Pics from Almaty International School

Outside it was cold. Like 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit cold! Inside we were toasty warm. The Almaty International School is full of color in stark contrast to the landscape outside. More about that later, meanwhile here are some pics from inside the school.

Say what you mean - mean what you say...

The electric kettle sounds like a rocket taking off miles away. Squat and round, a glass sputnik minus the appendages the water tumbles and bubbles inside 212 degrees Fahrenheit or so, outside it is still dark and probably near zero degrees, it is 5:30 am.

I'm up and awake drinking coffee just a couple hours earlier than I would be at home - we're adjusting to the 11 hour time difference between Cleveland and Almaty, Kazakhstan – should be completely acclimated just in time to turn around and head back home to take another spin at jet lag.

The teachers 'conference that we came to speak and teach at was by all accounts a rousing success. Maura, Russ, Dan, Frank and everyone involved did a stellar job. This was the first symposium of this magnitude attempted by this international school association, Quality Schools International, and it ran as true to course as the Siberian Express. Sara and I did our best to show how poetry and performance could be weaved into a curriculum as a learning tool and a jumping off point for comprehension and literacy. I think we succeeded.

The director of the school kicked off the second day by greeting everyone with an original poem he had penned the night before sausage stuffed with intentionally bad rhyme and slightly better humor but the coup de gras came when the model poetry slam we ran to end gathering was won by the physical education teacher performing Mason Williams Moose Goosers poem. The regional head of the district said that was the dollop of sour cream that sealed the deal for him – if we could get the gym teacher excited and involved in poetry there just may be some hope for the form.

Meeting teachers like the ones in attendance here at the Almaty International School this past weekend is what gives Sara and me hope - period. These folks are willing to pull up stakes and venture into the unknown to educate and instruct. International teachers are a very special breed indeed. A little bit crazy, but a good crazy. We heard stories of standing in 3 hour line delays at the Kirgizstan border crossing, attendees pulling all nighters and others camping out on gym mats on the tile floor of a kindergarten room just to be present at this conference. Not only does this illustrate the dedication and afore mentioned mania for teaching that has infected these people but these acts serve as an illustration of the undeniable worth and importance of these professional development events. These gatherings not only instruct, just as importantly they feed the spirit.

Part of the mission statement of the QSI schools is to graduate students who are kind and socially responsible as well as academically proficient. I can't think of a more noble aspiration, or one that has more significance. Better communication skills go a long way to achieving this goal. How many conflicts are the results of miscommunication? I'd venture to guess almost all. This pledge is one of main reasons we travelled here.

With just a little extra effort and more global perspective as exemplified by the curriculum here at the AIS I think we'd all be in a little better world. Somehow I managed to communicate via cell phone with a driver picking me and Sara up from downtown Almaty. The driver only spoke Russian and me only English but we figured it out. On the drive back to the school he showed us a picture of his family and we showed him photos of ours.

That was our conversation, sharing our similarities via images – a little bit like poetry.

Almaty Kazakhstan - so far

Almaty International School Kazakhstan

Kazakh Crow

Almaty.

We got in real early – 5am or so. I took a picture of the Welcome to Kazakhstan/Almaty sign above the passport and visa check in and immediately was told to put my camera away by a gruff uniformed man. Sasha our driver and our hostess Maura, the principle of the Almaty International School drove us to the hotel we are staying in the first three days of our visit, it was still dark the whole way. (By the way the time difference is 13 hours difference – as I type this it is 9pm back in Cleveland and 8am here.

We showered off the road dust, ate a decidely Eastern European breakfast of boiled eggs, salami, and Nescafe coffee then went over to visit the school we'll be teaching at. What a beacon of brightness in an otherwise winter gray landscape. The sunny rooms were almost as surprising as the mountains that appeared outside our room's window once the sun came up.

Here are a couple snapshots – we'll be keeping you posted.

terminally terminal

So, i popped a couple ambian on the flight over and am still a bit groggy - it is noon here but 7am back in Cleveland. We had hoped to shoot into Amstrdam for lunch - but the concierge here at the airport lounge recommended against it,

As a rule, I ignore airport personel warnings - they are almost always too cautious, especially in Europe - but coupled with the time change and the sleeping pill induced fuddlement we're gonna just cool our jets here in the lounge and fill up on espresso and tuna wraps.

Once I've burned away some cobwebs I might go see what duty free has to offer.

Next stop the most excellent country of Kazakhstan.

motor city ditty

In Detroit – waiting for our flight to Amsterdam.

Back home the bad dog Suzi is going to Granma's house where she will be bathed in mastiff drool and seriously overfed. At our house we have a long haired socialist leaning poet house-sitting and our card carrying NRA member of a neighbor keeping an eye on things too. One of these days I'll post the story of the time he shot a possum IN my son's room.

