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[Venezuala] Caracas
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morgue
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Dec 14, 2005 10:27 PST
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[the surgeon's warning]
My flight from Mexico City to Venezuala connected in Houston.
(Somehow that was the cheapest route.) Climbing aboard the plane in
Houston I found two of the three seats in my section taken by a
middle-aged couple. We smiled at each other as I buckled myself in.
When we were in the air, the gentleman, who was verging on retirement
age if not there already, asked me if I was staying in Caracas or
connecting onward. We had a conversation, of the hesitant
language-limitations kind I've become used to. His name was Miguel,
and he and his wife were from Caracas. He'd been at a medical
conference in Houston. If I had any problems at all in Caracas I was
to give him a call. He pressed his card into my hand - Dr Miguel
Angel Ortega, a cardiovascular surgeon with a scrabble-board's worth
of letters after his name. He asked my hotel's name, I told him, he
said he lived nearby and his nephew would drop me off while taking
them home. This offer was gratefully received, since I was arriving
at the airport past midnight and the taxi ride takes about a
half-hour. (Not to mention the relatively high incidence of crime
against passengers in taxi cabs.)
After a period of silence, he and his wife turned to me and he said
"From your hotel?"
"Yes?"
"Do not go outside at night."
I knew Caracas was a dangerous city, but it wasn't until this
conversation that I gave myself a curfew.
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[frames and lies]
I didn't take any photos in Caracas.
As it happens, it isn't my style to take lots of photos anyway. I
admit to feeling a kind of twisted pride when telling people I spent
three days in Rome, falling in love with the beauty of the city, and
across those three days was moved to take precisely one photo. Which
didn't really come out.
You need to be a bit careful with photos. I've seen people approach
new places solely in terms of photo opportunities, as though the
travel was the uncomfortable and wearying precursor to the true
pleasure of reviewing your photo album from your favourite armchair.
The environment was constantly being resolved into subjects for
photographs, and activities were undertaken more to be recorded than
experienced.
I sometimes see the same tendency in myself. When I have a camera to
hand and in mind, I'm looking for a nice shot. When a moment of
beauty startles me I start to place a frame around it. As a result
the richness of what I am part of is narrowed.
Photos can never really capture something as complex as a place. The
more photos you take, the more elusive it becomes. Framing an
attractive and interesting photograph is fundamentally deceptive,
because of what it excludes; but there is no good way to include the
world around it, the unphotogenic world, that bland biilding next to
the cathedral or the ugly empty lot across the way.
I feel a responsibility to the places I visit. If I'm wandering a city
fraught with dirty streets and struggling people, I can't allow myself
to walk away with only images of the beautiful old buildings and the
one scenic fountain. That wasn't the place I visited. But I don't
have the skill to easily find ways to suggest the complex whole.
Sometimes, it just gets too much, too hard, to photograph a place, and
I give up. I gave up trying to photograph the Day of the Dead in
Patzcuaro, with all its contradictions and troubling ambiguities. And
I gave up trying to photograph Caracas.
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[political gravity]
I booked my flight back to Edinburgh from Venezuala. Stared at a map,
decided it was reachable from Mexico, and booked the flight. Didn't
really think it through. It seemed like an exploration worth
undertaking. A place hard to get to, and interesting, one of the
global centres of political gravity.
Venezuala's President is exploring a new socialism that is aligned
with the global justice movement. He has survived a bald campaign of
internal media opposition (still continuing) and was temporarily
unseated in a coup (likely backed by the CIA). While Hugo Chavez
isn't the clear-cut hero of the Left I would like him to be, he has
been taking concrete actions which provide abundant reason for hope.
All eyes are on the Bolivarian Project in Venezuala. Everyone has an
opinion. (While I was in the US, terrifying "Christian" Pat Robertson
publically advocated the assassination of Chavez.) There's a lot of
smoke and chaff about, and I was keen to set these discussions against
the reality of personal experience.
It was election time. The politics were everywhere. My bare-minimum
Spanish was Mexican, and thus useless here; all I could go on was the
tone of voice in which they called out the name, Chavez. I heard the
name a great deal.
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[a certain way of walking]
Caracas is a large city, sprawling along valleys and creeping up the
shallower hillsides. The clean, busy metro system consists of one
long, straight line, with another long, straight line branching off at
one end at a slight angle. The city is long and thin. A steep
mountainside, thick with foliage, rises hard out of the city so all
the tower blocks are set against green instead of blue. The top of
the mountain was shrouded in a belt of cloud the whole time I was
there. The sky above that, and over the rest of the city, was clear.
The sun was hot.
I didn't really know where I was going. The elongated city had no
obvious central point; I asked the receptionist at the hotel, who gave
me a metro station to start out at. I emerged in a city park that had
seen better days, dull concrete lined with weed-choked grass, and men
sitting in pairs or small groups, talking and watching. The streets
in all directions looked narrow and none of them seemed to lead
anywhere. Wanting to keep moving, I chose the widest street and
started walking.
