R&K: Have you talked directly with church leaders about this?

NN: No, no, no. We are trying to be smart. The problem of May 17, first of all, was that all Georgia media was presenting the wrong idea, that the protest was going to be a gay pride parade. It wasn’t: it was a silent march in support of the organizations that protect the rights of sexual minorities. But all the press, during ten days beforehand, they were saying gaypride gaypride gaypride.

We are not looking for any scandals. Even in the titles we put on the show, they are not so easily understood as being about transsexuals, for example. It’s not because we want to complicate it. We are spreading the info without making any big stories about what we’re going to do.

We are ready for anything. But if we think too much about it, it will be impossible to continue. And we have to continue. The festival is just days away.

R&K: Tell me about this work on the North Caucasus in the festival.

NN: We have a few traditions for the festival that we try to maintain from the very beginning. One of them is to try to always show something on the Caucasus. It attracts international public, international media and it’s a chance to show more about the region where Georgia is located. Not just the South Caucasus, but the North, because it’s very important for us, historically.

So in the past we’ve had [Thomas] Dworzak on the Kavkaz, and [Stanley] Greene on Chechnya.

We know what is going on around Sochi, how far it is from the glamour place of winter skiing.

It’s also a tradition to show one country through the work of young photographers. It’s a very interesting trick to show a country through photography. This year’s festival starts a few months before the Sochi Olympics, and Sochi was very political from the beginning, especially for us. So we were thinking okay, why not give the place and space to this huge international event? At the same time, we know what is going on around Sochi, how far it is from the glamour place of winter skiing.

It raises the question: does the larger public know that the Winter Olympics will be held in a very complicated region that still has great risks?

The images are also very interesting, because you see for the last four or five years, the North Caucasus is mostly photographed by Russian photographers. So our shows from the North Caucasus are all Russian photographers, except for Andrea Bruce in Ingushetia.

There are new names, like Maria Turchenkova with her Dagestan work, and Maria Plotnikova in Sochi, and Grozny Nine Cities, which is a joint project of three young photojournalists: Olga Kravets, Maria Morina, and Oksana Yushko. We see the Grozny and Chechnya that pretends to be in normal life, but of course, there’s more to the story.

And, because of the Sochi connection, we decided to include the Sochi Project; they will make a presentation.

R&K: There’s also been a change in government in Georgia since the last festival. The government is a major sponsor. Has that hurt the festival?

NN: You know, it’s incredible timing. It was a really hard year. All the people we were partnering with in government changed. The people in City Hall changed, but they are still supporting us. We never deal directly with the government. Nobody ever asked us what we are doing. Nobody touches us. Nobody asks. They know we’re doing things at a very high level.

This year was the hardest one. But we are doing it, and we are convinced that this is the most important one yet.

[Top image by Oksana Yushko from Grozny Nine Cities]

]]> http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/tbilisi-photo-festival/feed/ 1 http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/famo/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=famo http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/famo/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 20:56:32 +0000 Will McGrath http://roadsandkingdoms.com/?p=11247 We are drawn by the pulsing famo beat, drawn from our rondavel in dark of night, down past the turn in the river and the semi-deserted hospital, down toward the grounds of the vacant hotel and into the gutted adjacent building—some defunct abattoir—where all hog-butchering has been laid aside to give the band some space to play. The building is a dusty cinderblock warehouse, windows painted over, walls shedding plaster, the whole place haunted and forbidding.

And there is an honest-to-God famo band napalming the stage—actually, there’s no stage, defunct abattoirs don’t have stages—but the singer is raging and the drummer is raging and the dancers are raging, though not the accordionist or the bassist, because those two stonefaced motherfuckers are motionless, wearing sunglasses, chain-smoking, sitting with their backs to the crowd, and laying down an absolutely dirty line of accordion-bass polyphony.

But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, because I don’t want to skip over the man with the machine gun, and because I want to make sure, first of all, that we know what famo is.

(For the curious: it’s FAH-MOO.)

Famo is the reigning musical genre in the southern African nation of Lesotho—that glorious mountain kingdom, all boulder and canyon, where the scorched-red earth of the foothills soon gives way to wind-blasted basalt and dizzying donkey trails along gorge edge—that tiny peaceful nation tucked unobtrusively within the poison bosom of South Africa.

(For the curious: it’s LEH-SOO-TOO.)

Famo sounds like some African step-cousin of zydeco. The music is filled with plaintive, reedy accordion runs built over a foundation of stuttering bassline (guh-duggah-duhduh-guhduh) and thumping basso kickdrum, then filigreed with bright guitar flourishes and fluttering synthesizer trills. These last two instruments—the guitar and synthesizer—are unnecessarily rococo additions, however. Accordion, bass, and drums are all you need. Layered over this three-piece shuffle-stomp, the vocals take the form of: A) breathless Sesotho raps, the words all fused into one Germanically-constructed superstring, or B) melodic moans that follow along with the accordion line.

It is, perhaps, an acquired taste.

It is always important to be on the same page as the man with the machine gun.

But when there is a live famo band playing in a warehouse that doubles as a slasher film backdrop, then one must go, even when it is late and one is in one’s pajamas and the man at the door is casually shoulder-slung with heavy firepower. Live music is incredibly rare up here in the eastern mountains of Mokhotlong district, where the passes snow over for days and the only way into and out of town is via missionary-flown Piper Cub.

To be precise: the man with the machine gun is not the first person to meet us at the door. The first people we meet at the door are collecting cover for the band and they try to jack up the price. But then, as we haggle, the man with the machine gun comes over and ends the discussion.

We will pay the same price that everyone else did, he says, and not the quoted price, which was double.

“Kea leboha, ntate,” I say, giving him the tripartite Sesotho handshake, because it is always important to be on the same page as the man with the machine gun.

Despite the fact that the warehouse-barn-abattoir is mostly empty—the small numbers in our party have almost doubled the crowd—the band is burning through their set. The singer wails into the mic and flops onto the ground, his lyrics beyond distorted through the blown-out P.A. The drummer bludgeons his kit until a cymbal stand topples over. His bass drum keeps sliding out from under his right foot, metal supports slipping over smooth concrete, even though the drum is held in place with several small boulders. An unsecured cymbal flips off and rolls away after a particularly vicious crash hit and an audience member returns it to him. The accordionist is busy not caring and the bass player is busy not caring, while at the same time slathering his dirty-dirty bassline all over the floor. The dancers—because the presence of a dance team is another famo fundamental—are three men in matching t-shirts, wrapped in traditional woolen Basotho blankets, doing coordinated hop-skips, shoulder-dips, and one-footers, all the while swinging their wooden molamo in beer-dazed ecstasy. These are people deep in their métier.

Here in the warehouse-barn-abattoir, the crowd is deep Basotho. Everyone is in blankets and gumboots, all the dudes are molamo-wielding shepherds, everybody is straight-up country. While the camptown here in Mokhotlong district is quite remote, it is the regional hub and thus modernized to an extent. (Point: there is an ATM in the camptown. Counterpoint: people withdrawing money often arrive on horseback.) The people in the crowd tonight are distinctly non-modernized, though. They are grizzled and backwoods, in from the outer villages where they don’t run power lines. Everybody is staring hard at us, unflinching, just staring.

That is, until my friend Reid gets up to dance.

Any remaining semblances of propriety are hauled into the street and shot at dawn.