Next dispatch from the Netherlands

mgs.

look both ways before crossing

Okay,

The big bags are packed – we blow this country tomorrow afternoon for the most glorious land of Kazakhstan! A friend of mine asked me the other day where do I feel more real – on the road or at home. This question gave me pause. The two existences are so different.

I first answered by giving him some marriage advice. If you are lucky enough to share your bed with someone I have a suggestion that will guarantee to nurture and sustain your relationship: down comforters.

Notice – I am talking in the plural here, especially if you have a queen or king sized bed – equip it with two comforters so that you do not have to share with your partner. This is something we picked up while traveling in Europe years ago. I think it was in Amsterdam, or maybe Prague – the bed had two top quilts and we were able to roll up in them like stuffed cabbage at a Croatian wedding without pulling the blankets off of each other. We brought this custom home and Americanized it by supersizing up from the continental pair of twin sized to double and eventuall two queen sized comforters.

So, one of my favorite places on earth is twisted like a goose feathered croissant in my bed on a chilly winter morning another one of my favorite places is balancing on a rocky jetty in Whittier, Alaska casting for salmon which ranks right up there with riding on the back of a motor bike in Saigon - equal but different experience.

I am always amazed when we get met by old, or soon to be new, friends at an airport, train station, boat dock or churchyard at midnight sometimes tens of thousands of miles from our front stoop. The terrain we've traversed, the people we've passed, sleeping babies, German baggage handlers clicking their heels, car rental agents who think we are insane to consider driving three hundred miles in one day… But, it seems, things always work out somehow in the end – this is because quite literally, they have to.

When traveling great distances it is helpful to remember that no matter what – time will keep passing on and things will change, a smile opens opportunity and most folks do want to help the pathetic and while humbling, being pathetic every now and then is not fatal. I think this is the biggest lesson to be taken to heart when leaving the safety of a common culture and language, that one is not the center of the wheel.

I stood on the corner of an insanely busy intersection in Ho Chi Minh City outside the Sheraton conference center waiting for the light to change so that I could cross the street to get a bowl of soup. This is what I had done in every major city I had ever visited – not eaten soup that is – but waited at a corner for the light to change so that I could cross a roadway. Of course when in Britain I had to be sure I looked the "right" way before crossing because the limeys drive on the "wrong" side of the road – I knew that because I am seasoned world citizen.

So I waited, and waited, and waited. In the meantime, I began noticing other pedestrians simple stepping off the curb into the boiling traffic calmly walking to the other side as the cars, trucks, busses and motorbikes swerved around them as if they were wading across a river. The light never did change, and eventually I steeled my courage up and stepped into rushing traffic and purposefully put one foot in front of the other until I got to the other side.

I gleefully taught the skill to Sara by walking into the street with my head turned back to her away from the traffic as if I "accidently" had stepped off the curb. We had to learn a new paradigm as well as trust simply to cross the street.

Who knows what this trip is going to teach us?

Oh yeah, having a traveling companion that you get along with 98% of the time makes things a million times better in the best and worst situations – but that deserves a whole post on its own sometime and I'll get to that. Suffice it to say for now, just like in bed – it's good to be sure each other's butts are covered.

Here we go….

fish or cut bait

Okay,

The holidays are finally past us – not finally in the "thank god it's over sense" but finally in the "now we can get to everything we said we'd get to after the holidays" way. It is so easy to stack up tasks and duties behind barricades of "the holidays" – a perfect excuse to procrastinate. In a little less than two weeks we will headed to the hinterlands – literally. Kazakhstan – which I can now spell correctly sans spell-check, is next on our oversea work schedule. We need to put together lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations for teachers, pack bags, stow away sleeping pills, diarrhea medicine, passports and I need to buy some gloves. I wonder what horse meat tastes like? Stay tuned for pics and commentary from the road. Besides preparation for this trek, we've let all kinds of other tasks slide as well – this blog entry is the last ditch effort to ignore the responsibilities fogging the windows.

Of course that is not what this post is about – this posting is about sharks!

I have spent a fair amount of time atop and in water fishing for various, well fish. These excursions have been met with differng success. That is if you measure success by the amount of fish that are removed from said body of water. Sometimes not catching anything is the perfect day and, not being caught oneself is a pretty good thing too.

