dsbenson dot com

hook up xbox to HDMI with analog audio output

dsbenson — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:00:16 +0000

I recently bought myself an XBox 360, and intended to hook it up to my HDTV for high-def video, and to my stereo for audio.

But my stereo is old, and doesn’t accept HDMI inputs. And my high-def TV doesn’t have audio output. So I needed two separate cables out of the XBox: one for video (the HDMI cable) and one for audio (analog 2-channel would do).

It never occurred to me that the XBox couldn’t do this, as I knew that it had several outputs on the back. I did know that an HDMI cable didn’t come with the XBox, but I had an extra one already. However, when I opened the XBox box, I found a couple of F-You’s from our pals at Microsoft:

First, the XBox came with a nonstandard “weird cable” adapter that goes from the XBox’s Weirdo Port (some elongated thing that I’m sure Microsoft has a name for but I’ve never seen before) to analog audio (left and right RCA cables, which is exactly what I needed for my stereo) plus crappy analog RCA video, which is useless and won’t allow for high def (or even reasonable video quality).

Secondly, although the XBox had both the Weirdo Port and a standard HDMI video port, these were directly one atop the other on the back of the XBox.

Thirdly, the F-You cable that Microsoft gave me was designed with an unreasonably fat piece of gray plastic at the end which completely covered the HDMI port, preventing me from plugging in both HDMI and Weirdo Port cables at the same time!

Naturally, in a final F-You, Microsoft offered to sell me an upgraded Weirdo Port cable that would split into both HDMI and analog audio. For $50. I should point out that eBay has similar adapters for about $10.

[I should point out that if I had surround sound on this particular system, I would have had to buy one of these adapters, since I'd have needed an optical Toslink connector rather than 2-channel RCA analog cables. But I didn't need that this time.]

But the heck with it: I figured that since I was going to be stuck with a useless Weirdo Port cable anyway, I might as well take the thing apart and see if I could make it fit with the HDMI at the same time.

Guess what? It worked! If you break off the grey plastic cover at the end of the F-You Weirdo Port cable, the actual metal part is nice and thin, and fits just fine with an HDMI cable. Both can be inserted at the same time, and both ports are completely active. Video goes out the HDMI port, and audio goes out the Microsoft-supplied F-You cable.

Tip for breaking off the gray plastic cover from Microsoft’s cable:

The sides of that hard plastic have a groove. I first tried to wrench them apart with a screwdriver, but that’s a losing proposition. Here’s the really simple way: if you have a vise in your workshop (you DO have a garage workshop, don’t you?) just gently use the vise and you can crack the plastic pieces apart like a walnut shell.

If you don’t happen to have a vise, I bet you could do the same thing with a pair of pliers. Or a few gentle taps with a hammer.

Anyway, you’ll be up and running in a few minutes, and save the money and aggravation.

hook a mac mini to your tv, & remote control everything!

dsbenson — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:17:34 +0000

Name Withheld asks,

Hey – I’m considering a Mac Mini to do a home entertainment solution as per your config. A few questions:

• What do you use to connect to your TV screen? Are you happy with the quality? I like the idea of the flexibility provided by a Mac Mini vs Apple TV, but notice that the Mini does not have HD out.

Dear NW,

The Mac Mini can certainly do an HD signal. New ones have two video outputs: you convert either the mini-dvi to HDMI or mini-display port to HDMI. Your best best is probably the mini-display port to HDMI rather than mini-dvi, as that gives a higher resolution (and supports HDCP, which is the horrible copy protection that the industry created in order to make life that much more difficult for people trying to hook up their gear). But they’re both digital signals.

For what it’s worth, I have an older Mini and an older HDTV without enough digital inputs, so I just get 780 rather than full 1080 out of the Mac Mini. It looks great, though.

I don’t believe that the Mini as of this writing (or Apple’s software) puts audio out over the mini-display port, so converting that output to HDMI will only give you video unless that changes. There are, however, solutions for this. There’s a “Kanex” cable from Apogee that, on the Mac side, gets power and audio from the USB port and video from mini-display and converts both of those to a single HDMI. There are probably other adapters like this as well: search for “mini-display plus usb to hdmi.”

But here’s the deal: you only need a cable like this if you want both audio and video over HDMI. That would be appropriate if you intend to put the HDMI cable directly into a TV that has speakers (in general, yuck!). Or if you’re sending the HDMI cable into the back of a stereo receiver.

If, however, you’re running the HDMI cable into a recent stereo receiver, then you probably have several options apart from getting both audio and video over the HDMI cable. You could, for instance, hook a mini phono plug (it’s like mini headphones) into the audio output of the Mac Mini and route that into the stereo. Or better yet, the Mac Mini uses that same audio output for an optical digital signal, which can carry audio over a “Toslink” connector to your stereo and give you 5.1 surround sound. You’ll need a mini-optical to Toslink adapter cable. I found one at Radio Shack.

One good reason to go from the Mini to a stereo is so that you can play audio from your Mac through your stereo without having to turn the TV on. I detail some of this in a previous post, and talk more about it below.

* * *

• How do you navigate the UI of the mini on your TV screen? Do you use a keyboard or are you able to navigate with a remote? If a remote, the one that comes with the Mini or something you bought separately?

I can navigate a lot of ways. The Apple Remote (which used to come with the Mac Mini but is now a separate purchase, I believe) is primarily for the Front Row application that comes with Mac OS, but I don’t use Front Row. I have too much audio for that UI, and I don’t like the screensaver.

Rather, I do like Front Row visually, but I’m concerned about burn-in given the type of TV I have. I think they use a different screensaver on Apple TV. The one that Front Row uses has areas of pure white that switch out every 20 seconds or so but nevertheless stay on the same region of the screen. So unless you’ve got a TV that won’t suffer from burn-in (and nearly all of them do), it’s not a solution for hours-at-a-time use in my opinion.

So back to the remote control question:

We have a lot of gear (stereo, Mini, TV, DVR, wii, etc.), so I use Logitech’s Harmony remote. Really excellent way to control everything if you don’t mind spending a while setting it all up. M wouldn’t have been able to do it, but now that I set everything up it’s easy for her and the kids to control it all.

Love the Harmony remote. We have two of them. The new models use Bluetooth and then use a re-broadcaster to convert that to infrared (IR) signals to control your stuff. If you can handle the cable complication this is a good thing, because a universal remote that’s setting up (or turning off) multiple pieces of equipment must otherwise keep pointing at your gear until it finishes sending the slow IR signals. Bluetooth means that you can press the button on the remote and it doesn’t matter where it’s pointing.

Not an issue for me, but my wife and kids sometimes forget and only half of the gear turns off.

So that’s the Harmony universal remote, which I can use to turn on and off everything, control volume, play and pause, etc. There are other ways to control the Mini as well, more directly. What I use depends on what I’m trying to do:

- Wireless mouse to directly access the machine, though often we access it over screensharing from other laptops etc. without ever turning on the TV (for audio, we just need the stereo!). You’ll need a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard, unless you’re going to control the Mac Mini entirely ‘headlessly’ over VNC/screensharing. It can certainly be done, but sometimes something will go wrong with the screensharing (another app will interfere with it, or a system update or something) and you’ll want to access the Mac directly. Hence the keyboard and mouse. I don’t use these very often, though, as a TV isn’t a great computer monitor. Small text that’s perfectly readable two feet from your face becomes really hard to see from a couch.

- Remote (the iPhone app) for playing audio. Again, no need to turn on the TV. I use this constantly. Love it! I can play any audio in my library (thousands of albums), controlled from my iPhone or iPod Touch. Since I have several Airport Express’ in different rooms of my house (all hooked to smaller satellite speakers) I can actually control volume and turn off different sets of speakers, too. All from my iPhone.