When Reid gets up to dance, borrowing my wooden molamo—the intricately decorated shepherd’s cane that was made for me by a Mosotho friend, which I brought along tonight because it is de rigueur to bring one’s molamo to a shindig like this—well, when Reid gets up to dance the people in the crowd are no longer just staring, they are bug-eyed and leg-slapping, hooting and ululating. The crowd is genuinely jaw-dropped that lekhooa is not only dancing, and with a legit molamo no less, but lekhooa actually seems to know the steps.

This is because we practice.

Reid’s dancing cracks open the floor. Any remaining semblances of propriety are hauled into the street and shot at dawn. We are all up here now, these deep Basotho up and around us, doing the hop-skip and the shoulder-dip and the one-footer, doing the scoot-scoot and the double stomp and the clackety-hop. The locals are doing the tooth-whistle and the bird chirp too, since Basotho are—by birthright—the most creative and dexterous of whistlers. This acrobatic whistling is another famo essential, and is beyond the capabilities of any makhooa.

The dancing goes on for some time. At one point I split off from a wild pseudo-conga line and head to the adjoining public bar to grab two quarts of beer to share with our party. While I am waiting to pay, a man sitting at the bar asks me: “Are you a promoter?”

I glance toward the warehouse-barn-abattoir, then back at the man on the stool. I tell him that I am not a promoter, although I am enjoying the band.

He arches an eyebrow. “I think you are a promoter.”

I raise my beers toward him and head back to the music, nodding at the man with the machine gun as I enter. The bottles are passed around, down our row of folding chairs, throughout our group, and then into other rows and off into the night.

One woman brings up dolmas, stuffed leaves (grape, cabbage, anything will do) as a distinctly Azerbaijani food and I mention that I’d encountered them first in other cuisines and had always assumed they originated elsewhere. I’m told that dolma comes from the Turkic verb “to fill up,” and that those countries who try to claim dolmas as their national dish—namely Armenia—don’t even have the decency to change the name to something non-Turkic and can’t justify the Turkic name for the food in their language. I’m told that Armenians are actively trying to usurp Azerbaijani food and culture (the Armenians, I’m informed, have even usurped an entire breed of distinctly Azerbaijani sheep). And they’ve tried to usurp khash as well, claiming that the dish’s very name comes from an Armenian word meaning “to boil.” In their variation, they will eat the dish during any month that contains an “r,” announced with a series of ritual toasts, and mixed with crumbled dry lavash flatbread.

I hear a similar speech just about every other day that I’m in the country, usually whenever food is served and usually in relation to dolmas (apparently the issue of Armenian dolmas popped up on TV recently, so it’s in conversational vogue). The concern about culinary usurpation runs so deep in some parts of the country that, while visiting the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, a region separated from the center of Azerbaijan completely by a 30-plus mile thick strip of Armenia, I’m presented with a thick volume printed by the state entitled Nakhchivan Cuisine, created in an effort to flash-freeze the notion of Azerbaijani cuisine and lend the weight of an encyclopedia to the silent battle to reclaim dishes from Armenia and protect the nation from further culinary theft.

I will sweat this out and it will stink, but I will also be full for a week.

A little over a day after our binge at the dacha, the khash is ready. I reconvene with Leyla’s family just after sunrise and the sleepy family lumbers down around a heavy wooden table. Leyla’s mother brings out bowls of yellow-brown broth with clumps of flesh sloughed off the bone and draped here and there in limp and pocked fragments of stomach. I’m given three small pots of vinegar-pickled garlic, salt, and pepper and told to mix them liberally into the khash. The smell is overwhelming—thick, rich, and greasy—and the vinegar lends it a sharp hint in the back of the nasal passage.

I take a gob of vinegar and garlic and drop it into the bowl. Leyla’s mother frowns, then reaches down and adds a larger dollop. I guess I must look skinny and sickly in the dim morning light, because her father pipes in:

“Khash makes you strong. It warms you up. It’s good for your bones and muscles,” he says. That’s what makes it a natural dish for mountain people. That’s why it’s so attractive to everyone in the Caucasus Mountains—it’s hearty food for hearty people. His reverie trails off into pragmatism: “But it’s high in calories and cholesterol. So you really should only eat it once or twice a year.”

I scoop up a spoonful carefully composed of garlic, head meat, and stomach and slurp it down. The flavor is even more rich than the smell, and rather than an after-taste, I’m left with an ever-taste. The meat sits heavy and the oils and lipids course under my skin—I will sweat this out and it will stink, but I will also be full for a week.

As I swallow and swallow and swallow I begin to understand both the aversion and the attachment to khash. It hits hard and anyone not ready to smell of sheep for a day, to suffer a severe bout of meat sweats, will want to avoid it. But it does just feel right for the Caucasus—it feels like a quintessential meal for the mountains in the winter. It’s a rich food, and a food of memory and belonging. In that sense, I can see how it’s a dish worth the wait, the effort, and the fight.

]]> http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/a-song-of-sheep-face-stew/feed/ 0 http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/wagah-border/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wagah-border http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/wagah-border/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 15:31:15 +0000 Jon Rosen http://roadsandkingdoms.com/?p=11128 I should not have been surprised by the road sign—the green and white aluminum slab that hung across the highway and read Lahore: 30km.

I knew we were close to Pakistan, but the fields of wheat that stretched to the horizon did little to suggest we were approaching a city of ten million people. It was a Saturday afternoon along the Grand Trunk Road from Amritsar and somewhere up ahead, past the cattle pens, cricket pitches, and wedding-goers swarming to Dream Land and Sun Star Palace, there was a border.

This was not just any border, but one whose creation in 1947 had led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, one of the largest mass migrations in human history, and more than six-decades of highly militarized contempt between what today are two nuclear powers. Since 1959, the India-Pakistan crossing at the Punjabi village of Wagah, where I was headed, has also been one of spectacle, famous for a daily ceremony known as Beating the Retreat—a show of inane yet belligerent antics in which goose-stepping Indian and Pakistani border guards, donning fan-shaped tufted hats, spend 45 minutes trying to out-kick, out-stomp, and generally out-perform the others, before lowering their respective flags and closing the border for the evening.

These theatrics have made Wagah a border crossing unlike any other since Checkpoint Charlie: the vast majority of visitors arrive not to stamp passports but to gawk at the line in the sand and its guards. For both countries, it is a 365-day-a-year national ritual, held at what is the only open road crossing along the 1,800-mile border between the two states. Although I had come in part for the entertainment, I also hoped these stomping men in silly hats might teach me something about the long-intractable India-Pakistan conflict.

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by borders? The lines on maps, the arbitrary way in which the earth is sliced for man’s objectives, the feeling you get from crossing that line into some place new—even when that place turns out to be not so different. Growing up, I had always gotten a rush out of crossing into a new US state, even if it just meant walking on an airport runway or convincing my parents to drive across a bridge so I could step for a moment on Illinois or South Carolina soil. Later, as my travels became more global, this fascination had led me to some of the world’s most distinctive border posts. While living in Rwanda, I had once walked a mile along a mud-strewn path between the two official crossings with the Congolese city of Goma—a border at the crux of one of Africa’s longest simmering conflicts that was demarcated by little more than a piece of string and a few sullen troops with AK-47s.

It was a far different experience along the most fortified border in the world, the 160-mile long “Demilitarized Zone” between North and South Korea, which is open to visitors at the Joint Security Area of Panmunjom. There, on a day trip from Seoul, I stood in a border-straddling conference room with a stone-faced, teenaged South Korean conscript, who guarded a door that opened north into the world’s most secretive state. Outside, 50 meters into Kim Jong-un’s North, a lone member of the Korean People’s Army watched us enter and exit the building through binoculars.

