Poetry // Current TV

On Our Way

We’re in the beginning of an Arizona/Grand Canyon Western film set, so stop... more

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Traveling to the Middle of Nowhere To Get Sick

The six-hour 4x4 trek from Timbuktu to Douentza on the Muslim Feast Day of Tabaski... more

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Sana is going to let us scout his house. Good to have Abdul back — we drive. Bea and Karamo hop out to follow Sana, I am slower and when I get out they’re gone. I ask Lamont where they went. He points across the street. I saunter into the compound, and when I see a woman with two children staring at me in surprise and fear I call out for Sana. Suddenly, a tough-looking guy steps out of the main house with a pistol. I say Je cherche Sana, je vous empris, and with a flick of his gun I get myself out of there. Next thing, he’s out on the street, sans pistol, and Abdul is trying to calm him. Sana comes out, tensions ease. I tell Lamont he almost got me shot. Sana says not to worry, “he is military man.” Seems like that’s good cause for worry to me.

This morning (December 8) is Tobaski, a major Muslim holiday. Lamont sees the military man cruise by the hotel in a truck marked Commissar Police. Bea calls her Mom in Sao Paulo to tell her about the nightmare she had last night, of a military takeover in Brazil. She helped an old woman over a bridge, basically carrying her. Everyone was calling the military “Crocodiles!” Her mother says not to worry – there will never be another military coup in Brazil. Because of the internet.

I am reading Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, which posits an alternate universe where 9/11 didn’t happen and where the US is not in Iraq. Instead, there’s another civil war in the States. As always, ever-expanding writing enmeshed in great story. Please don’t kill the characters, kill the author! Etc. My headlight goes out, change batteries in light without light, man in the dark.

Over Tobaski breakfast, the same old instant Nescafe, powdered milk, round loaf of bread with butter and red fruit jam, I know something is different.

The grit is gone. How can there be a loaf of bread in Timbuktu sans sand? Must be time to head out. We’ll try for Dogon country tonight, but will probably end up at the crossroads in Douentza. Road conditions are impossible to learn in advance.

But then until last night we thought Tobaski would be two days from now, which is the date Papa Susso had told us, and we were looking forward to a Dogon el Eid (Arabic), Fete el Khabir (French). That turned our schedule around. Let me sleep in this morning. Anything could be going on in America. Last dreams in Timbuktu.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/Sana is going to let us scout his house. Good to have Abdul back — we drive.... more

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Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus (VIDEO)

The poem masterfully lays out the difference between those who profess to be... more

StewSteve
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9 days ago
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Timbuktu

Timbuktu Bucks

It’s expensive here – dinner costs around $10, double the price of Dakar and Bamako. The jewelry hustlers are all over you all the time. And you understand it – a tourist arriving here is like Mali making a pact to export to Montenegro. It’s hard to get here: the pharmacist yesterday apologized for his lack of lip balm, and promised it would be on the next plane into town. Right. The only way to export your work is to get a tourist to carry it home. And the exchange rate is lower, too.

Big Day Shooting

Bea and I settle in for a Production Meeting and lay out a morning in town and afternoon with the Tuaregs. Sana introduces me to his brother, Sandi, who turns out to be his cousin, who turns out to be… etc. When Sana sees me looking at Bradt’s, he casually drops the news that it’s Sandi on a camel on the cover. Indeed.

Losing a Negotiation with the Tuaregs

No problem.

We go to the Tourist Office and shoot my passport getting the official Timbuktu stamp. Only took me thirty-five years. Shoot the outside of the 15th Century Mosque that looks as much like Arizona as Timbuktu. Have a great conversation with Sana at the sacred Tim (well) of Madame Buktu, who lived alone but her well became the way station that became the stopover that grew into today’s Timbuktu. Karamo buys a homemade, tin-can mbira, and we have an impromptu jam ‘round the well. I fall in. It’s dry.

A Kilo of Salt

Buy a kilo of salt, one chunk, dug straight from the earth, two bucks. [NB - this purchase is destined to appear on the poster for LinkTV’s broadcasting of “On the Road.”] Stage the meeting of Sana and Bob at the Hotel Bouctou, another of the seemingly infinite number of places where Ted Joans lived. The owner, another friend of Ted’s, tells us he always stayed in Room 2. But we’d already shot in front of Room 1 – Ted’s number one room, according to Sana. Lunch, like all meals in Timbuktu, takes forever unless you’ve ordered in advance. Omelet clocks in at an hour and fifteen minutes. Last night we ordered chicken. We heard a squawk about half an hour later.