- VNC Lite (iPhone App) when I need to screenshare to the Mini. Not usually necessary, since I can get to screenshare from any other computer in the house. But it’s really cool and has come in handy several times.

- Air Mouse (iPhone app) — really cool. Uses the iPhone as a mouse. Since my iPhone is nearly always in my pocket, this is what I often grab when the TV is actually on, rather than using the wireless mouse. In fact, if you carry around an iPhone anyway, and the wireless mouse isn’t an every day thing for you on the Mac Mini, you can avoid the mouse altogether and just use the Air Mouse application. Apple should buy this.

The most minimal setup would be:

- a wireless mouse (or iPhone + “Air Mouse”) and keyboard for when the TV is actually on and you need to access the Mini directly

- “Remote” on the iPhone/iPod Touch to just control what songs or albums are playing

Beijing 5: odd duck

dsbenson — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:20:09 +0000

I had been walking all day, starting south of QianMen in one of the old Beijing Houtongs, remnants of a much older Beijing. I worked my way through the crumbling old neighborhood to the LiQun duck restaurant mentioned in a guidebook, a small, out of the way place where the only English I heard spoken was the word “Duck.”

“Duck?” Yes, I nodded. Duck.

They brought me a whole, massive roast duck, shiny and red, a duck that until its recent loss of motility had been as well fed as I was about to be. Carved into neat stacks of thin slivers, it overflowed two large plates. Add dishes of sauce, sliced cucumbers, sprouts, thin pancakes to wrap it all in and a large Yangling beer so as to avoid the dangers of tap water. Enough food for my whole table. Unfortunately I was the only one sitting there at the time. Apparently I ordered the People’s Liberation Army Officers’ Mess Hall Happy Meal.

After honoring the duck who gave its life to fill my table, I spent the entire day waddling it off. Tienanmen Square (Chinese for “You can’t get there from here”) is enormous, much larger than I had imagined. It’s more Official than ugly, and sized for a few million people.

I was a half hour too late to see the Maosoleum, where the frozen popsicle of Chairman Mao’s body is brought upward daily out of the deep freeze to be displayed to the flag waving crowd. When I was a kid, everyone “knew” that Walt Disney had cryogenically frozen his body somewhere deep in Cinderella’s Castle. Apparently Mao had heard this as well, but actually had it done.

Well, it gives me a reason to go back to Beijing. Can’t see everything in one trip.

In the endless flat plaza of Tienanmen Square, children call out to me, and Chinese tourists come up to say Hello or take their pictures with me. Some really are tourists, I’m sure. Anyone who can speak a few words of English. Others want to walk with me, “practice their English,” see the sights with me—as long as those sights include a stop at a local teahouse where, I’m sure, my bill would somehow end up much higher than it ought to be. I politely demur and insist on going where they will not follow. The men’s room works well for this.

Here’s a tip: if you’re walking in Tienanmen Square and very friendly young Chinese claim they’re also tourists and want to see the sights with you, head toward the giant portrait of Mao outside the ticket gates of the Forbidden City. That place charges admission, so it’s bound to shake off any lampreys.

The Forbidden City is huge. They don’t call it the Forbidden City Block, after all. Emperors had to stick palace after palace in the place just to have places to rest as they walked in their enormously heavy Star Wars outfits from one end to the other. It’s quite impressive, and the GPS-enabled headset was well done, but I got Ming’d out after a few hours in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Palace of Heavenly Purity, Hall of Mental Cultivation, Palace of Oh My God My Feet Are Killing Me!

As sun set, I continued northward skirting Jingshan park through another old Houtong where Deng Xiaoping had lived. Here in the remnants of old Beijing beyond the Forbidden City, where once the relatives of the emperor, courtiers and eunuchs lived, the extremely wealthy now live in large homes connected side by side with poor families crammed into squalid 10 meter rooms, a warren where multiple families share a single cold shower from a barrel on the roof and babies squat to crap in the alleyways.

Still further north I came to a series of beautiful lakes surrounded by bars, restaurants, gardens: Beihei, Quianhai, Houhai. A truly lovely place to stroll, where young lovers boat on tranquil waters reflecting multicolored lights from shore. I joined a group of giggling girls at an outdoor grill and pointed my way through roasted spiced meat on a stick and some sort of sugared fruit before continuing northward past the tourist areas, through the quiet areas around Xihai lake and onward toward a subway station.

Ten hours of a most excellent walking tour of Beijing, a city not known for being walkable!

I ate quite a lot of good food on this trip, though what sticks in my mind (and my teeth) are the challenging fare I consumed…

At lunch with the China development team: Pigs foot and a bowl of gelatinous sea vegetable soup that was filled with tiny white wormlike fish that had little black spots for eyes.

At a mountain retreat with Wang Ping and Justin: a trout I caught in a heavy net, well seasoned and full of bones.

At the infamous Wangfujing night market: ostrich on a stick, raw sea urchin I ate directly from the spiny urchin body, fried scorpions, odd desserts.

I didn’t try the bloated and extremely nasty looking silkworms, though in my defense I did try silkworms two weeks later…at lunch with my team back in San Francisco!

Beijing 4: lady bar sex sex sex

dsbenson — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:03:54 +0000

The man crab-walks up to me and asks, “Lady bar?” and I imagine some sort of chocolate covered ice cream on a stick, but that’s not what he’s asking, so I politely decline. Not hungry, anyway. I wasn’t expecting to find Gentleman’s Mammary Clubs or porn shops in China, but you can hardly exit a dumpling shop, walk two doors down and take a surreptitious left without running into one. We actually did see a club called “Lady Bar Sex Sex Sex.” Maybe these grow from tension caused by the “One Child” policy, or maybe I have that backwards and the One Child policy grew out of a preexisting preoccupation with bonking.

Just like home.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. China hasn’t run out of people, so they’re obviously getting plenty of horizontal time. But I’d read that the government has a very strict anti-pornography policy, so I am surprised to see so many places that appear to flaunt that. Perhaps I should have ventured in after all. Purely for cultural research, of course.

I’m not sure what I would have found in the store we passed labeled “Adult Appliances” though. Sexy washing machines in flagrante frottage with naughty microwaves, coquettish double ovens slyly winking behind their thick thermal glass. Kitchen aids.

On my last night in town I walked an endless road alone, and long after dark I left the tourist areas, heading down quieting streets toward the still-distant subway station. The line of street lights dribbled their yellowish glow on sporadic groups of locals in the solid but seedy old neighborhood. I had enough confidence in myself (tall, vigorous, oblivious) and my map (iPhone, Google, well charged) to continue my walk despite the generally dilapidated appearance of the area.

Quiet. Very quiet now, and dark. I passed two brothels. Not the Lady Bars catering to Western tourists, but real neighborhood brothels where everybody knows your name, with red lights outside and in, and thinly dressed, thinly waisted women of ages from too old to probably too young sitting on ordinary chairs and watching for customers. It might have been a sweatshop, but they weren’t making shoes.

Walk on by. No stopping. If anyone asks, “Looking for a good time?” I’ll reply, “I’m already having a good time, thanks.” But nobody does. There’s something comforting about being left alone. I continue northward toward busier neighborhoods, and an eventual subway station.

beijing 3: the great wall of sticky rice

dsbenson — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:06:12 +0000

At 7 AM on Saturday, Justin and I are met by Wang Ping, our guide to a remote and wild section of the Great Wall known as Jiankou, about 200 kilometers and 3 hours from our hotel. Ping has brought a friend, an attractive young woman of an uncertain name. After asking her to pronounce her name twice and then spell it for me, I give up, blame the road noise, and write down “Angie???”