How different in Europe, a continent that is busily melting its internal borders. Two years earlier in Belgium, one border I had set off to explore had failed to appear at all. One day, while visiting a girlfriend in the university town Leuven, I decided to run the sixteen miles round trip to the border between the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders and the French-speaking region of Wallonia—a line that effectively divides two nations within a state that has at times appeared on the brink of splitting apart. Having carefully planned my route on Google Maps, I arrived in an hour to the spot where the border should have been—somewhere along a quiet country road between the Flemish village of Sint-Joris Weert and the Wallonian village of Nethen. Lacking GPS to confirm my location, with no visible border crossing in sight, I approached the only other pedestrian, clearly a local, and asked whether we were in Flanders or Wallonia.

“J’sais pas,” he said in French, seemingly perplexed as to why I cared. “Wallonia is that way,” he pointed ahead. “Flanders is back where you came from.”

This same Line of Control is, in sections, a skiable border. Or at least, it’s surprisingly alpine. My first day in Srinagar, where I began my month-long trip to India, a friend and I spent an afternoon with a young shikara boatman, gliding on Dal Lake though reflections of Himalayan peaks. The second day, we headed to the ski resort of Gulmarg, in the Pir Panjal mountains to the west of the Kashmir Valley. Gulmarg is just a few miles from the Line of Control, and if it wasn’t just a week after the January skirmishes, and if I hadn’t been flopping around in the knee-deep powder to begin with, I would have contemplated skiing the backcountry to get there. Instead I thought I could just return to the hotel and look at a map, simply to relish how close we’d made it to the de-facto border. Yet when I loaded Google Maps, the dotted Line of Control I had seen back home was gone. As I would later learn, Indian law prohibits the publication of maps that are not in “conformity” with the official Survey of India, including those that fail to represent India’s claim to all of Kashmir. Although I could see plenty of Pakistan from the ski slopes—including the 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest mountain— my border fix would have to wait for Wagah.

That day would come two weeks later, after a flight to Delhi and a bus trip north to the Punjabi city of Jalandhar, where I had stopped for a few days to visit a friend. There, on a Saturday morning in early February, I stood under a dusty highway exit ramp, breathing the fumes of India’s industrialization, and waited for a bus to Amritsar. The city is the spiritual center of the Sikh religion, and India’s closest to the Wagah crossing. Arriving 90 minutes later, I hopped a rickshaw to the colonial-era Grand Hotel, where I booked a ride to the Wagah ceremony for later in the afternoon. I spent the next few hours exploring the town, passing by the Harmandir Sahib, home to the holy scripture of Sikhism and better known as the Golden Temple, and the Jallianwala Bagh public garden, site of one of the darkest moments in Punjabi history. Here on an April afternoon in 1919, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered 50 British Indian Army riflemen to shoot at a peaceful civilian gathering in an event that would shock both the British government and leaders of the Indian resistance movement. With all entrances to the garden blocked, Dyer’s troops fired on the protesters for a full ten minutes— including women, children, and the elderly— spending 1,650 rounds and stopping only when ammunition was nearly exhausted. According to the Indian National Congress, the number of dead approached 1,000.

I returned to the Grand Hotel, hopped in a van with a group of Western travelers, and headed west, past the wedding goers and wheat fields, toward Pakistan. Twenty minutes later, not long after passing the Lahore road sign, our diver pulled over and parked in a field, as we alighted to a swarm of vendors hawking popcorn, chaat, and plastic Indian flags, much like the atmosphere outside of a stadium. Twenty rupee flag in hand, I walked toward the border with a stream of Indian and foreign spectators, arriving at a concrete grandstand as a festively plumed member of India’s Border Security Force (BSF) checked my passport. As a foreigner, I was assigned to the VIP section—somewhat closer to the action, yet far less raucous than the already brimming grandstand, which came to life as flag-bearing men in track-suits initiated the wave, and the high-wattage speakers unleashed a flurry of popular Hindi film songs including the Slumdog Millionaire hit Jai Ho. Glancing at the crowd, my eyes fixed on an artist’s rendition of Gandhi, painted in traditional white shawl, that was perched atop an archway that spanned the two-lane highway. A hundred meters away, across an iron fence in Pakistan, a stern-looking Jinnah, depicted in trademark Karakul hat, stared back.

What followed was a spectacle much like I had imagined. For 45 minutes, the stretch of road in front of me became a theater for all manners of stomps, kicks, steps, thrusts and marches. There were ordered salutes, peacock-like struts and seemingly crotch-defying knee-to-nose maneuvers, made all the more impressive by the advanced age (many appeared to be in their forties) of the BSF performers. Although the two sides agreed in 2010 to tone down some offensive gestures, including “thumb showing” and “staring,” the expressions of the guards were as stern as those I had witnessed at Korea’s Panmunjom, and the posturing of both India’s khaki-clad BSF and Pakistan’s black-clad Sutlej Rangers suggested something more odious than high-stepping pageantry. The only significant difference between the two sides appeared to be the role of women. In Pakistan, the performers are all male and female spectators sit separately in the grandstand. In India, seating is integrated and, since 2010, women have been part of the performance. However, as one BSF officer told local media in 2010, they are only allowed to continue the “very hard job” if they “feel comfortable and don’t receive any injury.”

At Wagah, though, the crowds are as much a part of the show as the troops. For the thousands on the Indian side, the patriotism was a living, firebreathing thing. Young and old from all religions, castes, ethnicities and walks of life meshed to create a frenzy unmatched by even the most high-stakes events in sport while launching into regular chants of Hindustan Zindabad, or “Hail India.” Although the Pakistani crowd was smaller, shouts of Pakistan Zindabad and the occasional Allah-o-Akbar taunted from underneath the green and white crescent moon flag across the border. The fervor reached a crescendo as both sides inched closer to the barrier, stomping more ferociously in one final bout of pent-up machismo before pausing for a bugle-accompanied lowering of both flags, the briefest of handshakes, and the slamming of the two gates.

When it was over, many in the crowd rushed onto the road to meet the performers, while others milled about, discussing the merits of a spectacle that, despite the overt belligerence, was clearly better than the Line of Control-style alternative.

“You don’t have your borders as bad as this?” one spectator— an auto parts dealer from the southern state of Tamil Nadu— joked as we walked back to our vehicles.

“We do some drama out here,” he smiled. “But we like it this way. At least at this level where they meet each other every day, you don’t expect them to start taking a gun and shooting at each other. As long as it stops with this, let’s all be happy.”

Back at the Grand Hotel in Amritsar, over Kingfisher beers and Punjabi butter chicken, I tried to make sense of the bizarre intensity of the scene I had witnessed. What was it about this rivalry—between entities divided by such an arbitrary line—that elicited such passion? I kept returning to the portraits of Gandhi and Jinnah, icons of the independence struggle, which gazed over the Wagah crowd like fathers watching over their children. Perhaps it was something about these men—and their visions for India and Pakistan—that was behind this show of patriotism.

Yet something about this reasoning did not seem right. Where, after all, was Gandhi’s India of agrarian self-sufficiency in today’s emerging industrial powerhouse? Where was Jinnah’s secular Pakistan in a country where security forces mingle with jihadists and political elites trade accusations of Islamic impurity?

“The irony is that those are jest images,” Johns Hopkins’ Anderson told me a few weeks later. “Jinnah’s views and Gandhi’s views have almost been forgotten in both countries. Gandhian philosophy and Gandhian economics have no following. Jinnah’s views of secularism in Pakistan have remarkably little following, either. Jinnah was a person who barely could speak Urdu, who drank, who ate pork, never went to a mosque, was probably an agnostic at best… he would be horrified with what he would see today in Pakistan.”

