote died last week in South Africa at the age of (about) eighty. He’s not very well known internationally because when it comes to African countries, people in the West generally only have available memory space for one name per nation. In Uganda’s case, that position was permanently taken out of competition during the 1970s.

In fact, nobody would have ever heard of Amin if Obote, leader of Uganda both before and after the well-known monster, had not appointed the practically illiterate sergeant as the commander of his army in the sixties. Idi was considered a safe choice: he would never have the ability or the ambition to threaten the president’s position. Even after the coup in 1971, people were optimistic that things are going to be good. Amin would not try to stay in power. Why would he?

Obote was the de facto leader of the country from 1962 (independence) to 1971, spent the seventies in exile in Tanzania, ruled again from 1980 to 1985 after a rigged election, then suffered another military coup, and went into exile again, living the rest of his days in Zambia. In many ways, his life history equals the history of this country. Most experts think he did a decent job negotiating the complicated ethnic divides in the beginning of his first term in power. Then, threatened by mounting unrest, he became more and more dictatorial. The military grew too powerful in his control, then got out of control and toppled him twice. It’s still way too powerful after having been consistently fed by the conflict in the north for twenty years under Yoweri Museveni’s rule. If anything jeopardizes free and fair elections next year, it’s the bloated and frustrated military. In that sense, Obote created both independent Uganda and the monster that can be seen to threaten its democracy.

In his last years of presidency, the man was just like any other African dictator, staying in power the best he could. Some sources say his forces killed hundreds of thousands of civilians while fighting Museveni’s guerrillas in the now infamous Luweero triangle. In comparison with Amin, though, he was a boring little fella: no outrageous excesses in personal lifestyle, no background in boxing, no bizarre gloating, no stories of cannibalism, no sensational bulk necessary for legend.

But what a poetic name he had! Apollo Milton. God of poetry (music, prophecy, medicine) combined with the creator of Paradise Lost! Vision combined with literal blindness. Very descriptive, in a retrospective way.

As I write this, his body has arrived in Kampala. It’s going to tour the country for about a week before they bury it in his home village.
11.10.05  


The face of modern Dubai.



Tourists were here.
Dubai
We just spent a long weekend in the United Arab Emirates. Needed some place to go, and flights to Dubai were convenient. So I thought, with the profound expertise acquired during the three-day stay, I’d offer a comprehensive in-depth analysis of the place here. It’s probably the hottest place I’ve been to, though not deadly humid like Mombasa. Day temperatures were certainly close to forty.

Dubai is a fungus of a city. New skyscrapers mushroom every day. On good days, two. I’m fairly sure when we left there were a few more on the main road than when we arrived. Nobody knows what will happen to them when they grow old, but it hardly matters now that they are all bright and shiny. The biggest one, Burj Dubai, is going to be something like 800 metres tall when it’s ready. They say it’s going to be extended even further if anyone in the world is crazy enough to try and build a taller one. About ten kilometres down the road, there was absolutely nothing a year ago. Now the skeletons of about ten skyscrapers are standing there. Construction cranes are the distinctive feature of the skyline. Hundreds of them. Everywhere.

Dubai lives in the future rather than today. The huge construction projects that are either being built or just planned already exist on the maps. It says “Dubailand” on the map, referring to an enormous entertainment complex, but if you went there, you’d find nothing but desert. The first gigantic palm-shaped artificial island is being constructed; the map already shows three of them in place. Billboards everywhere are decorated with pictures of finished satellite cities and other projects, whether or not the work has even started. The modern Dubai knows no past. It practically has no past, or at least the past exists separately from it, in a completely different universe, or mode of existence. A caption at the museum says the first bank was founded in 1946. Then, in the seventies, they found the oil.

Before that? Five thousand years of Beduin nomadism and a few hundred years of pearl diving. Few think of that, since it’s not compatible with the present.

Driving on the main road, the ultra-commercial landscape of malls, hotels, and highways resembles what you see in certain parts of the biggest American cities. Only it’s all flashier, newer, shinier on the surface. It’s almost impossible to pass those structures and not think about something written by Jean Baudrillard or Fredric Jameson. The facades mirror everything, but still they seem transparent. It looks as if there might not be anything behind them, as if they were only sheets of bright material representing buildings. There are no pretenses of trying to imitate anything pre-21st-century.

A project called the World is growing off the coast. It’s a series of artificial islands arranged in the shape of the world map. Each piece of sand represents a real geographical area. Millionaires will have villas there, just like on the palm islands. Rod Stewart just bought the British Isles, paying 25 million dollars. This is one of the details guides provided. Little was said about any of the major sights without mentioning how much X would/will/has cost. Money as a tourist attraction.

Well, we did visit the desert too. Drove the dunes and rode a camel, ate iftar buffets (delicious and plentiful meals after sunset – it is Ramadan), smoked a shisha, saw no belly dancing whatsoever (yes, it is Ramadan). The place may have little visible history, but it does have a tradition and a culture.
On the blog again
My blog has experienced one of these temporary paralyses that plague all avenues of expression when the person voicing the message is either too preoccupied with something or not engaged enough in anything. Perhaps I am both. I’ve been very busy writing the last chapter of my dissertation, but simultaneously I could not describe the past month as very eventful. Routine, mostly, spiced by a few rare flashes of the extraordinary.

One of the latter took place on a Monday when I attended another Hash run by the Kampala HHH. Due to an insane traffic jam, I arrived at this school in Mengo (a western Kampala suburb and a former capital of the Buganda kingdom) half an hour late. Luckily, for precisely that purpose the organizers always mark any route turns with chalk, so I set out running through the slums alone, hoping to catch the group at some point. I did eventually. And it was a very interesting experience without the group as a protective shield. I was pleased to notice that despite dozens of people yelling something as I trotted along, I heard nothing malicious or even remotely threatening. It is a much less pleasant experience to run through a poor neighborhood in one of the First World countries that have a strict division of wealth.

Sometimes blogging reminds me of what a former Finnish president (as I quite subjectively think I remember) said about art, namely that it requires two things: one should have (1) something to say and (2) the ability to say it. Given how low the standard for (2) is generally set on (or by) the Internet, opening one’s mouth seems to depend almost solely on (1). Perhaps not even that. A lot of people are very content saying things that amount to nothing; perhaps the medium is pulling us all in that direction.

If I am coming out of hibernation now, it is because something concrete enough has happened for it to stand as an obvious subject for an entry. The next entry, that is.

Old Ones
helmikuuta 2004
maaliskuuta 2004
huhtikuuta 2004
toukokuuta 2004
kesäkuuta 2004
heinäkuuta 2004
elokuuta 2004
syyskuuta 2004
lokakuuta 2004
marraskuuta 2004
joulukuuta 2004
tammikuuta 2005
helmikuuta 2005
maaliskuuta 2005
huhtikuuta 2005
toukokuuta 2005
kesäkuuta 2005
heinäkuuta 2005
elokuuta 2005
syyskuuta 2005
lokakuuta 2005
marraskuuta 2005
joulukuuta 2005
tammikuuta 2006
helmikuuta 2006
maaliskuuta 2006
huhtikuuta 2006
toukokuuta 2006
kesäkuuta 2006
elokuuta 2006
syyskuuta 2006
lokakuuta 2006
joulukuuta 2006
tammikuuta 2007
helmikuuta 2007
huhtikuuta 2007
elokuuta 2007

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