In the afternoon it’s Tuareg time – I ride a camel into town, Karamo and Lamont ride into desert. Bea and I scout the village – located in the midst of scrub and sand, a particularly unhappy piece of desert. Bea immediately asks for a dune, which Sandi conjures up and which totally makes the shoot. Camels, hypnotic music, the sword dance. Karamo sits in on kora. It’s decided professor Bob should ride his camel sans handler, which turns into a rich comedy of camel stubbornness and poet exhilaexasperation. The sun slides down. The women are wearing incredibly ornate silver headresses which mingle gorgeously with their deep indigo clothing. Bea requests a woman to dance. She moves away from her drum, settles on the earth, and subtly moves her hands. Waves of sand. An hourglass without the glass.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/Timbuktu Bucks It’s expensive here – dinner costs around $10, double... more

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Love's curse

I loved you with a passion unsurpassed You were my awakening and my dream My days,... more

JanforGore
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12 days ago
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LOUP - The Opening - free album . great free jazz

LOUP is a mix between free-jazz, drone and noise, captured in a voluntary, affirmed... more

worrg
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12 days ago
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Modern mismatched manuscript molested...By: Christopher Stephen Cluney

Amplified orbital overt apparitions overflow obsessive braggart beaten believable... more

Day2Day1nSociety
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12 days ago
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Piyut Bo: 5772 - Los Angeles kabbalah | Examiner.com

One of the ways in which Mind speaks to itself is through the arts. Poetry, music,... more

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14 days ago
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Last Night on the Niger

It couldn’t be. But it looked like a rainstorm ahead. The river got choppy. Whitecaps appeared. The temperature dropped. The air turned to milk. I had Beatriz and Lamont start shooting and they shot for an entire tape, an hour. We were moving through memory. Inside a cloud. The trees along the river were shaking. It was the last night before Timbuktu.

The sun came down like an iron cover on a pot. Suddenly darker than dark. We huddled around the table for warmth – no food till new land. The Captain’s flashlight revealed nothing but swirling wisps of fog. The moon ghosted up, and the familiar two stars that have been her accompaniment on this trip, but otherwise the sky and river merged into a black tunnel. It was very late, we were very hungry, very cold, freezing, a few miles from the Sahara.

But the Muse calls. I turn on my headlight to jot some words. “Fermez la lumiere!” bellows the Captain. “Turn off your light! It’s dangerous!” “What’s the danger?” I reply, trying to get some perspective. Silence. Crocodiles? Hippos? Are we lost? I see a flashlight on the left shore. “A gauche!” I shout, half a joke, half hoping the Captain will heed my advice and pull us in to safe haven.

This is supposed to be the time to travel by water to Timbuktu – the river at its highest. Much of the year the trip is impossible – the Niger dries up as it bends (“le boucle,” the Buckle) south at the Sahara. Thirty years ago the Niger flowed through Timbuktu. Now it’s almost twenty kilometers away. Desertification for real.

But tonight the river’s height has changed the shoreline. The fog cloud has turned things around. The high water has caused some of the riverfront villages to be abandoned. Where can we put in for the night? Where is the shore? We cross the broad river, searching. Our jokes have subsided. For almost two hours the Captain stands at the prow, making small hand gestures to the man at the wheel. This way, that.

Suddenly we are ashore, a lonely sand spit, wind blowing mercilessly. The lone tree explodes in a cacophony of scolding and we name the place “Monkey Island.” As the crew sets up the tents, Karamo goes ashore to record the madness. It’s not monkeys but egrets, huddling themselves, reproaching us for invading their sorry dune.

We take dinner on the boat. Last night had been full of stories and imitations of each other. Tonight, our last night on the Niger, is full of tent-shaking monsters – grit teeth to stay on ground. Sand blowing everywhere, somehow getting inside the tents. Frantic dreams. By morning, my sandals, left outside, must be dug out.

We break camp. Two tents blow into the Niger and are fished out with poles. We cast off at daybreak. We’re too cold and tired to shoot.

The blankets we’d bought in Niafunke became our outerwear. All we can do is make time downstream. We are promised a Tuareg village; the one we find is deserted. Filled with loneliness. Finally, late afternoon, we enter Timbuktu like most: tired, dusty, bumping along in an open bache (small truck), wrapped in rags.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/It couldn’t be. But it looked like a rainstorm ahead. The river got choppy.... more

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POSTCARDS FROM KATHMANDU

Spoken-word poet BOB HOLMAN is on a search to record a Newari poet for the endangered... more

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On the Road: Episode 1 - The Griots of West Africa

A griot (gree-oh) is the keeper of the West African oral tradition and the... more

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15 days ago
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Senosa: the Gold Earrings

After the shoot we head 12 kilometers North to Senosa, the village of the huge golden... more

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Monday Market Day

The Campement Hotel has air-conditioned rooms with great showers, flush toilets:... more

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Films w/in Films

Love that Bea. She also came up with a third movie this morning. OK, retracing memory as usual: we’re making a movie, “On the Griot Trail,” about Papa Susso and I searching for the essence of the oral tradition, the living meaning of the oral historians/musicians we call griots, as part of a larger project I’m working on to bring to light, via poetry, the plight of the world’s endangered languages. But deaths in the family and a broken camera have changed our modus operandi: Papa has returned to Banjul to spend time with family and celebrate Tabaschi (L’Aïd el-Kebir), leaving his son, the marvelous griot and sound tech, Karamo Susso, to carry the torch. And because the price of DHL-ing another camera costs as the same as flying here, the wild and wonderful Philadelphia poet/photographer Lamont Steptoe has joined us with two cameras, as second camera/still photographer/jolt of energy.