What if the two sides needed this conflict for the sake of building nations?

If the fervor were not about these icons, then, what if it were about something even simpler? What if Pakistan’s “negative identity,”—its birth as a response to “Brahman chauvinism and arrogance,” as Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s second president, wrote in his autobiography—gave ordinary Pakistanis a raison d’être, a source of pride? And what if Indians, despite India’s stronger basis of national integration, also needed Pakistan, that ever present thorn in India’s side, to fully embrace their Indian identity? Maybe, despite the bloody legacy of partition, the history of atrocities in Kashmir, the attacks by Pakistan-supported militants and counter-abuses by the Indian army, the two sides needed this conflict for the sake of building nations, for the sake of forging unity. And maybe, throughout this whole process, these entities divided by a highly artificial border had somehow come to justify that division; to bring the Radcliffe line to life, to give the Wagah crossing its meaning.

I washed down my second Kingfisher and passed through the hotel lobby on my way out to catch the night’s last train to Jalandhar. There, I paused to chat with Kuldeep Singh, a Grand Hotel employee who’d given me a primer on the ceremony that day and was eager to hear what I had thought of it. As we talked, I asked Singh—who told me he’d been to Wagah 30 times—if he had any reliable attendance estimates.

“Yes sir,” he replied, grabbing a pen to jot the numbers in my notebook. “The Indian side averages 25,000 spectators each day. Pakistan normally gets 200 or 300.”

Laughing, I almost began to argue. Sure, the Indian crowd I had seen was substantially larger than Pakistan’s. Perhaps by a factor of five. But certainly not a factor of 100.

But then I realized, this wasn’t about the facts. Forging a nation from arbitrary lines on a map requires more than that: both an embrace of the collective ‘us’ and a rejection of the collective ‘them’ that necessitates the bending of truth, be it exaggerating a few numbers, or celebrating historical icons, even if their views have largely been forgotten.

So instead of arguing over his figures, instead of telling him I felt the whole ceremony was a tad on the silly side, that I had actually been more affected by the no-nonsense, goose-step free glowering of Korea’s Panmunjom, I played along.

“You’re right,” I said. “The Indian side was crazy. I still cannot believe how high those guards could kick.”

Singh smiled.

“But what’s the deal with those Pakistanis?” I continued. “Man, their side was empty. Don’t they love their country?”

]]> http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/wagah-border/feed/ 1 http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/in-prison-in-pictures/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-prison-in-pictures http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/in-prison-in-pictures/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 11:59:24 +0000 Pauline Eiferman http://roadsandkingdoms.com/?p=10741 Ask Michal Chelbin what surprised her the most when entering Ukrainian and Russian prisons and she’ll tell you it was the wallpaper. Those walls, coated with blooming flowers, ocean views and grassy meadows, were the inspiration behind the name of her latest series, “Sailboats and Swans.” Over four years, the Israeli photographer shot portraits of the residents of seven prisons, sitting at times several hours with one subject. A monograph published by Twin Palms earlier this year features 62 of her images, all taken with Chelbin’s signature Hasselblad 503. At times inscrutable, always honest, the portraits immediately make you question the rather faceless word inmate: here, what you see is a person first—and that person is looking straight at you. With a body of work that explores contrast in all its shapes—the old and the new, the innocent and the perverse, the familiar and the strange—Chelbin often finds her characters and stories in the depths of Ukraine and Russia. She joined me for a Skype interview from a small Israeli village between Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Roads & Kingdoms: How did “Sailboats and Swans” come about?

Michal Chelbin: It started when I was traveling in Ukraine for a different project several years ago—a monograph entitled “The Black Eye,” which was a series of portraits of wrestlers. We passed along a prison wall, and when I realized it was a prison, I wanted to get inside. Everyone said it would be impossible but I started making some inquiries and eventually got access.

Inside it’s still a boy’s prison, which is really hell on earth.

R&K: Can you tell me more about your relationship with Ukraine? When did you go for the first time and what attracts you to the country?

MC: It’s not just Ukraine, it’s Russia as well. It started in the late 90s when I was still a student and all my models were people who came to Israel in the big immigration waves from the former USSR. So the natural thing was to travel there. I went to Russia in 2003, and since then visited Russia and Ukraine several times. What I like about these countries is the mix between old and new, between the modern, the sophisticated and the classical, the rundown. The faces are great, and the light, and the backgrounds… It’s just a great setup for me.

R&K: Yes I had the same visual experience when traveling to Ukraine to find my grandfather’s birthplace…

MC: My father was born in Ukraine during World War 2, in a small town close to Rovno. Back then it was still Poland. Him and my grandfather fled west during the war.

R&K: So we’re almost connected! But back to the prisoners: describe the process in getting access. How easy was it to actually get inside and meet these people?

MC: It was very difficult to get access, and please understand if I cannot elaborate on this issue. Once inside, they usually assigned an officer to us, and spent the first few hours walking around, scouting and casting. And then we started to shoot. We were able to approach almost everyone we found interesting.

Election years seem to bring out the worst in Ahmadi torment. In 2013, as in 2002 and 2008, there has been a special voter list designed to segregate the group from the rest of the population. To register on their list, Ahmadis would have to renounce any association with the Prophet Muhammed and, ominously, give their home address. The Ahmadis, who are such pariahs that their neighborhoods and villages have been untouched by campaigning anyway, had no choice but to announce an official boycott of the election.

But let’s get back to Shezan All Pure Mango drink. It is juicy, pulpy perfection, best when chilled, evoking a tropical abundance that is one of the best sides of Pakistan. But the drink itself is a lightning rod for anti-Ahmadi sentiment across the country.

Shezan the company is now a public company, and Ahmadis only make up 25% of the workforce, but it’s an easy target any time anti-Ahmadi feelings surge in Pakistan. “Whenever there is a campaign against the Ahmadi community, the Shezan company is the first victim,” said the company’s Marketing Director, Waseem Mahmood, in an interview with The Independent last year in which he said his salespeople had been beaten while on sales calls.

Last year, as part of a national anti-Ahmadi campaign, the Lahore Bar Association banned the sale of Shezan juices and soft drinks in the subordinate courts. Approximately a hundred lawyers supported the decision. Stickers displaying warning messages were slapped onto the canteen walls, cautioning lawyers from buying and consuming Ahmadi products.

She had a recurring dream that she blocked the bullet that took her father’s life.

Unfortunately the persecution goes well beyond fruit drinks and condiments. In 2012, over a hundred graves were desecrated by unidentified men at an Ahmadi graveyard in Lahore. Tombstones were smashed and broken, while the graveyard’s caretakers were roughed up after being told that the Ahmadis were “infidels” and that Islamic inscriptions were not to be written on the tombstones of their dead.

In May of 2010, a college friend of mine (sweet girl, long hair, with a gentle, almost maternal way about her) had her father caught up in anti-Ahmadi terrorist attacks in Lahore. On a Friday afternoon in broad daylight, assailants stormed two Ahmadi mosques in the city, throwing grenades and shooting everyone they saw. Her father, in the Darul Zikar mosque, scrambled for refuge. He had been shot in the left foot, but was able to call his wife. He told her to remain calm, but just then his wife heard a series of gunshots on the other end of the line. The line went dead. He was one of approximately 94 Ahmadis who were killed that day. My friend had a recurring dream afterwards that she had been there, that she had been able to block the bullet that took her father’s life with her own body.