As we drive outward through the expansive Beijing suburbs, signs exhort us to “Don’t follow too clowsely.” Scattered chimneys from countless small factories attest to the ongoing lack of pollution controls, and belch thick clouds of off-white smoke that spreads out into a solid stripe lying low over the fields, a horizontal band of milky haze below the treetops.

The air has a smoky wood smell.

The major highways look just like the ones in California, though perhaps with fewer potholes. Similar signage, tollbooths, road construction. The main roads show evidence of a large labor pool: the medians are well groomed, manicured and planted with bright flowers.

Ping speaks English well, having learned from an American teacher, a 24 year old named Christine. He describes her thusly: “Christine is same as you are, with very big nose.”“Oh,” I said, laughing. “You mean she was very beautiful!”

Getting to the Jiankou section of the Great Wall entails taking a series of ever smaller roads past rivers and countryside villages. Ping points out the resorts, which appear to be constantly under construction. Apparently this is a popular region to escape to on hot summer weekends.

As the roads narrow, we pass groups of people digging up the discolored but otherwise perfect bricks that line the road, replacing them with whiter versions of the same bricks. I suppose this is the Chinese equivalent of the Works Progress Administration back in the 1930′s in the U.S.: keep the people employed.

We wind through the mountains past corn-growing farming communities. Occasionally we are charged small tolls to pass through these villages, women and children moving makeshift barriers to let us through after being given the requisite small bills. Apart from corn, this forms a large part of the village income, and so is tolerated by the local authorities despite the signs we now see proclaiming “This section of the Great Wall is not open to the public.”

Apparently, the payment of the toll makes us private, not public. Ping explains that the signs were put there after the villages got sued by the family members of people who died. Hiking the wall. Where we’re going.

“Ah,” I say. “Perhaps you should have mentioned that earlier.”

“Don’t worry,” replies Ping. I wait for more words of reassurance, but he seems to have reached the end of that particular thought.

We reach a small village in the mountains at the literal end of the road, where Ping’s van is argued over by an insistent woman and a creaky old man, each of whom wants our business at their respective parking areas, e.g. flat bits of dirt not otherwise occupied by cut corn stalks. The woman is quicker and louder, and the old man loses out.

At 3600 feet, Jiankou is one of the most picturesque sections of the Great Wall, rising and falling hundreds of feet in successive sharp peaks. Just getting to the wall is a hellacious climb up a steep trail from our small village, and I’m thankful for the loan of a walking stick from Ping. It takes the four of us about 45 minutes to climb the switchback trail. When we reach the Wall from the northern side of what used to be Mongolia, we can see the village back down in the valley, a thousand feet below.

The Jiankou section of the Great Wall is not restored like other better known and well-supported tourist sections. This is the real wall, a majestic and crumbling 600 years of history, crawling its way up and down over sharp and close set peaks like a line of paint laid over crumpled tinfoil. Each peak along the long-vanished border has its guard tower, no matter how steep the approach.

The base of the wall remains solid, even where trees have taken route. Some portions of the wall are broad and heavily forested. Other spots are thin and bare, straddling knife-edge ridges in the mountains where you can stretch from side to side and take long looks down to the left and right.

In most places, the side walls preventing an accidental fall remain intact, the hard white joints between the stones still displaying the incredible staying power of the sticky rice used in the mortar. Rice does not grow in these mountains, and would have been carried from the south of China upriver by barge, then by cart, then by hand. Some of that rice ended up in the stomachs of the builders, and some ended up ground into powder and mixed with water, lime or egg white. The builders and their meals are long gone, but the once glutinous rice remains centuries later, fossilized and still incredibly strong.

In the frequent spots where the wall climbs sharply and clings to the sides of mountain peaks you can see gravity and time slowly winning out, turning stone steps into dense piles of rubble that we must climb. Some of the sections are nearly vertical, requiring us to heave ourselves upward from stone to stone or climb the outside edge of the wall and push ourselves up on the twisted roots of trees.

As my shoulder bag flops around in an attempt to send me spinning downward I am reminded that a “man purse” filled with water bottles is not the most stable thing to carry. Had I known in advance I’d be doing this climb, I would have brought a small backpack. And some hiking boots. Hey, at least I remembered a hat. Ping tells me I look like Indiana Jones.

He also suggests I take off my clothes and hike the Great Wall naked, saying the resulting movie would get a lot of attention.

“You mean the kind of attention where I get arrested, thrown into a Chinese prison and never get seen again?”

“Oh no, it would be no problem. You would be famous.”

“Hmm. I think you’re confused in your English. There’s a difference between famous and infamous. Angelina Jolie is famous. Me being arrested for hiking naked at the Great Wall—that would be infamous.”

I am, however, quite tempted to drop trou’ and hike a section in the all-together. I wonder how Ping, who has only met me a few hours ago, could possibly know me so well. I swear upon my future grave, which I’m thinking could be any moment now, that he brought this up entirely on his own.

In the end, discretion and my fear of the authorities wins out, and I tell Ping that if it weren’t for the presence of a coworker, particularly one with a fancy camera, I would have gone for it.

“You would be very famous on YouTube,” he insists.

“You’re confusing me with my brother,” I say. “A lot of people get us mixed up. He’s a YouTube star. I just get naked on mountaintops. But not, I think, today.” Luckily for all concerned, we drop the topic, I keep the trousers, and we all hike onward.

For the next six hours we play the part of Ming dynasty guards and march up and down the steep mountain passes to stop, panting, at each ruined guard tower. On the tallest of these peaks, the aptly named “The Eagle Flies Upward” (which it would need to do in order to avoid smashing into the vertical cliff face), I find cell phone reception from the distant village far below, and call my wife!

I tell M where I am so she can look it up on the Internet, totally forgetting until after I hang up that she will find, right before she tries to go to bed, that Jiankou is described as dangerous, hazardous, risky, wild, and crumbly. All true, which makes it a wonderful place to visit. But perhaps not the best place to surprise a loved one on the other side of the world.

“Okay, I’ll call you later if I survive the day. Sleep well, sweetheart, and pleasant dreams!”

Although there were plenty of other hikers, we didn’t see another Western face the entire day. Jiankou is a place for intrepid travelers only, and I was thankful that we had a good guide. Wang Ping can be contacted at his website,

http://www.greatwall-alternative.com/

where he confusingly refers to himself as Mr. Dereck, the name given to him by his expatriate English teacher Christine, she of the brown hair and the beautifully large nose that looks just like mine.

beijing 2: the caveman way

dsbenson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:49:02 +0000

Using only a printed piece of paper showing the address in English and Chinese, a pocketful of cold, hard cash, and a caveman’s flair for wordless pointing and grunting, Justin, Steven and I share a taxi to the Adobe office. The driver isn’t familiar with the address, but in a city large enough for 17 million people that’s hardly surprising. He lets us off within a block and, grunting our thanks, we triangulate using the piece of paper (asking passersby and watching where they point and grunt) until we verify that we are heading toward the right set of buildings.

The Beijing Adobe office is as you’d expect: a clean, well-lit place of business. Multiple computers crammed into cubicles mark the spots where coding and testing happens. The occasional stuffed bunny brings a pinch of levity, though I sense that the Chinese do not treat their places of work as extensions of themselves like we do. The questions I am asked suggest that the China developers and testers are most curious about our team social events. I’m guessing there aren’t many picnics, Friday beer bashes or “wear all black and paint your fingernails like a goth zombie” days in the China office. They like the photographs the U.S. team shares with them.