When fishing from the shore in North Carolina it is rather common to pull in sharks, we're not talking Jaws here – these little guys are barely a foot long. They're leathery and rough feeling like a deflated basketball rolled into the diameter of a paper towel tube. The diminutive buggers have some pretty sharp teeth though so it's a good idea to use some long nosed pliers to get the hooks out of their bony mouths. After the initial fun of catching a shark of any size – they become a nuisance on your line. Their only redeeming quality being that they look just like their bigger cousins and I've never heard of a swimmer getting a chunk taken out of the back of their thigh by one of these demitasse denizens of the deep.

On the other hand – when out deep sea fishing I have seen sharks big enough to make your heart beat a bit faster. Six or seven feet of shark will kick in a primal flight response usually reserved for encounters with a landlord flaunting a gun. One of these brutes slashing around on a wet deck will instantaneously turn a whole boat load of Hemmingway wannabes into the chorus line from Riverdance while a deck hand chases the beast around with a baseball bat like Barry Bonds in the throes of a 'roid rage.

We have friends who have a house in the Keys. Let me digress here a bit – I used to marvel at how starving artist writers like D.H Lawrence etc. would travel all over the world with no visible means of support – and now we, not being loaded by any stretch of imagination, are not quite starving artists traveling all over the world. Having friends who are gracious enough to put a pillow under your head goes a long way to these ends. Anyway – we are visiting these friends of ours in the Florida Keys. They live in one of the middle keys – a bit more laid back than Key West and its Conch Republic drunken weirdness.

Now this couple, amazingly enough writers and artists themselves – restrict most of their fishing to bagging snapper for the grill off of their dock. I on the other hand wanted to see if there was any larger fare to be brought to the kitchen so I drove to a far side of the island where I could wade out and cast into some of the dredged out boat ways to see what might be lurking below.

I gingerly walk out maybe fifty yards into the water – it is very shallow and warm around the keys – until I am waist deep and within casting distance of one of the boat ways I mentioned. I walk carefully because I am barefoot and there are all sorts of coral and other prickly things underfoot. So I begin casting past the boat way, reeling in, slowing down so the lure dips into the channel like a wounded baitfish. The sun shining, the water is sparkling; my mind is blank as I cast and reel, cast and reel – then – I see the fin.

It pops up like some cheesy B movie – slicing through the water toward my lure. Sharks are attracted to splashing – that's what I've seen on the Discovery channel at least. A calm retreat would be most prudent so I naturally throw the rod over my shoulder, turn my back on the fish and run flailing like I was on fire, splattering water in my wake – dragging the lure twenty feet behind me in zig zags which the shark continues chasing. If the shark had wanted anything to do with me it could have caught and tasted me with very little effort – luckily the lure was more interesting this time. This fish was definitely big enough to have done damage if it had been so inclined.

I was done fishing for that day – got back in our friends' car and drove back to the safety of their house and dock. Funniest thing – I kept checking the rear view mirror to be sure the shark wasn't following me – like it might have sprung legs and would be running alongside the car with a knife and fork. Turns out the shark were not what I needed to be most afraid of. In my haste to exit the water – I ran over coral and what I think might have been some type of sea anemones so that later that evening my feet swelled up to the size of coconuts.

All praise to the makers of Benadryl.

Okay, now I have to straighten up the kitchen and start getting serious about getting to everything we put off 'til after the holidays. Happy New Year. Hope you dredge up some fish stories of your own this year.

Yurt place or mine?

Well, winter has officially smacked the north coast upside the head with a slush ball. The yard is six inches deep in snow, it's windy, and the sun is gauzed over with gray the same color as mold on an orange. Any sensible person would escape – and in a couple weeks we will be doing so. Where are we headed, Key West, Tucson, Jamaica? Not a chance – we trekking to glorious Kazakhstan! Of which the lonely planet guide quips, paraphrased: "If you're a fan of lunar landscapes, hypnotically long train rides and horse sausage – this is the destination for you!" Oh, and it should be colder'n a bejeezus there too! The country (the 8^th largest in the world – who knew?); slapped to the left side of a border between Russia and China is the first of a triumvirate of trips we are making this winter. Our second is to Jakarta in February – a much more climatically timed excursion and Istanbul in March.

Like all folks making a living as poets we are filthy rich and globetrot for amusement.

Right, believe that and I have a bridge to sell ya in Brooklyn. We are lucky enough to have found our way into the international school circuit as teaching artists, spreading the power of poetry and performance as a part of an educational curriculum designed to enhance literacy and comprehension skills at all grade levels. So why do we work in such far flung destinations? First and foremost, we are adventurers – the opportunity to mix teaching with seeing different cultures and locales is an experience that appeals to both of us – we are not homebodies. But secondly – and a bit scary, because the opportunity to do our kind of work here in the US of A seems to be becoming fewer and further between we have to look across the oceans to practice what we preach.