[Waiter at Shezan in Fortress Stadium. Photo by: Saad Sarfraz Sheikh]

It wasn’t supposed to be like this: In his address to the Constituent Assembly in 1947, the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, said: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has got nothing to do with the business of the state… We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.”

Jinnah was a worldly visionary. A just, fair man who believed in the basic human rights of his people; in the equality of men, in impartiality, in objectivity, in his hopes for Pakistan to be a secular nation after independence. Some of Jinnah’s closest friends were minorities: Foreign Minister, Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, was an Ahmadi; the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Alvin Robert Cornelius, belonged to the Catholic Church; Law Minister Jogendra Nath Mandal was a Hindu. In fact, Jinnah’s second wife was a Parsi.

Unfortunately, Jinnah’s Pakistan now stands as a fragmented, disjointed version of itself, marred by ethnic and religious divides, never more so than during its own elections.

At the beginning of the 1990s, a group of scientists from the Institute travelled to Ethiopia and brought back one hundred chimpanzees. They released them along with other monkeys from the Institute into a forest near Tumisi, a short drive from Sukhumi, to study them in a natural habitat. The area, a semitropical landscape of dense hills and valleys, is sealed off on all sides by a river. The monkeys quickly multiplied to five hundred and became, for a short while, something of a local menace. They stole mandarins from nearby properties. So did local militant groups, whose presence in the area was intensifying.

The first year of the Abkhaz-Georgian war, 1993, was said to be unusually cold. Temperatures dropped as low as -7 degrees Celsius. Crossing the Kodori Gorge, Georgian refugees followed cattle tracks in the snow. Many of them died of exposure. In Sukhumi, Abkhaz separatists had taken over parts of the Institute and used the buildings for storage and shelter—relics of their presence are scattered over the grounds to this day. The monkeys in captivity were severely affected. They began to shed hair, developed neurosis and died in numbers as high as fifty a day. During the war, employees of the Institute would risk their lives to bring food for the starving monkeys from their homes in the city.

“When the war ended,” Dr. Barkaya said, “we were left with a unique research opportunity: to study the effects of war and post-traumatic stress disorder on apes. No one had ever had an opportunity to conduct this kind of research.” They found that chimp mothers would grieve as much for their killed children as human mothers do. In some cases, the effects of the bombings and incessant shooting were more pronounced on monkeys than they were on people. Unlike us, Dr. Barkaya said, they couldn’t understand what was happening.

While the war fed new research subjects to an ailing institution, all attempts at finding the monkey colony failed. There were no remains, no bones. “It’s as if they vanished,” Dr. Mikbabia said. Some have suggested that retreating Georgian soldiers had taken the monkeys as trophies, or that they were shipped across the Black Sea and sold to businessmen in Sochi, where, incidentally, a rival research institute is based. In any case, efforts to find the colony are underfunded and the search has become a symbol of the institute’s—and Abkhazia’s—futile attempts at reclaiming a past that had disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Ivanov was summarily convicted of counterrevolutionary activity.

Like many a protégé of Stalinist ambitions, Ivanov heard a knock on his door one night in 1930. It was the secret police. They arrested him and drove him to a police station or prison, where he would have been interrogated. Ivanov was summarily convicted of counterrevolutionary activity and sentenced to exile in Kazakhstan. He died two years later, of a stroke, on the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

That same year, the Bolshoi commissioned an opera to celebrate the anniversary. Librettists Alexei Tolstoy and Alexander Starchakov teamed up with composer Dmitri Shostakovich to write “Orango”. In the then-unpublished opera, a French biologist inseminates a female chimp with human sperm. A Paris-based journalist discovers the project, and his article creates widespread uproar. But the biologist continues his work. One day, he learns that his chimp had given birth to a human child. Orango, the product of the fertilisation, grows up as and finds work in the newspaper that first exposed the experiments. He rises up the ranks, and eventually takes charge. His new position gives him considerable political and social influence. But his fierce anti-Communist views estrange him from society and the woman he loves, the biologist’s daughter—like her father, she had become a staunch Communist. Orango marries a Russian woman in Paris. But as his hatred for the working classes grows, he begins to regress into ape form. In his increasing isolation, he turns to the Catholic church, but is rejected by the Pope. At the end of the play, Orango’s metamorphosis into ape is complete, and his wife sells him to the circus. We see him one final time, caged and despondent, just before the curtains close.

]]> http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/a-dream-of-soviet-ape-men/feed/ 4 http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/fahsa-yemens-stew-at-war-and-at-peace/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fahsa-yemens-stew-at-war-and-at-peace http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/fahsa-yemens-stew-at-war-and-at-peace/#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 17:10:24 +0000 Adam Baron http://roadsandkingdoms.com/?p=10652 At first glance, the average fahsa restaurant looks more like a venue for metallurgy than, well, cooking. Kitchen staff stand perched above heroically oversized metal pots; propane flames spit out from underneath the cauldrons. But the danger is more imagined than real: these men are professionals. Prep work starts at dawn—fahsa must be served fresh—but the real action starts around noon, the start of the Yemeni lunch hour.

You could call fahsa a stew, but such a simple descriptor belies the complicated nature of the dish. That’s not to say its charms are obvious from looks alone. It is a thick, brownish-red, meat-studded broth served scalding hot, covered in green foam, in a flame-blackened pot. It does not seduce the eye. But the taste silences all critics.

The popular narrative is that fahsa began in the days when the Yemeni highlands were part of the Ottoman Empire, as way of stewing kitchen scraps, donations and leftovers at poor houses. In the centuries since, the stew has slowly transcended its lowly beginnings—the addition of a generous portion of meat distinguishes fahsa from salta, the more direct descendant of the beggars’ broths of the past. Both dishes are ubiquitous in Sanaa now, beloved by rich and poor alike.

Fahsa began in the days when the Yemeni highlands were part of the Ottoman Empire

Like many aspects of Yemeni culture, eating fahsa tends to be an intensely communal experience. The stew is dropped in the middle of a table, accompanied by extra maraq (broth), sahawaq (the local tomato-based salsa analogue), helba (fenugreek foam) and a basket of flat bread or khadam (a sort of sourdough roll). What follows is driven more by instinct than by decorum. Someone will drop in more maraq; someone else will add the helba prior to breaking the seal with a chunk of bread. At its best, the spread is like a perfectly constructed work of art, each element complementing the other. The helba cools the heat, the meat provides depth and the bread provides a means of delivery—though, it’s worth noting, Yemeni bread is often an attraction in and of itself. The eating process isn’t particularly elegant: everyone’s going after the same food in the same pot. But even if you end up elbowing the guy to your right, no one will take offense. The food is delicious and anyway, in Yemen, you’re almost always among friends.

Fahsa has been a recurring presence during my two years in Yemen. Filling and warm, it’s classic comfort food—whether in times of war or peace. At lunch with tribal fighters during Sanaa’s Hasaba War of May 2011, there was something deeply soothing about breaking bread and devouring the meaty stew as the neighborhood around me dipped in and out of chaos. During the heady days of the Yemeni revolution, post-demonstration fahsa lunches with activists seemed like a perfect fit as well, providing vital nourishment as tens of thousands of Yemenis peacefully gathered to call for a better future.