We open a 22nd story window to let in some cool air—that’s something you don’t get to do in office towers back home. We’d be too distracted throwing paper airplanes out of skyscraper windows to get any work done. Down on the street I can see bicycles everywhere, but no bike lanes. The mortality rate must be crazy high, as biking here seems like a cross between a shooting gallery game and coal mining. If you don’t get hit by a bus you’ll wind up with black lung.

I’m pretty sure the Internet here is delivered a bit at a time by all those bikes. You can fit a lot of zeros and ones on a bicycle, though the smog creates digital wind resistance that slows down the throughput. At least, that’s what I think the IT guy was saying. His accent was a bit strong.

The management treats us to a fantastic lunch, ornate and overabundant, delaying tonight’s dinner by several hours while we attempt in vain to digest enough to compensate for several thousand additional calories. A gigantic Lazy Susan fills our table, dishes piled on like preschoolers on a playground roundabout. Thin roast duck skin, light and crispy. A bowl of jellyfish, more crunchy than gelatinous. Roast duck meat with vegetables and various dipping sauces, rolled up in paper-thin crepe wraps. Round mushrooms that look like roasted chestnuts penned up in a broccoli corral. Marinated cucumbers colored a deep, dark green. A fragrant bowl of soup broth filled with soft unidentifiables. Slices of goose liver pate. Commas and curlicues of crispy beef. Something that looks like a bird’s nest filled with multicolored jewels. A giant fish. A dozen or more dishes, each more interesting than the last.

I feel like a fat kielbasa stuck in the microwave and about to split lengthwise. I’ll have a lot of explaining to do to my scale when I get home, and those new pants are going to be angry. (I was going to say the new pants will be pissed, but I don’t want to piss my pants.)

We head back to our hotel as the sun sets. I revise yesterday’s statement about the smog: while it’s not visibly as thick as I’ve seen elsewhere, it’s relentless and turns the sky to slate. There’s an acrid quality that’s giving me a slight burning in my eyes and a sore throat. I’m thinking of having my tonsils removed. I could probably get that done here for under a hundred bucks. And get a suit tailored from whole cloth at the same time.

Our taxi scoots along in stop and go traffic as the sky turns to twilight. Groups of ornate kites flutter over the local parks like winged beasts out of mythology, like enormous and colorful dragonflies from Land of the Lost.

Pairs of pay phones mounted two to a pole give a standing salute every few hundred feet on the major thoroughfares. Pay phones! As if they’ve never heard of cell phones here. Each pair is shielded from the weather by two half globes at the top of the pole. A more charitable observer might describe them as the top of a Valentine’s heart, but to me they look like big orange buttocks, mooning us as we pass slowly by in our taxi.

Late that night we walk down dark and narrow alleyways to a restaurant not far from our hotel, where not a word of English is spoken except by the three of us. Various waitstaff talk rapid-fire to us in Chinese, and we manage to order and share a succession of marvelous and spicy dishes, each one unique and something we’ve not had before. Ordering is simple: we just point and grunt, the caveman way.

beijing 1: the opposite house

dsbenson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:23:48 +0000

It’s a short line of sleepy, shuffling rather-be slumberers at 11:15 pm Sunday night in the Air China waiting line. LAX is a wishy-washy pile of an airport, closer to Lacks or Ex-LAX than to re-LAX. It’s taking five minutes a person to move the line ahead. China here I come, albeit slowly.

11:50. At the gate, and the plane won’t board for another hour and 20 mins. Damn. Arrived too early this time. Nothing to do, and little enough juice to do it with. Need to find an electrical outlet and juice up. Should buy a sandwich, water, bottle of coffee for morning: the essentials. Gotta get some currency as soon as the cash transmutation office opens at midnight. I’ll need small bills to hit the ground running at 5:30 Tuesday morning in Beijing.

1:25. I’ve boarded an Air China plane the size of Rhode Island, a fossilized 747 from the Ming dynasty. Hope they’ve changed the oil. They’re playing Silent Night over the speaker system at nearly subliminal volume. Sleep in heavenly peace, indeed. I sure hope so. The pharmacopia in my backpack will undoubtedly help.

Only a few minutes to go now before my row-mate and I are declared the winners. We are separated by an empty seat and have no row behind us, yet still recline. This impossible jetliner is nearly full, a flying Cruise Ship, a winged office tower of the skies.

Should have ordered the special meal. Peruvian goat clusters, Pygmy ham, jellied snake milk salad. I’ll probably sleep through food. The sandwich I crammed in my bag will be rank and spoiled by dawn’s early light. After all, we cross the date line and don’t land until Tuesday. Ahead and behind me the rows of seats stretch to an infinite vanishing point, as if you’d end up back in coach if you continued forward far enough. I can see the left side of the plane curving inward far ahead of me. Perhaps the plane is donut-shaped, and will roll all the way to China.

The giant airlock behind us grinds close with bank vault finality. Things are looking up. We win! We win! High fives and extra seating space all around. Adios, city of angels!

We taxi slowly with darkened cabin lights. A hush falls over the long body of the plane, and some passengers nod off. Those fuzzy voices from the speakers are probably telling us to turn off our iPhones now. But the voices are in Chinese, so it doesn’t count, so I keep blogging.

Yep. English now, fuzzy as a drive-through and so stilted it could see into business class on the plane’s top level. See you later.

Ambien. Slept for 6 hours, then watched The Watchmen. Billy Crudup’s blue prothesis isn’t as impressive on such a tiny screen. Falling asleep briefly, I was shaken awake at 4:30 AM to open my window and watch our dark descent.

Fewer lights than expected, given the density of population.

I am in China.

It takes five minutes to deplane and go through customs, much faster to enter China than the US. The new wing of the international airport, built for the 2008 Olympics, is huge, and soaring, modern, beautiful. And nearly empty at this time of day, an echoing cathedral to tourism.

It very silent here so far, and my phone is as disoriented as I am.

Walking through these Olympic caverns overhung by black skies, we are passed in the other direction by a phalanx of midnight-uniformed airport workers who descend a broad escalator four abreast, each wearing a sky-blue surgical mask. I am filled with confidence. Or germs.

In broken English, an elderly Chinese man asks me for directions. Oddly enough, I am able to give them. We are, after all, only going to baggage claim and the train won’t take us anywhere else.

5:45 AM at baggage claim. Phone and email work as smooth as silk. Marci sounds like she’s standing next to me, whispering into my ear. A driver should have a sign for me. If not, I’ll look up the hotel website to get the address in Chinese.

5:50. No problem. An attractive young woman met me just past the security zone and led me to an awaiting car.

We drive off toward the city. The sky is a deep blue with a hint of light around the corners. Trees planted thickly by the broad highway hide the landscape. Soon a concrete forest of new highrise apartment buildings rises above the fir tops.

The air shows early smog, but not as bad as the inversion I experienced in Delhi. It looks more like a light San Francisco marine layer misting. Luckily I am here in the fall, when the cool air keeps the pollution moving. Cranes everywhere testify to the pace of the construction economy. This is a place where the landscape changes quickly.

We arrive at The Opposite House, an amazing and very new hotel. Ultra modern. The room is so spotless and clean that I wouldn’t eat off the floor for fear of sullying it with my tongue.

A large cedar tub calls to me, siren-like, and I succumb to its still, warm embrace before meeting fellow travelers in the lobby.

Current theory based on several elevator trips at The Opposite House: successful young Chinese women are all cute and smell like flowers. Whereas I am large and smell like a wet dog.

