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oh a package just arrived with a book from sara from beirut via new york… i sit in my rocking chair and smile and let the stories transport me…

around noon i up look at the bright blue sky. somewhere up there is the airplane with a seat reserved for me – i guess i’m considered a “no-show” now. decided not to fly back home. god knows that i would have wanted to be in europe, or in beirut, but not here.

but i feel immobile now, it has been too much. the feeling that “here” starts to slip away – too much of being in between places, jet lagged, not very grounded. i am so used to juggle different places, to travel in between them, to have different relationships with and engagements in them. not sure if i would know how to live well in only one place.

but this time, this place, i’ve hit some kind of limit. it’s the fact of being in a place i don’t really like and therefore being unable to turn it into a good pied-a-terre which makes it so much easier to be mobile. it’s the sheer distance – i should stop pretending california-europe is another version of brussels-utrecht, brussels-luxemburg, brussels-london or brussels-istanbul. it’s the body – that material map of the things one does – getting older. it’s… whatever it is, it’s hitting a limit. a kind of exhaustian which unsettles “here”, not as a particular place, but a disposition of body and mind.

when i look at that blue sky my mouth tightens – god knows how much i would have wanted to be on a plane going east. but i know i need to stay here.

since i got back from Nashville, i’ve been playing the latest Dixie Chicks CD all of the time. in the kitchen (which is where i play my music, leaving the door to my room open). probably driving my housemates nuts. it was time to go to the movie tonight.

maggie had told me the story: the singer Natalie, from Texas, makes a comment about being ashamed that George Bush is from Texas, at a concert in London. weeks later the comments gets picked up in the US, and the ball of a campaign against the Dixie Chicks gets rolling, including a boycott of their music on virtually all of the country music radio stations in the midwest and south.

the movie documents the escalation. the comment at the time when the US is invading Iraq and thousands and thousands of people are on the streets of London. (you’d have to say something when you’re a (country) band from Texas playing those days, no… i remember the beautiful steamy intimate Amparanoia concert in El Meteco at precisely the same time, with Amparanoia saying “nosotros somos de Madrid pero… SOMOS CONTRA LA GUERRA!!! as she was screaming and jumping she lost her balance and fell off the improvised small stage, and in whose arms did she fall… yep, i just had to mention that sweet memory.) the concerted effort to boycott them, through right-wing republican websites calling for people to contact their local radio stations and threaten to withdraw support if they continue to play the Chicks. radio and record stations with big garbage cans outside where people can come to throw their Dixie Chicks’ CDs. people protesting with banners (and American flags) at their concerts. brief pieces of interviews with these people throughout the documentary: against “freedom of speech” which is obviously used in the Dixie Chicks’ defense, one person says something along the lines of: “freedom of speech doesn’t include giving your country a bad name when you’re abroad”.

what happened with the Dixie Chicks is set up in a dramatic way in the documentary. when i report about the movie to my housemates, some are quite shocked (and also quick to make it into something about “those people” in the midwest and south, the bushpeople) and mihui adds that there is something about this government that polarizes people. she tells me once more the painful story about a old school friend who was staying over. they happened to get into a discussion about the president, or mihui happened to make a critical remark about the president, and soon enough the discussion got out of hand. she got emotional, hysterical, mihui says, and ended with a comment about if she doesn’t like what’s going on in the US, that she’d better get on a plane and go back to where she came from (and she didn’t meant LA, where mihui is born). the friend took her bags and checked in a hotel, she didn’t want to sleep at mihui’s place anymore, and they haven’t talked since. her mihui’s point: all through her studies and law school she met many people with political convinctions that differ from her own, but she didn’t have the impression that discussions got so polarized as they do since Bush.

the movie goes through some effort to portray the three women as ordinary white southren country girls: the images from the ranch, the stories of growing up with country music, also the emphasis on (two of) them as mothers. in a sense they are portrayed as more “real”, more representative of the south, than Bush and his companions. which is precisely why the respons is so strong and violent, i guess. one of them says as much in the movie: it’s because we’re the image of the All American Girl. and precisely in that light it’s interesting to see the process they go through of taking a public political position. kind of trown in to it – Natalie is portrayed as a big mouth – but in the fact of nasty reactions they decide to stick together and stand up for peace and for a different kind of patriotism (american flags on the other side). and in the process – narrated in many songs on their latest CD – they have in fact become a different kind of band, more well-known than they would have been and with a whole new spectrum of fans. like me.

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
[…] It turned my whole world around
And I kind of like it…

my favorite scene by far. the activists just managed to make a hole in the iron fence that contains cows in captivity. it’s dark and they’re nervous, looking out for the security or law enforcement that for sure will turn up soon enough. if only there’s enough time for the cows to escape, en masse preferably… (the press release is ready.) but cows don’t run. they’re freightened, they recoil. a concerned activist starts a conversation with a cow: “what’s the matter? don’t you want to be free?”

with mihui and george at the beach
(followed by the discovery of Marianne’s,
the best icecream place in the world…)

yoran doesn’t know where to look first when we pass the Santa Cruz fire department. the fire-fighters see yoran’s eyes and invite us in…

his adventures don’t end. today lotte and wim and the children visit the mystery spot. when he comes back, i ask him what he saw. i try to imagine the concrete things he might have seen, like a crooked house and furniture that doesn’t quite stand straight, and all the other constructions they make to frame the optical illusion.
“so did you see the house, yoran, what did you see?”
he looks a bit disturbed at me, why is she talking about things as trivial as a house, and all the graveness in the world he answers: “no, i saw gravity.”

(and gravity sure on the little boy’s mind. some months ago, wim tells me, yoran’s teacher let a glass slip through her hands. yoran comforts her: “don’t worry, it’s only gravity.”)

imagine: sahar got acupuncture from leta this afternoon.
how california creeps under your skin…

sooner or later all guests have some kind of shock treatment to santa cruz. for sara it was the history of native american genocide, for giulia it was privilege and the obscenity of new age spirituality in its connection to liberalism and capitalism, for sahar it was the cult of paradise sheltered from the rest of the world. or something like that, or all of that. arwen, 6 months old, had acupuncture today.

she needed a pediatrician and leta managed to squeeze us in the lunch-break of the best pediatrician in town, and lotte and i jump in the car to get ourselves to the clinic as fast as we could after leta phoned us saying we should come “now”. only when we arrived at Five Branches it slowly started to sink in that this would not be a western medicine consultation. an impressive short and square chinese lady comes in and establishes a great contact with arwen. looks in her ears for traces of the ear infection and then gives her tuina massage and acupuncture. arwen enjoys, apart from the very last part where she can actually see the needles as they go in her arms and legs. welcome to santa cruz, little one.