We would often head to al-Faqih, a sprawling, multi-roomed restaurant packed tight with hungry Yemenis. There are other items on the menu, but we always order a fahsa and a salta. Al-Faqih’s salta, which combines Yemeni kebabs (roughly equivalent to Syro-Lebanese kofta) with a potato-grounded stew—has left me with a sort of Pavlovian salivation-trigger every time I see the restaurant’s orange awnings. I once believed al-Faqih served the best fahsa in Sanaa, but a few months ago, I began to wonder if I wasn’t wrong about that, if there wasn’t a better version of it somewhere in the city. I set out on a culinary exploration, following any and all leads. Neighbors and cab drivers kept sending me back to the fahsa places by a market a few minutes from my house, which spans the margin between the edge of Sanaa’s old city and one of the city’s busiest streets. They’re all similarly atmospheric—a cacophony of packed metal tables filling the ground floor of centuries old tower houses—and, ultimately, I came to the conclusion that they all fell into the same quality: good, but not great.

An American friend who refers to al-Faqih as the “truckstop”—out of reverence or derision depending on his mood—took me to a different place near his house that he dubbed the best in Sanaa. First impressions lowered expectations—it’s housed in a shed and the tables and chairs are nearly falling apart—but the curious interjections of English-speaking Yemenis who overheard our conversations suggested that the restaurant was drawing members of the country’s educated classes. The fahsa was good, with a near-perfect balance of spices, but it was still distinctly inferior to al-Faqih’s version.

At lunch with a Yemeni friend, the son of a former minister who I frequently consult for both culinary and political analysis, at al-Faqih, I finally felt moved to ask whether this was as good as it gets. It wasn’t, he said, but he was coy about who the real champion might be. The whole thing slipped from my mind until he gave me a call a few weeks later.

Walking through a khat souq to a nameless restaurant fronted by a large chicken rotisserie, I wasn’t sure what to expect. From the outside, it looked no different than the thousands of other fahsa places in the city. But the pride emanating from the waitstaff as they dropped off our food suggested this place was different. In my subsequent, nearly weekly, visits, they’ve been pleased to see me, but they’ve never seemed particularly surprised; both the content grin that accompanies the kitchen boss’ wave and the satisfied smile in the framed portrait of the owner, who hails from a rural area outside of Sanaa, come off as sly acknowledgements of their daily triumph.

I always order a kamil, a four-part meditation on food served in flame-blackened clay pots that will usually feed two friends and me. There’s the classic fahsa, plus one dish that’s basically lightly seasoned chunks of meat, an okra stew, and another dish that combines tiny chunks of tomatoes and ground beef. Shared stocks and spices tie them all together, though the fahsa, with its perfect broth, subtle zing, and tender, stringy beef is the star. I’ve run into plenty of Yemenis elites in subsequent visits—they tend to frequent the private rooms—but, still, by and large, the clientele is a perfect cross section of Yemeni society, little different than the mix of office workers, tradesmen and hungry students that tend to be found at any other fahsa place. I feel as if I and other regulars form some privileged grouping. Despite its transcendent food, the place is relatively unknown; selfishly, I can only hope it stays that way.

When I told a Yemeni friend that I had found the best fahsa in Sanaa, he asked me if I meant al-Faqih. No, I told him. “You will never look at al-Faqih the same way,” I said. “I’m taking you, and if you don’t agree with me, I’m deleting your number from my phone.”

We had lunch together with another friend a few days later; I took no small pride in the fact that both agreed that it was better than al-Faqih. Lingering afterwards as waitstaff cleared the empty clay pots off the concrete table, I had rarely felt so satisfied. I had just gorged myself on excellent food, in addition to succeeding in completely reordering two Yemenis’ conceptions of where to eat their national dish. Finishing our traditional Yemeni meal and readying ourselves for a traditional Yemeni afternoon spent chewing khat, it was clear to me: fahsa epitomizes everything I love about this country. Its humble beginnings reflect Yemeni ingenuity; its unremarkable appearance hints at the unexpected, yet intoxicating, charm of a country often maligned as a terrorist-infested “failed state.” The way it is consumed embodies the general attitude towards personal relationships here—there’s something great about having friends who you can feel completely at ease with, even as you’re crammed in uncomfortable seating angling for the same steaming pot of food. This is true meaning of comfort food: fahsa, for me, means comfort with yourself, with your friends, and most of all, with your adopted country.

[All photos from Jabar's fahsa shop in Sanaa by Rachael Strecher. See more on Josh Berer's site]

]]> http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/fahsa-yemens-stew-at-war-and-at-peace/feed/ 0 http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/the-biggest-week-in-bourbontown/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-biggest-week-in-bourbontown http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/the-biggest-week-in-bourbontown/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 16:32:55 +0000 Michael Lindenberger http://roadsandkingdoms.com/?p=10463 When the editors of the brand new Sports Illustrated cobbled together the money to pay William Faulkner to come to Louisville to write about the mad scene leading up to the 1955 Kentucky Derby, they had but one real concern: How to keep the famously thirsty Southern writer away from the city’s equally well known, and forgiving, attitude toward bourbon drinking long enough to keep him writing. They needn’t have worried. Faulkner was on a roll. On the day he arrived, Tuesday of Derby Week, he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and by the end of the week had produced, in daily chunks of 300 words each, one of the most famous pieces of sports journalism of the last century.

I am not going to promise that you will have that same kind of luck this week should you decide to join me in Louisville for the horserace, which will go off again on Saturday in front of 165,000 or so whiskey-drunk gamblers and maybe 15 million Americans watching from the safety of their living rooms. But as the Lotto hucksters keep telling us, you can’t win if you don’t play – and there’s never been a better place to be on the first Saturday of May than in Louisville, Ky., when the bugler calls the horses to post and the lonesome notes of Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home wash over the more or less awe-struck, already hopped-up crowd beneath the white twinned spires of Churchill Downs.

By the end of that week in 1955, Faulkner had understood just that. He was, after all, a man who knew something about the power of place, of history—and of that brown liquor called bourbon that snakes through the story of Louisville like the muddy river on whose banks it was founded.

The race was already old in 1955, having been run year after year since 10 years after the slaves were freed, long enough then to count as a permanent fixture on the spring social calendar in all the right places in the South, but not yet so venerable a fact of life that very old folks couldn’t remember a time without a Derby.

But that didn’t limit Faulkner’s imagination.

“This saw Boone:” the piece began, “the bluegrass, the virgin land rolling westward wave by dense wave from the Allegheny gaps, unmarked then, teeming with deer and buffalo about the salt licks and the limestone springs whose water in time would make the fine bourbon whiskey; and the wild men too—the red men and the white ones too who had to be a little wild also to endure and survive and so mark the wilderness with the proofs of their tough survival—Boonesborough, Owenstown, Harrod’s and Harbuck’s Stations; Kentucky: the dark and bloody ground.”

It was the mighty Ohio that gave Louisville its first purpose and which still lends it a beauty that landlocked cities must envy. The Iroquois called it Oyo, which means the great river, and the Frenchman René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, one of the first Europeans to see it, recorded it on his 1669 map as, simply, ‘la Belle Riviere,” or the beautiful river.

Slaves and abolitionists would come to know it by another name, however: the River Jordan, in a nod to the freedom that lay just on the other side from Louisville.

Any discussion of Derby City has to acknowledge that it’s a place that generations of slaves sought to slip past, to avoid at all costs, to flee from. If they were caught, whether at the river or deep in the north, they were often dragged back in chains and sold at auction on street-corners in downtown Louisville. Kentucky may have sided with the Union, but it was a slave state. As my family was in this town from the beginning, slavery was part of their story too. Last year, deep in the archives at the massive genealogical library maintained by the Mormons in Salt Lake City, I discovered the 1810 Census form for Capt. Patten. There, in faded black marks, was incontestable proof that five years before he died in the house overlooking the Falls of the Ohio, he was a slave owner. Among the oldest legal records in Louisville is a death sentence recorded for a slave named Tom, for the crime of stealing less than three yards of fine Cambric linen from that same ancestor of mine, Patten.