Later modified theory after a groggy day of sightseeing: the average Chinese woman is not cute (same as the average human everywhere), and objects to being sniffed. But she can spit in your eye from ten feet away.

Everyone spits here. If the sidewalks were lined with spittoons the air would ring like hail on a tin roof.

Steven, Robert, Justin and I spend the day at the Summer Palace, a beautiful complex of palaces and Buddhist temples in the hills surrounding a lovely lake. There’s a lot of climbing and walking up sharp hills, and very little context in what we’re seeing. What’s with the venerated rocks? Vertical worm-eaten rock chimneys dot the palace grounds, as if x-marking the spots of a thousand ascensions to heaven. They sure like their piles of furrowed and twisted stone here. Signs on the barriers tell us to “Help Protect The Cultural Relics” and also “Help Protect The Railings.” No signs protect the signs, so they’re fair game. Scenic vistas and architecture crop up around every corner.

After a mid-afternoon lunch at a dumpling shop whose menu features items like “Clod Meat” and “Small bowl first Palestinian brain tendons,” we take the subway back toward our hotel. The subway is jam-packed, much like Tokyo at rush hour. But it’s very well marked, and bodiless voices call out the stops in both Chinese and clearly pronounced English. In fact, this subway is even easier to navigate than Tokyo’s.

Fat Buddhas are in abundance. Ditto for mosques. We pass several churches and a wedding party. For a bunch of godless heathen Communists, there sure is a lot of religion. Many things are not as I expected. I’m not seeing a lot of Soviet-style architecture, for one. My overall impression of Beijing is one of newness, construction, economic activity, success. There are many trees, and not a lot of trash. Beijing seems a lot closer to New York than New Delhi.

One regret that I must find a way live with for the rest of my life: I did not order the “small bowl first Palestinian brain tendons.” Now I will never know.

los angeles 2: support our tropes!

dsbenson — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:24:38 +0000

Slept late Saturday after last night’s 3 AM Xbox party, my head feeling like a pumpkin tossed off the porch by rejected trick or treaters. Greg, Kim and I head into the desert valley flatlands to Twitter-chase a couple of lunch trucks that we’re expecting will shortly pull up in front of a Vietnam memorial. The memorial is a long granite wall, tapered at each end and plopped in the middle of what looks like a dusty and barren landing strip. The place is filled with, in no particular order, veterans in Vietnam war memorabilia clothing, reservists and others in military gear, supporters of our troops (again, wearing T-shirts so you can tell), and, outside all of this memorializing, a group of supporters of BBQ, mostly Koreans.

We’re standing there now, in the shade of a lone tree just outside the memorial area, amid a passing flow of veterans and their families, awaiting the Kobe Korean BBQ taco truck and wisecracking. Us and the Korean youth brigade. It looks like we’re protesting the Vietnam memorial. We just need placards. “EAT, WE CAN!” or “SUPPORT OUR TROPES.”

Ok, truck’s here. We join the growing crowd that chases the truck around and around the parking lot until they finally get directed by the Men In Fatigues to a spot conveniently situated in the blazing LA desert sun on a dusty runway away from the lone tree where we’d been avoiding heatstroke. We huff and puff our way to a spot near the front of the line, and wait in the blazing sun. Yea, though it’s 94 degrees in the Valley, there’s no shadow of death. There’s no shadow of anything. It’s just plain hot as blazes.

The food was great. We ate under a tent where a trumpeter burped out patriotic standards, songs like America The Beautiful or You’re A Grand Old Flag, with extra notes thrown in for free. Just as we down our meal, the Hawaiian “Get Shaved” shave ice truck appears. Hawaiian shave ice is like a snow-cone in the same way that filet mignon is like a Big Mac.

It’s a very multicultural memorial. A bit of Vietnam (or rather, the complete absence of Vietnam, other than the Americans who had left some of themselves there), some Korea and a sprinkling of frozen Hawaii: a scoop of ice cream, covered in a ball of the softest, fine snow and flavored with various lovely syrups, then topped with sweet cream.

In the evening, Greg took me to Elf for vegetarian food beyond belief: spicy kale salad, a stew, and savory crepes. Everyone who worked there looked like they’d just dropped in from 70’s era Berkeley. Elves, one and all. And moments later, we were front row center to see our long-time idols, the amazing Firesign Theatre, perform bits from their classic albums of the 60′s and 70′s a few feet from us. The experience was just incredible, like having the Beatles reunite and perform 6 feet from us, only without having to bring anyone back from the dead.

To cap off the night, we went to Thai Tits for dessert. Not sure why it’s called that. Something about the Saturday night clientele. Great place for late night dessert.

los angeles 1: i have a balm

dsbenson — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:08:29 +0000

Friday morning. Inauspicious start to a week of travel. I’m heading to Beijing a few days from now, but first I’m taking an extended weekend in Los Angeles. Unbeknownst to me and ignored in the email that United sent to my iPhone, the flight out of SFO is early for a change, so I arrive five minutes too late to check the bag I’d already prepaid. Lost my 30 year old pocket knife and various soothing creamy unguents.

Apparently the airport doesn’t like it when they ask, “What have you got in your luggage, sir?” and I answer, “I have a balm.”

Also: cavity searches aren’t pleasurable. I don’t care how kinky you are.

First stop: Los Angeles. I haven’t been here since, let’s see—last week. Visiting my brother, so This Time It’s Personal. By the way, that’s my tagline for the script I’m working on, a sequel to The Passion Of The Christ: This Time It’s Personal.

Sitting at an audition with Greg, watching my brother work the room. Look up Gregarious. Greg’s headshot is right there in the dictionary. At least, until somebody on Wikipedia deletes it. I keep adding his head, somebody keeps taking it down, like head badminton.

He’s playing the part of a snowman. The director invited me in to watch Greg audition and sit on the casting couch. No, no, no, it’s not like that. It was a real couch. I’m sure the stains were just butter from the popcorn.

Outside in the waiting room, a guy noted, “You can tell the kind of stuff people are auditioning for by looking at who shows up.” Apparently next door to the snowman commercial they were casting women for GOT MILF?

Sis-in-law Kim met us back at the house, a.k.a. Mediocre Films Studios. G shot us all for a brief intro to one of his YouTube videos, and I took a nap before we all headed off to one of Kim’s auditions. Maybe they’ll invite G and me both in. I could use some popcorn to tide me over.

It’s a clear and hot day in Los Angeles. We arrived at Kim’s audition, in a tiny unmarked house where apparently a huge number of national spots get cast. Kids run around in the tiny yard. People who look familiar from other commercials sit around under poor lighting and look glum. Greg and I split to go get dinner.

Zankou Chicken! It’s a pilgrimmage for me whenever I’m in LA. And then off to see Mike Birbiglia at a comedy club. We actually saw Mike B before the show, walking toward the club with his wife. Intro’s all around. He’d seen some of Greg’s videos. Nice guy. Fast walker. Managed to get away from us a good half block before we hit the back of the line waiting to see him.

To be fair, I’d be hurrying too, to avoid being late to my own show. Or just to get away from Greg, Kim and me.

Homeless guy on the street calls out as we pass: “Hey, I’m a fan of Richard Pryor. Can I have five dollars?” Greg responds that he is also a fan of Richard Pryor, and No. How’d the homeless guy know it was comedy weekend?

Mike Birbiglia’s show was great! The warmup act had 10 really funny minutes, but was out there for 30. Excellent yogurt afterward, and Beatles Rock Band, and XBox on the big screen, and sleep.