The streets were lined with vendors and their little stalls, selling
clothing, or spices, or bootleg DVDs and computer games. 'Teach
Yourself English' CDs seemed to be popular. I passed a small crowd
gathering around one vendor who kept up an enthusiastic patter while
demonstrating a juicer. Everything was narrow, and cars choked the
street, and people brushed past close because there was no room to do
anything else.
I saw pickpockets in action in Barcelona. I've been told about how
kids do it in South-East Asia, confusing your sense with lots of
touching in a crowd while they slip out your wallet. In that kind of
crowd I have a way of walking I fall into without thinking about it,
lots of horizontal movement, an exaggerated bounce in my step, my
hands close to my pockets. Combined with being 6'5" and hence out of
reach of shorter arms, it makes me a harder target for pickpockets, or
at least it makes me feel a harder target. Much happier when there
are bodies pushing past me on all sides.
I was walking like that almost the entire time I was in the city
centre. There were always cars and stalls clogging the streets. It
was always crowded. There were always bodies close by.
I had my camera in my pocket. I never took it out. I wasn't finding
the right moment. Pulling a camera would have drawn the attention of
everyone else on the street; there was always an everyone else. And I
never found a view that worked. I kept searching for the right spot
to take the chance, but it didn't come. Just busy roads and
stall-choked pedestrian streets, criss-crossing into each other
endlessly.
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[argument/puppetry]
In one public square there was a puppet show. A wide stage, set at
chest height, about a metre wide, was crowded with puppets. They were
marionettes, their feet fixed to the baseboard. They sagged emptily
waiting for their moment, as a voiceover spoke at length of the
political changes wrought by Chavez' government. At certain points in
this speech, raucous music would take over and two or three of the
puppets would jerk crazily around, illustrating some point that had
just been made - in a far corner, a puppet pumped gas into a large car
while his customer bobbed about, flush with cash. At the left, three
black-clad puppets smashed apart a broadcasting station. Elsewhere a
woman with child lifted her arms to the heavens. The audience watched
with fierce attention, despite the prevalence of political rhetoric
over puppetry. They crowded up to see the hourly shows; pressing in
five or six deep, from the very young to the very old.
Across the square, about thirty men and women were seated on chairs
engaged in a chaired discussion about the political scene. TV cameras
broadcast the whole discussion; it appeared to be a regular fixture. A
crowd of several hundred looked on from all sides, applauding when a
speaker made a good point. Everyone was paying close attention.
Down by the art gallery, a week-long festival was taking place,
apparently organised by the Ministry for Energy (if my translation
skills could be believed). A young, charismatic man introduced a
series of dance and music acts, most of them troupes of women in
traditional costume performing traditional dances. Between acts, he
pumped up the crowd, sometimes improvising songs into the microphone,
other times punching the air, frequently leading the audience in cries
of "Chav-ez! Cha-vez!" The bulk of the audience were men and women
in their late teens or early twenties wearing the red tee-shirts of
the organisers, and they joined in the chanting with huge enthusiasm.
In several places I saw groups of ten or fifteen men and women
standing on street corners, arguing politics together.
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[giant red mug]
There are a number of historic buildings concealed in the thick
streets of Caracas. They have all been painted in flattening colours;
the depths on their frontages look like tricks of the light, a clever
use of paint. They don't look real, especially set against the
use-worn edifices all around them, but resemble architect's models
somehow expanded to full size.
Near downtown Caracas there are two buildings built to the same plan,
each forty storeys high and abundant with reflective glass. They are
both unfinished, appearing like skeletons at the top. A single red
crane towers above the streets, slowly making progress. As I watched
it work it entered my head that the crane was not building the towers
but disassembling them, bringing about their decay piece by piece. I
couldn't shake this perception, and every time I glimpsed the towers I
wondered about it. Caracas is not full of ruined buildings but it has
more than its fair share.
Proceeding downhill along the long main street, the pedestrian can see
ahead a tall building topped with the logo of Nescafe. Nestle is
everywhere in Venezuala, and almost all of the country's convenience
food is manufactured by the company. The Nescafe logo on the top of
this building is about two storeys tall, large enough to be easily
read from the far end of the main street. Visible from even further
away is what sits above the logo on the top of the building: a
gigantic red coffee mug, ten or twelve stories high.
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[latin girls love fashion]
As I walked back towards the hotel, I saw a young woman coming towards
me. Written on her shirt was this message: Latin girls love fashion.
I turned my head to watch her as she passed.
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[more info on Venezuala]
For much much more on the Bolivarian Project, check out this account
by Michael Albert of a visit to Caracas in October:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1598
The Venezuala Analysis site has lots of interesting material and is
recommended, although be aware it is only presenting material from the
leftist/progressive movement. For a wider selection of news and views
check out the portal http://www.venezuelatoday.net/
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