Those things aren’t easy to learn, and harder yet to square on a week like Derby week, where Louisville tries to turn its traditions into an unalloyed, glorious good time. But blacks have been part of the Derby from the beginning, sometimes in unexpected ways. When Meriwether Lewis Clark’s year-old track hosted the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, in front of some 10,000 fans, thirteen of 14 starters in the Derby were ridden by black jockeys, including the winning rider aboard Aristides. Black jockeys won many of the first 25 Derbies, but have long since dropped out. There hasn’t been a black winner since 1902.

For 15 years, Chicago filmmaker Barbara Allen traveled to Louisville to meet friends from all over the world and party the weekend of the Derby. Her memories of the city and the race remain fond, she told me, three years after she was here last. “I still love the Derby.”

But she also recalled that faces like hers, black faces, were rare at the white parties that so define the public image of Louisville during Derby Week—at least they were rare among the guests.

“There seems to be two Derby celebrations: One white, where the blacks work and pick up extra cash catering,” she said. “And another, distinctly black, with family gatherings and reunions, neighborhood parties and clubs open all night. Unfortunately, the black parties always got harassed by the police, but we’d have a good time anyway.”

Muhammad Ali bent forward and I leaned in to hear. “This isn’t my home,” he said

Many black voices in Louisville say the harassment, or at least heavy watchfulness, of the police has remained a fixture over Derby weekend. In 2006, the then-mayor Louisville announced that the city would no longer permit ‘cruising’ on Broadway, the main east-west drag downtown. The year before someone had been shot, and 400 police had since been assigned to monitor the impromptu gatherings that took place along West Broadway in historically black west Louisville.

In recent years, with the cruising officially banned, police by the hundreds monitor the west Louisville’s main drags throughout Derby weekend. With tens of thousands of mostly white residents crowded bars all over the rest of town, that has left some sour taste for some in the west end.

Still, the parties continue in other ways. Families gather by the hundreds in Shawnee Park and elsewhere to party on Derby Day, and there doesn’t seem to be any less fun even if the menu has fried bologna instead of the garlic-crusted prime rib with Henry Baines sauce served by the uniformed waiters on the fourth- and sixth-floor seats known as Millionaire’s Row at Churchill Downs.

It raises the question of whether the Derby truly belongs to all Louisvillians. A story: Years ago, I was on assignment for Reuters, prowling Millionaire’s Row in between races. In walked Muhammad Ali, shuffling slowly across the room.

He might as well have been walking on water, for all I cared. He has always been, and always will be, the first citizen of the city of Louisville, even if some few of its older residents have never stopped seeing him as a draft dodger.

I approached Ali gingerly, his face a mask. “Welcome home, champ,” I said. “How does it feel to be back home?”

He bent forward and I leaned in to hear. “This isn’t my home,” he said in a barely audible whisper.

The words startled me and I looked up at his face. His expression never changed and in a moment he was shuffling by.

I’ve thought about that ever since, and wondered what he really meant. I still wonder, but it’s hard to say. Legend says he tossed his gold medal from Rome into the same river James Patten used to trawl as a pilot. But then, Ali has never stopped bragging about Louisville, either, and images of him showing off the pink Cadillac he bought his parents the day he turned pro aren’t easy to forget. He bought the car with the $10,000 signing bonus he received from the syndicate of 11 wealthy, white businessmen, led incidentally by an executive of the Brown Forman distillery.

Ali bought a home in Louisville in 2007 and talked about moving back for a while. He still might.

And this year, against all hope, one of the leading contenders for the Derby is a horse named Goldencents that will be ridden by Kevin Krigger, a 110-pound jockey who is the first black rider in the Derby since 2000.

How much of this history, the new stuff or the old, will be known to the mint julep drinkers who will be betting close to $200 million this Saturday is anyone’s guess, but the smart money says not much.

That they will still be standing by then, some of them anyway, will be testament enough to the tough frontier stock from which Louisvillians are made of.
It’s always been a mad scene. In 1970, the race was 95 years old, and Hunter S. Thompson was 32. It had been 14 years since he had been released from a Louisville jail on condition that he leave for the Air Force immediately, and he hadn’t been back to a Derby for a decade. And yet, as he wrote in his seminal piece for Scanlan’s Monthly, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, looking out onto the stands from the press box on the day before the Derby, he had a pretty good idea of what to expect the next day. Standing next to Ralph Steadman he pointed to the Infield.

“I pointed to the huge grassy meadow enclosed by the track. ‘That whole thing,’ I said, ‘will be jammed with people; fifty thousand or so, and most of them staggering drunk. It’s a fantastic scene–thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles. We’ll have to spend some time out there, but it’s hard to move around, too many bodies.”

“Is it safe out there?” Will we ever come back?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll just have to be careful not to step on anybody’s stomach and start a fight.” I shrugged. “Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.”

Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier as they lose more and more money. —Hunter S. Thompson

If that sounds over the top, maybe it is—a little. Like much of Thompson’s most imaginative journalism, when it comes to the Derby it can be hard to draw the line between fantasy and reality, even by people who have lived it.

Take my friend Kevin Hyde’s recollection. He’s a writer and a stay-at-home dad and a drinker. He isn’t entirely sure where the line between Derby myth and Derby fact is drawn. He blames it on the whiskey, of course.

“I grew up in an east side Louisville suburb, which looked like it was pulled right out of a late-1970s, early-80s Spielberg movie,” he told me last week. “There was a middle-aged woman who lived down the street from us–a doctor, an MD, as I recall. Every once and awhile, as we ran and played throughout the neighborhood, my friends and I would see her in her backyard, slowly rolling a large wooden barrel back and forth.

“It turns out that every spring she procured a used bourbon barrel from her brother, who worked at Brown-Forman. She would splash about a gallon of water into the bottom and close it up. Throughout the summer, she periodically rolled it, thus pulling the alcohol from the wood and producing a nice, little 40-proof batch of pure Kentucky brown wine. “I don’t need to add water,” she once told my dad. “I just pour it over ice.”

“Now, this might be a childhood memory severely altered and romanticized by years of bourbon drinking. But I swear I remember seeing her once, in full Kentucky Derby regalia–the beautiful spring dress, the hat, the whole thing–holding a drink and kicking that big, damn barrel back and forth in her yard.”

He added: “If it didn’t happen, it should have.”

This was Louisville. This was Derby. This is why they invented bourbon

There’s a kind of hazy allure about the Derby for those who have lived it year after year after year that makes those kinds of recollections seem entirely normal in Louisville.

Allen Helm, a microbiologist on staff at the University of Chicago, remembers Derby Week in 1997, the last year before he left town for good to pursue his doctoral studies.

“I was the first person in my family to get a bachelor’s degree,” he told me. “Up until then, everybody got out of high school and immediately went to work or hit a junior college. Nobody left town… in fact, most everyone lived within a few miles of each other… a tight-knit, German Catholic family.”

He made sure, then, that he would do his last Derby week the right way. He spent much of it in bars, in particular a restaurant called Come Back Inn, where they poured his favorite brand, Wild Turkey. It was a sunny afternoon on Thursday, and the annual Derby Parade was just about to start. In through the door streamed a bunch of local writers and others ready to talk about the city, its politics, culture and music. He was in heaven.