To be continued…

tooth fairies and tooth demons

dsbenson — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:26:54 +0000

At some point in the silent post-midnight hours after I went to bed, but before dawn’s chirruping chorus awoke my second son, Quentin Wilberforce, T.F. visited himself upon us yet again. I have never seen Quentin, nor have I heard the passage of his footfalls outside our door. He must be very light to avoid squeaking the wood floorboards in the hallway.

I imagine Quentin as short, perhaps Hobbit-short, small as a four year old child, and very, very thin. I see him as older and dapper, with graying mutton chop whiskers. Archaic clothes, well worn but exquisitely tailored, with bone buttons on a tweed waistcoat. I have never asked Geran what Quentin looks like, and he has not asked me. None of us know for sure, though he leaves a calling card each time he visits our home, so as invisible visitors go, he is unmistakably corporeal.

We have naturally assumed the T.F. appended to Quentin’s name stands for “Tooth Fairy,” though this has always been implied, never spelled out. His visits are marked by notes left for Geran, written on tooth-shaped paper with carefully-canceled tooth-shaped stamps. These notes are a dead giveaway, an unmistakable clue as to Quentin’s fairy nature, as they are seldom seen except when left by visiting creatures of Toothkind. The stamps alone would mark this as peculiar, and I have never seen similar commemorative postage issued by the U.S. Mail.

I thought the most recent note that Quentin left had a rather odd shape, and not at all the typical Tooth. It was as dissimilar from the standard outline of teeth as a real heart from a Valentine, but Geran pointed out that the shape of his latest card matched his small, prolate pearl of a tooth.

As I recall, my elder son, who is now closer to losing his Wisdom Teeth than to his last, long-passed “baby tooth”, had more than one tooth fairy in his day. One was female, I believe. I don’t recall her name. For some reason the male’s name sticks in my head, however: Throckmorton Idyll Bluster III, T.F. A mouthful of a moniker, and one that required a full set of teeth to pronounce.

Geran has, I believe, only been visited by Quentin, a seemingly small and delicate fairy as evidenced by the ornate and miniscule script.

*****

Throckmorton and his female counterpart visited Ben a large number of times. Thrice in one memorable week: one tooth which fell out naturally, one which was pulled, and one which fell victim to an apple. I’m sure there’s a story in there somewhere, one that gets told by Throckmorton Idyll Bluster himself, at dark and musical Tooth Fairy gatherings, over flagons of questionable beverages around green and ghostly campfires on the moor.

Once, toward the middle of his prime tooth-giving years, Ben asked Marci, “Mommy, are you the tooth fairy?”

Marci looked at him and replied, “Do you really think I have time to fly to peoples’ houses all night and take away little kids’ teeth?”

Hesitation. “No, I guess not.”

“Well, there you have it, then.”

On another occasion, Ben said somewhat hesitantly, “Daddy, if I asked you to tell me the truth about the tooth fairy, would you?”

“Is that something you really want to know?”

He thought about it. “Not right now.” He never mentioned it again, and as he has grown into a young skeptic, I’m glad for that. The Tooth Fairy has been a tangible presence, unseen but definitely sensed, and a “small god” of the most personal sort. Some mysteries are best left alone.

*****

Both boys wrote notes to their respective tooth fairies. Geran still does, since he’s the one who is still losing teeth. The notes are brief and, I imagine, as hard to read by Quentin as they are by me. But the messages are heartfelt and sincere. How are you? Is there a Tooth Fairy Queen? Do you have a middle name? Where do the teeth go when you take them?

I imagine some sort of castle made from the teeth, but I’m not positive on that count. As I’ve already said, there is undoubtedly a moor involved. And dim light even at midday.

One thing I can definitely say about the Tooth Fairy is that the money exchanged for teeth has risen. I’m not sure it’s kept up with inflation, but as I recall, the tooth fairies of the 1970′s paid in quarters, and today’s T.F. pays in small bills.

*****

I imagine the polar opposite of the Tooth Fairy: a tooth demon, wicked and sharp-incisored, who pulls teeth before they’re ready to come out. Some times I will threaten that if the kids do not get ready for bed they will be visited by the Tooth Demon. It hasn’t happened. But that doesn’t mean it won’t.

Perhaps the Tooth Demon visits us already, and leaves bad breath, oily hair, and socks on the floor. That would explain a lot. If so, the Tooth Demon is much busier than the Tooth Fairy in my house.

But much less welcome.

congratulations Ben you mad it?

dsbenson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:10:36 +0000

We are counting down the days until our oldest son, Ben, becomes a Bar Mitzvah. There are so many last-minute items to take care of, so Doug and I have divided the list and set out to conquer!

My task was going to Lucky’s, a grocery store I normally try to avoid, to order the large platters of fruit and piles of fried chicken for the last event of the weekend, a picnic in the park for the remaining out of town guests. The last thing on my list was ordering the cake. After waiting ten minutes at the counter for someone to assist me, a woman finally comes to take my order.

I tell her I want the half-sheet cake, chocolate: chocolate filling, chocolate icing.

“What do you want the message to be?” she asks, getting out a pad and pencil.

I recite slowly: “Congratulations, Ben, You Made It!” Then I tell her, “Be sure to add the exclamation point.”

I look across the counter at her pad, where she’s written the following question: “Congratulations Ben you mad it?”

“No,” I say, “exclamation point!”

She says, “Yes, I have it. Did you want it somewhere else?”

“That is a question mark! I want an exclamation point! And I want an ‘e’ at the end of ‘mad,’ and while you’re at it, a couple of commas would be great, too.”

After several back and forths, she managed to write the words properly. The anticipation is killing me; I can’t wait until Sunday to see what actually shows up on the cake!

nineteen again, clear skinned and satisfied

dsbenson — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:36:30 +0000

On the first occasion of my nineteenth, I was a college freshman, as full of self-doubt and angst as I was of acne. Bespotted where now I’m beamish, confused where now content, frustrated where now fruitful.

M and I had already dated throughout that school year, and at the time, nineteen was legal drinking age. Not that the milestone mattered to me, as I was a teetotaler for those four years. (I gave up not-drinking after college, when traveling through Europe.) I made the mistake that birthnight of abandoning M to head to a Thomas Dolby concert with my roommate, and returned to find that Marci had gone on a bender in my absence and wouldn’t speak to me until the next day.

Today I am nineteen yet again, having been married one less than twenty sun-go-rounds to my beautiful Marci, and in the kind of heaven that I would create were I the creator’s creator, I would inscribe for us a lifetime of lifetimes. Being limited to just one with her is not enough.

In my first XIX, I doubted I would ever be content, much less happy. On this second XIX, I may not be smarter, but I know better. And were I to travel back in time to frighten the earlier me, looking parentally old to my younger self though seeing the world similarly askew, I would offer this advice:

“Don’t worry, kiddo! Relax and have a good time. Be open and try to connect with people. It’ll all work out just fine.

“Oh—and buy some stock in Apple and Microsoft.”

On second thought, best not to change a thing. No idea what I’d inadvertently alter. I’d probably just watch my younger self from behind a tree and let the younger me continue to muddle through. Him with his t-shirt and flared-leg jeans, splattered with twenty colors of oil paint, wandering through campus feeling generally outside. No sign yet of a spreading middle and thinning hair–not that it’s hurt my looks, of course. Right? (To be sure, I peaked some undefined while back, but the lack of women throwing themselves at me now that it’s too late is offset by the lack of women throwing themselves at me back then when it wasn’t, so it all balances out.)