The second film is a short, stand-alone we’re going to shoot in Timbuktu. A “Heart of Darkness” where Kurtz is a poet. In fact, he’s the Beat poet Ted Joans, who divided his time in the 60s-80s between US-Paris-Timbuktu. The Niger becomes a river of time – I’m traveling back to see Ted like I tried to do in 1975 while working on a play, “Bicentennial Suicide,” in the middle of the Sahra. I came down from Morocco through Algeria and made it into Mali at the desert outpost Tessalit where I spent the night in jail for having no visa, and then was shipped off for Tamanrasset, Algeria. But that’s another story.

This short “film within a film,” will be based on Ted’s poem, “Timbuktu Tit Tat Toe,” about the gentrification of the town (circa 1968!)*. Ted’s widow (he died in 2003), Lenora Castiglia, sent us an incredible poem epistle detailing her trip with Ted back to Timbuktu around 1986. We’ll also be using a piece I’ve written, “Once Upon a Place,” a bit of Georges Simenon’s “Tropic Moon” about Gabon in 1933. And I’m sure some of Lamont’s work will get in there too – he’s Ted, morphing from Karamo (who morphed from Papa!) (Got it?). I love films!

Bea’s new film idea (hereby copyrighted, as are the poems above) is “3 Ghosts” – all subjective POV and “signs” of the speakers – footprints or cushions puffing back up as they stand up, etc. Finally the three come together in the desert, approach a mirror, Finis. Throughout the film, everybody uses “We” as in “We’re hungry” and “Where are we going?” even though there are no Others. We learn that the word “I” has been lost from the language.

It’s been so hot the last couple days that we even used the AC for the last hour to Mopti – Karamo has been battling sinusitis. He started antibiotics yesterday and seems better today. I have no idea how the heat is affecting us, except to say, like all of Africa, it is. No one knows what day it is. As Janis Joplin said, July 4, 1970, Calgary, the day she kissed me (again, that’s another story), “It’s all one day, man.”

(* You can find this poem in Ted’s last published work, Teducation, published by Coffee House Press – shout out to founder Allan Kornblum.)

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/Love that Bea. She also came up with a third movie this morning. OK, retracing memory... more

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18 days ago
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Sharing the River

Days since writing for the blog. The doing overtakes the talking about the doing and the writing, which is the kind of talking about the doing I’m doing now, and sometimes you are the audience itself, dear Reader. Still the miles flow under and we head, full of anticipation and eyeful quaffing eyeful, kora note after note, towards Timbuktu.

Mud villages are generally Fulani now (with some Bela); the straw encampments, built around tree branches held together by twine, are the Bozo fishermen, whose pinasse boats are decorated with flag- like rectangles and the date of building near the stern, and who ply these waters with nets. The big adventure this morning was when we came across a three-boat net laid out all the way across the river, with the boss walking net on the near shore. We tried to maneuver under the net line, but eventually the two outer boats pull their nets together, allowing us to swing around outside them. A twenty minute example of sharing the river, accompanied by all kinds of shouts and recriminations between the two groups.

We embark from Mopti like real filmmakers, which is to say we did it and then we did it again from a different angle. Amodou 2, our river guide, had never heard of such a thing, but everybody enjoyed the silly tubabs (white people – I guess I mean me, Bea being Brazilian, Lamont African-American, Karamo African, Ram Indian) who had to leave twice. We were going to do it three times, but Bea figured that my entering the boat and taking off needn’t be repeated by the Karamo-and-me duet, that my sailing alone mid-Niger would suffice for both films. That felt good, loading everybody in after the second shot: Karamo with kora and Bob, poeticizing, hop on board.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/Days since writing for the blog. The doing overtakes the talking about the doing and... more

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19 days ago
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Piyut Vaeira 5772 - Los Angeles kabbalah | Examiner.com

Every seeking within is for the purpose of finding the place of becoming. Now this... more

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21 days ago
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Men Just Don't Ask Directions

This is a poem written by me and published by Yahoo.

thevoiceoftoday
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22 days ago
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How to Build a Kora

My first day in Mali not in jail. The in-jail story, suffice it to say, was some... more

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Weird Going 12

#12 I meant to play some classical music, this morning: some Beethoven, maybe, Mozart,... more

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