“We hung out for about an hour, they with their Woodford Reserve, and me with my Turkey… each drink over rocks if I remember correctly. I remember the frosty glasses catching the sun coming through the large windows at the entrance of the bar.”

The others left for the parade, and Helm stayed inside. “I stuck around to watch the parade on TV, over yet another Wild Turkey. I drank it in pretty deeply. This was Louisville. This was Derby. This is why they invented bourbon.”

There are more people who feel that way in Louisville than is easy to explain, even with a Ph.D.

And then there are others, of course, who stay away from the madness altogether, who see the whole season as a great time to go on vacation. Or some just remain and shut out the madness like the groundskeepers on some beastly old manor in the English countryside on the one day of the year when the locals are allowed to traipse through the gardens and have a picnic.

Take Kevin Morrice, another writer from Louisville, who now lives in England. “I’m a native Louisvillian from the school of thought that the Derby is for out-of-towners,” she explained, though she couldn’t help but admit that this time of year she gets homesick for the balloons, the flowers and the parties. “I’d like to come back and maybe get young Charlie (her 12-year-old son) hooked on all of it.”

But then, my father is 84 and except for a brief stay in Chattanooga during the Great Depression, he’s never lived anywhere but Louisville – and hasn’t attended a Derby and wouldn’t if the governor asked him to sit right next to him. He’s typical of a very different kind of Louisvillian than the ones I know best: He’s someone who would no sooner exchange his daily beer and glass of wine—one of each, please—for a bottle of bourbon than he would switch his Marlboros for marijuana, which is to say it’s never going to happen.

You’ll find me having lunches—more than one, when I can, like a hobbit and his breakfasts

It’s Wednesday of Derby Week and that means you’re already late for the party. What you missed: Fully half-a-million locals crammed on the banks of the Ohio River watching fireworks two weekends ago, the official start of the Derby Festival. Also: Runners snaking through the city on a marathon last Saturday, a hot-air balloon race, and nightly drinking and music festivals that used to be known as Chow Wagons but now just mean food, drinks and music at sites scattered throughout the city.

If you get here today, right now, you might see the Great Steamboat Race, easily the most crooked competition in the history of sporting spectacle, that nonetheless will bring thousands of drinkers to the banks of the river to watch the Belle of Louisville steam boat race up the river and back again, usually against a rival boat from Cincinnati.

Tomorrow: The annual Derby Parade in downtown Louisville, which means floats and bands and yet another excuse for Louisvillians to cut work early and drink in the afternoon.

In fact, that’s pretty much what has been happening all week: Long lunches, multiple drinks and nervous scanning of the racing forums as everyone asks, “Have you got your horse yet?” Few do, so soon, and those that have used some combination of gut instinct, folk lore and intelligence overheard in the men’s room and picked a winner keep it entirely to themselves.

No matter where you go this week, it will be crowded. Although the winters in Louisville are often mild, Derby Week is seen by nearly everyone—everyone besides my dad, perhaps—as an excuse to get out and stay out much later than anyone with any sense would suggest.

The other part of all this is the food. It’s probably better than the food in your city, unless you call New Orleans or New York or San Francisco home. And it’s better than usual, come Derby Week.

If you’re meeting me this week in Louisville, you’ll find me having lunches—more than one, when I can, like a hobbit and his breakfasts— and that means you’ll find me happy. You may find me in the West End, a large area of town that is largely black and largely poor. It’s also close to the river and often beautiful. And best of all, there’s Big Momma’s Soul Food Kitchen near 45th Street and Broadway, where if you don’t mind standing in line at a shack not much bigger than a taco truck, you’ll leave with a pile of fried chicken, pork chops—smothered chops on Fridays—collard greens, green beans and everything else that’s good.

If you’ve remembered to bring a clean shirt, you might meet me at Jack Fry’s for lamb chops and Manhattans—but not if you haven’t made reservations months ago. After dinner at Jack Fry’s, take a cab or clear your head with a walk over to the newly lively area east of downtown called—with it must be admitted a tremendous lack of imagination—NuLu. You might find me amid the art galleries and hipster coffee joints for a game of outdoor ping pong at the Garage Bar, owned by a whiskey heiress. Or I might be down the street still further at Meat, a cocktail lounge in Butchertown situated on top of the Blind Pig, where the meat is good.

Or maybe everyone will be sitting in the Oak Room at the same old fancy Seelbach Hotel where Scott Fitzgerald used to lunch and rub shoulders with some of the biggest gangsters in the Midwest, and where he’d later stage Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s wedding reception in The Great Gatsby.

But it’s the bourbon, not the food, that Louisville does better than anywhere else on the planet.

If you don’t believe me, ask Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer.

He keeps a bourbon library that would make Jay Gatsby green. “In the first week or so of being the mayor,” he said, “one of the distilleries sent me a bottle of their bourbon and I put it in the office. Within about two weeks of being mayor, I think I had a bottle out of every distillery around. Now, I joke that we have the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, the Urban Bourbon Trail (in the city) and a third option we call: My office.”

The advantages of office don’t stop there. “You know this is one of the best perks of being mayor, every year at Derby. I mean I can just get in the car and they will drive me right down Fourth Street right up the gates and I can get out and walk right into the Kentucky Derby. That’s pretty good.”

Gov. Beshear spoke slowly to me, as if to a child. “You can’t be governor of Kentucky if you don’t drink bourbon,” he said.

But the unelected and unanointed have plenty of places to drink as well in Louisville. At Jack’s Lounge in the east end, the co-author of the exquisite Kentucky Bourbon Cocktail Book tends bar, as she has for a generation, and if she can’t teach you the difference between bourbon and rye then you really ought to be in Lansing, not Louisville, this week.

Slip into Bourbons Bistro along the train tracks in old Crescent Hill, and you’ll be handed a menu with more than 100 bourbons – and you can always ask for the reserve list if that’s not enough.

It’s not just that there’s more places serving bourbon in Louisville than anywhere else. That’s true, but it’s also true that there is just more of the stuff to go around. Bourbon is booming. Last year, for the first time since 1973, Kentucky bourbon distilleries produced a million barrels.

A few months ago, when Makers Mark distillery announced it would water down its bourbon to make it go further and when Louisvillians collectively gasped so loudly that the company backtracked almost within a week, I had called the governor of the state, Steve Beshear, to see where his administration stood with regard to the emergency. Maker’s Mark, he said, had learned something he learned a long time ago in politics: You don’t mess with people’s religion, their families or their bourbon.

I asked him if he was a drinker himself. He paused, and then spoke slowly, as if to a child. “You can’t be governor of Kentucky if you don’t drink bourbon,” he said.

Good point. Last week, I asked the mayor of Louisville if he was a drinker, especially around Derby. Of course, Fisher said. He’s newer to politics than the governor, and he added, sheepishly, “responsibly.”

We can mark that down to the innate caution of a man who just announced he’s seeking a second term, because everyone, including the mayor of Louisville, knows there is nothing especially responsible about restraint during Derby Week.

This is a town, after all, that keeps its bars open till 4 a.m. every day of the year, except Friday and Saturday of Derby Week, when they are open till 6 so everyone can have their fill of whiskey without feeling rushed by the coming dawn.

In fact, the whole week is one big excuse to stop rushing, stop worrying, and to start drinking—or for those who prefer to count their vices one at a time—to at least start gambling.

Really, the only reason to rush this week, is in the getting here. And, since it’s Wednesday of Derby Week already, if you’re not yet in Louisville, you’re late.

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