A bit over half a decade from now, I’ll be nineteen yet again: I look forward to reaching my nineteenth anniversary of fatherhood. I like the sound of that. B will have stopped having birthday parties by then—or at least parties that his parents throw—but that’s no reason for me to stop celebrating my own anniversaries of parenthood! And once again celebrating a nineteenth, five years further down life’s chute-the-chute, as G heads to college and we empty our nest. It seems as far ahead as my original nineteenth seems past, but it’s close, close, close.

In a long enough life, so many opportunities to be nineteen again. Gladly, only one full of my own teen angst and acne, my existential crises and frustrations social and sexual. The subsequent years have been increasingly mellow, even if I retain enough of my youthful intensity to frighten the natives on occasion. Luckily, I’ve had a wonderful partner to help me through the years, to look forward to our twenties with, and to make me a better person than perhaps I’d have been otherwise, if, just before my first nineteenth birthday, confused and crazed, I hadn’t fallen in love with the beautiful girl with the amazingly curly and thick brown hair.

prom dress hookers and subway sociology

dsbenson — Mon, 18 May 2009 09:12:39 +0000

Comic books and electronics. Costumed kids and well dressed suits. Free Hugs, albeit often from kids born around the same time as the iPod, hanging out on the streets wearing hoop skirts, manga costumes and nose-obscuring bandages. Often simultaneously.

I’ve spent several weeks in and around Tokyo over the past two visits, including side trips to nearby towns and a bullet train to Kyoto. Interesting and accessible culture, beautiful sights, great food. Somehow it all works, and I find the youth culture—in a country with a birth rate just this side of the Vatican—quite fetching. So cute. Even the prostitutes wear outrageously fancy dresses, like Little Miss Muffet dressed for a remake of Gone With The Wind.

I imagine giant container ships in San Francisco Bay, now emptied of their Toyotas and riding high like Borg cubes upon the seas, setting sail from the Port of Oakland to carry back to Japan all of the once-worn U.S. prom dresses, freshly cleaned and pressed and ready to highlight the tiny waists of the evening girls in the Kabuchicho red-light district, who stroll up and down with parasols in front of the dive bars, just down the street from the glitter and glow of the multi-story, smoke filled Pachinko parlors.

I declaim to the warm Kabuchicho night air an impromptu street haiku:

wearing prom dresses
red lips on alabaster
japanese hookers

Six or so of us were in Tokyo doing research on a then-upcoming version of Adobe Flash Professional. It’s the sort o’ management thing I like to do between all the writing, sleeping, fathering, spousing and carousing. Tokyo is a wonderful city to visit. If the world hadn’t ended last year in an economic catastroclysm I’m sure I’d be heading there again soon. But what with the banks all ablaze, the polar bears melting and all of the swine coming down with New AIDS (or is that New SARS? I really can’t be bothered, though everyone keeps trying) it doesn’t look as though I’ll be headed to Japan again soon.

But the trip was fascinating. In the mornings en route to meetings, we headed upstream like salmon returning to spawn, through the glorious Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, through which nearly four million people travel each day. The press of the crowd is unbelievable, rivers of humanity flowing to and fro with astonishingly little friction, endless schools of self-synchronized minnows describing an intricate dance.

We all remarked on it: it’s unbelievable that so many people can move through this space at once without causing the world’s worst human gridlock. Were this anyplace else, people would be stomped to a pulp twenty times a day, like a never-ending Wal-Mart on the morning of the Black Friday sales. But people in Japan are not built that way. They move quickly through Shinjuku, but don’t shove. They don’t cut each other off. They don’t jockey for position as they queue up for escalators. They’re polite to one another at the turnstiles. It’s downright freakish.

The invisible little devil on my shoulder—who is, I should note, generally balanced out by another devil of roughly similar mass on my other shoulder—whispered in my ear and I started to grin as we headed through the morning crush. I was walking at the side of the lovely Emmy H, and we were talking about the experience of being there, in this surging sea of rapidly moving politeness. So unlike the States, and probably anywhere else.

I noted that even when we drifted briefly out of our flowing river and into a mass of people flowing in the counter direction, we still avoided accidents. “It’s amazing we can get through this crowd without hitting anybody.” Emmy said something about Brownian Motion as I pointed out the seeming impossibility of our little group making such rapid progress moving amid hundreds of thousands of others, all heading in different directions.

“Let’s do an experiment,” I said.

“What kind of experiment?”

“Well, I bet that if you and I move a few steps to our right, directly into the path of the oncoming flow, we won’t run into anybody even if we don’t look where we’re going.”

“How could we do that?”

“Simple,” I said. “We’ll just carry on a conversation and look each other in the eye as we walk, and be completely oblivious to the million other people walking straight at us.” Emmy demurred at first, but the thought had stuck in my mind with little fishhooks and wouldn’t let go. “C’mon, it’ll be fun.” She agreed, under duress. I have an a-hole’s idea of fun, sometimes. Decidedly not Japanese.

Our course set, we waited for the briefest of lulls in the crowd. We started talking animatedly and eased rightward, away from the rest of our companions and directly into the oncoming path of the multitudes, but ignoring everyone except each other in our conversation. The tension was high: it wasn’t easy to keep walking at a brisk rate while failing to look ahead, and we laughed nervously as we talked about nothing at all while assiduously avoiding looking anywhere other than at each other. On and on we walked, maintaining a rapid pace with both our feet and our conversation.

Not once were we stopped, shouted at or denounced by the crowds, the omnipresent loudspeakers or the giant, talking billboards. We never came within more than a few feet of any other traveler. It was like we possessed an invisible force field that radiated out ahead of us in a wedge pattern: the crowd smoothly and seamlessly parted for us without a trace of effort, merging together just behind.

We repeated the experiment over the next day or so, with the same results each time. Ugly Americans, perhaps. But hey! Anyone could get caught up in a conversation, right? It’s only ugly when you know we were pranking. Now, I don’t recommend this behavior in others, of course. It’s just like what they tell you at the National Parks: if everyone took home a pretty, shining rock, pretty soon there’d be none left.

(That was the National Park Service that said that, right? Could have been the time I saw the British Crown Jewels. Anyway, same concept.)

I tried the same trick again in a different train station. Didn’t work. I was in New York, walking through Central Station during the morning commute. In under three seconds, I was shoved to the ground, kneed in the groin and trampled to death while buskers from Trinidad played a rousing funeral march on the steel drums. After a while, someone came and helped themselves to my wallet. In the evening, a recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic in search of the American Dream came with a pressure hose and washed the remaining blood stains into a drain while she whistled a popular merengue from her youth.

My body was never found.

life lessons from a kinder killer

dsbenson — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:30:08 +0000

I’m not a pet person. Pets smell, they never grow up and have their own lives, and if you eat them your family gets really upset. Fish meet one of my personal standards for pets: flushability. We also keep an ancient pile of hair and dander, beneath which you’ll find our arthritic cat. She’s grandmothered in, though, part of the family longer than our kids.

But other pets, no. Dog? Too loud and excitable. Potbellied pig? C’mon. A walking sausage. Fatty but definitely edible. Giant Galapagos tortoise? You can’t keep a pet that will outlive your grandchildren: a giant tortoise keeps you. Hamster? Well, a hamster is a reasonable pet for people who don’t really like pets. I mean, they’re cute, and they’re cuddly, and they die at the drop of a hat. Life span somewhere between a fruit fly and a Saturday Night Live sketch.

When Ben was in kindergarten, and the school kept hamsters, I figured the school sent them home with the children on the weekends just to teach the kids early life lessons. Mortality. The ultimate futility of everything. Stuff kids need to know. “Grandpa could go at any time, just like Harry the Hamster.” But, oddly enough, the kindergarten hamster made it through the first few months of the year. We’d even taken it home ourselves, and it was still breathing and quivering fearfully when we gratefully returned it on Monday morning.

