Maybe the strangest thing about Ghana: Cab after cab blasting Kenny Rodgers. Country music is absurdly popular here. Surreal experience of listening to an urban Ghanaian imitating the southern country drawl, singing about being all on your own 'cause the wife has left you for another man.
In other news, best story in a long time: "Kids send Marcus the Lamb to Slaughter”
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
daytime
The warm yellow fraying of my window curtains starts around 6am, and then it is pitch black by 6:30pm.
City life with an unnatural cadence: Buzzing with street boys kicking stones amidst loud crowds at 7:30am; empty and dark at 7:30pm, a quiet street corner with dark figures standing shoulder-to-shoulder, bent over a flickering orange kerosene lamp.
City life with an unnatural cadence: Buzzing with street boys kicking stones amidst loud crowds at 7:30am; empty and dark at 7:30pm, a quiet street corner with dark figures standing shoulder-to-shoulder, bent over a flickering orange kerosene lamp.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Werner Herzog school of film
Study film with Werner for a weekend.
My favorite rules:
"7. Excerpts of films will be discussed, which could include your submitted films; they may be shown and discussed as well. Depending on the materials, the attention will revolve around essential questions: how does music function in film? How do you narrate a story? (This will certainly depart from the brainless teachings of three-act-screenplays). How do you sensitize an audience? How is space created and understood by an audience? How do you produce and edit a film? How do you create illumination and an ecstasy of truth?
8. Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.
9. Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list: if possible, read Virgil's "Georgics", read "Hemingway's "The short happy life of Francis Macomber", The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular the Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo "True History of the Conquest of New Spain"."
Mailing address
I now have a mailing address (sortof):
Attn: Piotr Brzezinski
Maxwell Court
PO Box 3477, Accra
#84 Forth Ringway, Ringway Estate, Osu Accra
Because there are almost no street names here -- my road being an exception -- there is no direct delivery of mail here. So the only way to send/receive packages is either going to a PO box, or sending it to a local FedEx / DHL office (which will hold it for local pickup).
Attn: Piotr Brzezinski
Maxwell Court
PO Box 3477, Accra
#84 Forth Ringway, Ringway Estate, Osu Accra
Because there are almost no street names here -- my road being an exception -- there is no direct delivery of mail here. So the only way to send/receive packages is either going to a PO box, or sending it to a local FedEx / DHL office (which will hold it for local pickup).
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Life in Ghana
Accra, as Ryzard Kapuscinski put it, is a village that has managed to replicate itself a thousand times. It is an insular, safe and unremarkable place, a spread-out hodgepodge of Westernized estates, squat towers, shanties. Like in the village, its inhabitants have a severely limited sense of direction: the city is entirely navigated based on landmarks (go left at MegaTV, just past Aviation House) – street names are unheard of.
And, as in village, there are many dirt roads. Currently, in fact, I have a moat around my house. I’m staying at 7-bedroom mansion with a Harvard research team, and the exposed plastic pipe that runs along the sunken dirt road burst a few days ago. The street children squatting across from us bandaged it with a plastic bag, but this didn’t last long. So over the past few days the whole street has flooded and city officials remain nowhere to be seen. Someone, however, created a series a series of dirt islands in the middle (so you can hop island to island down the street) – very dangerous for returning home drunk (no streetlights, of course). And the water level is still rising…
Most of the time I’ve been working in Accra, but last week I managed to get outside on a data gathering trip to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city. The trip was unremarkable – fairly lush tropical forest along the way, poor towns, etc. – except for the bus ride itself. Each bus ride began with an ~hour-long Pentecostal service delivered by a preacher man standing in the aisle as the bus hurtled down the road. When the first passenger joined in, bellowing in tongues as the preacher chanted “jesus, jeeeesus,” I initially thought that he was shouting over the sermon on his cell phone. Even the 6am bus ride featured prayer time.
And after the sermon finished, the quack medicine salesmen/women got up. Each in turn, they advertised their malarial cures, impotence creams, and blood purifiers. The jovial crowd laughed both at and with these charlatans, but still bought the products. Finally, in the worst stage, came the Nollywood movies. The problem with these movies is not the mind-numbingly poor soap narrative, but rather the screeching, nails-on-chalkboard audio quality, played a maximum volume. It’s literally unlistenable, and deafeningly loud.
So, for future bus rides, I’m going to track down a semi-mythical VIP bus that costs twice as much but, allegedly, plays terrible western movies instead (Lord of War, no doubt).
Anyway, that’s my life thus far in Ghana. Next week I’ll be starting at Technoserve, changing gears a bit after working on the research project.
-Piotr
And, as in village, there are many dirt roads. Currently, in fact, I have a moat around my house. I’m staying at 7-bedroom mansion with a Harvard research team, and the exposed plastic pipe that runs along the sunken dirt road burst a few days ago. The street children squatting across from us bandaged it with a plastic bag, but this didn’t last long. So over the past few days the whole street has flooded and city officials remain nowhere to be seen. Someone, however, created a series a series of dirt islands in the middle (so you can hop island to island down the street) – very dangerous for returning home drunk (no streetlights, of course). And the water level is still rising…
Most of the time I’ve been working in Accra, but last week I managed to get outside on a data gathering trip to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city. The trip was unremarkable – fairly lush tropical forest along the way, poor towns, etc. – except for the bus ride itself. Each bus ride began with an ~hour-long Pentecostal service delivered by a preacher man standing in the aisle as the bus hurtled down the road. When the first passenger joined in, bellowing in tongues as the preacher chanted “jesus, jeeeesus,” I initially thought that he was shouting over the sermon on his cell phone. Even the 6am bus ride featured prayer time.
And after the sermon finished, the quack medicine salesmen/women got up. Each in turn, they advertised their malarial cures, impotence creams, and blood purifiers. The jovial crowd laughed both at and with these charlatans, but still bought the products. Finally, in the worst stage, came the Nollywood movies. The problem with these movies is not the mind-numbingly poor soap narrative, but rather the screeching, nails-on-chalkboard audio quality, played a maximum volume. It’s literally unlistenable, and deafeningly loud.
So, for future bus rides, I’m going to track down a semi-mythical VIP bus that costs twice as much but, allegedly, plays terrible western movies instead (Lord of War, no doubt).
Anyway, that’s my life thus far in Ghana. Next week I’ll be starting at Technoserve, changing gears a bit after working on the research project.
-Piotr
Premise
This will be a rarely-updated log of thoughts and experiences while I work in Ghana. It seems presumptuous to simply bombard people with update emails, so I might as well just put notes up here and let people read them if they should so choose.
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