One week later was a milestone in little Ben’s life. In kindergarten, Ben would never ride in anyone else’s car. Separation anxiety. Childhood road rage. But Marci, uncomfortable at the tail end of her pregnancy, got Ben to agree to carpool with a kindergarten friend. How had she worked this magic? Harry the Hamster would be there!

Our friends Barbara and Fred had taken home Harry the Hamster the week after us, and it was now Monday morning. Barbara’s car rolled up in front of our house, Marci walked out holding Ben’s nervous little hand, and Barbara opened the rear door. Whereupon Ben’s kindergarten friend Bradley threw open his arms in welcome and screamed out, “The hamster DIED!!!”

True story. Harry the Hamster’s number was up the very next weekend after we’d taken the little fur-ball home. Thank goodness we weren’t the ones who’d drawn the short straw. I’d still be paying for therapy. The kids in the class were devastated. Enough so that the school decided that a hamster lending library was probably not a good idea.

Soon after the Loss Weekend, Geran was born. Suddenly ex-utero, he spent most of the day drinking, pooping and sleeping. As Marci said, “He takes after his father.” Geran missed the demise of Harry the Hamster, and as a consequence is untroubled by the thought of death. Though, oddly enough, he nevertheless fears furry creatures.

A few weeks after Geran’s birth we were visited by Barbara and Fred, who kindly stopped by to bring us dinner. Their daughter Emily was four; her older brother, Bradley, was in kindergarten with Ben. We had a nice visit, talking and laughing in the living room while the three bigger kids played on the floor behind the couch.

All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, Barbara sat up straight as a lodgepole pine and looked quickly back and forth, head sweeping the living room, her eyes like spotlights at a prison camp. “Where’s EMILY?”

“Huh? She’s behind the couch with…oh. Dunno. She can’t have gone far.”

“Emily? EMILY?” Barbara jumped up in a panic, and her husband followed her with uncharacteristic grimness. I looked at Marci, who shrugged back at me, and we got off the couch.

“I’m sure there’s no trouble,” Marci called out, as Barbara headed for the back hallway. We followed our guests into Geran’s room. No problem: he was sleeping peacefully in his bassinet, little Emily peering at him over the top.

“Emily! Come away from there right now!” Barbara grabbed her daughter by the arm and pulled her out of the baby’s bedroom. Luckily, the noise didn’t wake Geran, who could cry loudly enough to rupture eardrums and shatter Hummel figurines. (As an aside, I consider the shattering of Hummel figurines to be a worthy skill, and since scarcity brings value, suggest eradicating as many as possible.)

“No harm done,” Marci said. “Geran’s fine, he’s sleeping. Emily was only watching him.”

Barbara, still holding firm to her daughter’s arm, just tilted her head downward and cast a meaningful glance at us over the top of her glasses. In a lowered voice, she asked, “Remember the hamster?” Turns out, Harry had not died of natural causes. Unless having sticks shoved up your nose by a four year old is a natural end for a hamster.

That became our rallying cry for some time afterwards. Remember the Hamster!

Psycho Killer,
Qu’est-ce que c’est?

http://www.dsbenson.com

the only roundeyes in the room

dsbenson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:07:27 +0000

We’re a family of cultural chameleons, hopping from ethnic branch to branch and sticking out like an NBA first draft pick at, well, pretty much anywhere. And by the way: if you know me, you realize how painful it was to make a sports analogy just then. I got a little pinprick right behind my left eye. Might be some sort of aneurism; let me go and check it out.

Ok, I’m back. Brain still working? Can I type? Wae feiak lajwoi fdaiw. Just kidding. Where am I? Oh, yes.

A bit o’ the short ‘n’ pithy: We live in a supposed cultural melting pot, but the cultures don’t melt. America is less a cheese fondue than a vinaigrette. Stop shaking the bottle and we all separate.

Case in point: I took Ben on Sunday to a Dim Sum restaurant in South San Francisco. Great big place with “Palace” in the name and terrific Yelp ratings. On the inside, it was opulent, cavernous and lit by incredibly bright and flat fluorescent lights. There were no shadows anywhere, just like Beijing when it’s full of smog (which is, apparently, 100% of the time). Home, crowded home. We had a great meal amid about a thousand other diners, most of whom spoke Chinese, and the rest of whom appeared to be close relatives of people who speak Chinese. We were the only roundeyes in the room. As I said, great meal. You know you’re having good Chinese food when you can’t understand a word anybody says.

Unless you’re at a deaf school. Their Chinese food is lame.

After we left our excellent Dim Sum lunch, we went to the grocery across the street, a good Latin American market full of south of the border awesomeness (that is to say, south of the Canadian border. There’s no shortage of good Mexican food ’round here). There, nearly everyone spoke Spanish. The rest of them appeared to be close relatives of people who speak Spanish. We were the only gringos in the room. This was just across the street, mind you. Plenty of Chinese diners probably needed to pick up some lemons on the way home, but none of them were stopping by the Latin American grocery store. And plenty of Hispanics on Grand Ave, but apparently none of them eat Dim Sum.

To cultural chameleons it happens all the time. Back in Texas B.C. (Before Children) we had yearly season tickets to the TITAS cultural events at SMU. Lots of wonderful concerts, dance events, and the like. Marci and I went to see Tito Puente with my BIL and SIL (Brother-In-Law And Sister-In-Law. Let’s just call them BASIL and be done with it). Anyway, we were at SMU for TITUS in the BC with BASIL. Clear?

Awesome event. I’m so glad I got to see Tito Puente bring down the house while he was still alive. Now that he’s dead, his concerts are nothing to write home about, but back then, man oh man! He had us dancing in the aisles. Couple thousand other people too. But again: we were the only gringos in the room. Hey, what’s up? Tito Puente, Oye Como Va. Who wouldn’t dig that?

A month later, we went on the same concert series to see Sweet Honey In the Rock. Beautiful a capella harmonies, great and soulful. Very spiritual, uplifting, fun. And us? We were the only crackers in the room. Or should I say crackah? Maybe that’s less offensive to, uh, myself. Where were all the otha crackas?

Same concert series: The Klezmatics. Funky Klezmer music. And we were the only Yids in the house. No, just kidding. It was Hebrew Central, one of few times outside the walls of a synagogue where “Hello, Rabbi!” is something you might find yourself saying more than once in an evening. But no African-Americans in sight. And no Hispanics. And no Chinese. Just like there were no Hispanics in sight at Sweet Honey In The Rock, and no black people at Kodo Drummers, and no Asians hearing Buena Vista Social Club because they were all having lunch with us at Lucky Empress Jade Palace.

But here’s the thing: being a social chameleon doesn’t mean squat. Doesn’t mean I’m enlightened in the least. As you can tell. Doesn’t mean I’m racially balanced. Surely not. If I was, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed who was around me in the first place. Maybe I wouldn’t have written this story. Maybe it wouldn’t strike me as odd that almost everyone around me at the symphony was light skinned, and almost everybody at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles was dark skinned. And as an aside, if you’re in L.A., there are few things better than a warm plate of chicken and waffles. I kid you not.

Walk down the streets of San Francisco and you’ll see a bit of everybody. Sometimes quite literally. Hey, fella, put a towel over it! It’s not just economics: everyone goes to see basketball. Even, occasionally, me. Everyone eats (except anorexics. They get eaten). But look for Asians in a Taqueria, or Hispanics eating Dim Sum. Go have Indian food, then look for those same faces at a sushi restaurant.

Life’s too short. Why do we put ourselves in little ghettos for the parts of life that really bring us to life?

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