The current climate of public education toward any programming that is not part of a cookie cutter fodder destined for a standardized test oven is as chilly as the wind outside my window at this moment. No Child Left Behind – sounds like a good idea. Of course, the folks who coined this phrase are also responsible for: The Clean Air Initiative – which actually relaxes emission restrictions for industry, The Healthy Forest Initiative – which allows more logging, Free Speech Zones – which are actually cordoned off areas far away from whatever event is being protested, and the granddaddy of them all – The Patriot Act – See a pattern?

Now while NCLB purports to bring responsibility back to the classroom and get back to basics – what it really achieves is can be summed up in this analogy that I have run across a couple times on the web:

No Child Left Behind - Football Version

The football version of what is going on in education right now. (If you're not an educator, this may not make a lot of sense to you. But send it to your friends who are in education. They will love it!)

For all educators in and out of the education system:

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time, even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. This will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind. If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.

Now I don't want to go on forever here – 'cause I could, so I am going to cut to an ending kinda quickly. One question that I can never seem to get answered by the proponants of NCLB is: "If it is such a good idea – why aren't private schools held to the same rules?" You know, those schools where the folks behind NCLB send their kids? I mean it couldn't be that they want an end to public education. What good would an uneducated, demoralized, unquestioning labor supply be to elite robber barons and their inbred progeny?

Kinda sends a shiver down your spine – doesn't it?

Accordian to prophecy

Rob Zombie is just about the perfect music to work out to in my opinion. Now I am not a big heavy metal fan and I'm not even sure you could classify Zombie's work as heavy metal – like Ministry and Motorhead his driving almost techno beat stuff bears little resemblance to the big haired Ratt – Poison administered during the 80s. There is very little that goes with the testosterone infused grunts of lugging barbells about than the ear drum numbing intonations of Zombie's Dragula or Ministry's Jesus Built my Hotrod. Now if I'm running on a treadmill (and aren't we all in one way or another) I will mix in a podcast or two, my favorite right now is a series called Poetry off the Shelf, produced by the Lilly cash drunk Poetry magazine folks – you can find them here

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio.html

But for bench pressing, squats and hammer curls give me Super Beast, Ace of Spades, maybe mix in some Social Distortion doing their rendition of Ring of Fire or… something with a little accordion.

I once saw a bumper sticker which read – Friends Do Not Let Friends Play Accordions – as humorous as I find this; I still believe I am genetically predisposed to music produced with a squeezebox. I myself have absolutely no innate musical talent, I can't tell a 4-4 from a 2-3 beat and my singing doesn't just scare my dogs it makes them inordinately angry so that they crawl around as if they were sneaking through high grass growling under their breath wishing that I would finally keel over from whatever spoiled food I have obviously ingested from the kitchen trash.

My paternal grandfather on the other hand – could play any instrument put into his hands. He was in a band, a Tamburitza band. Tamburitza is a gypsy inspired type of Eastern European music, a tambura being a long necked string instrument not too unlike a mandolin. There is a whole culture built up and around Tamburitza music within the Serbo-Croatian community and being a proud Croat (president of the Cleveland Croatian Fraternal Union) my grandfather was keeping it real back in the day. One of the first songs I remember is a version of Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, sung by him in Croatian accompanied with his superfast strumming of a Tambura.

There were accordions around too, little octagon squeezeboxes and giant things that looked like a sideways version of the electric Magnus toy organ we kids played with in the "other room" (On Top of Old Smokey pecked out by following numbered keys.) Thus I was incated during my formative years – "give me a child until seven…"

Now this predilection for gypsy music lay dormant in me like a cicada chrysalis while I discovered Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Pere Ubu and the Buzzcocks. I fed this bug literature, eastern bloc existential tropes of writers like Kafka, Dosteovsky, Chekov, Gorki and Gogol – then, that's what caught my eye. The recognition of a name, Gogol – of whom Dosteovsky said, "All Russian literature comes from beneath his overcoat" in the name of a band. Gogol Bordello, self proclaimed gypsy punks – the fusion of two types of music that were so much a part of me, the subconscious indoctrination of my grandpa knee bounced childhood and the anarchistic gyrations of pre fashionable punk I embraced as a young adult. All of a sudden – accordions were cool.

So, chances are – if you run into me at the gym with my ear buds trailing wires down to an Mp3 player, more than likely I will not be able to hear you talking to me due to the driving crash of power chords and bass kick – but, there is also a good possibility I am listening to an accordion. Friends don't admit to friends they like accordions.

flotsum

My thoughts are not so deep

anymore

like a tide ebbing

their surfaces steadily receding

drawn away from shore

by the constituents of my life

my son at university

his excogitations swim

like Kierkegaardian sharks

dorsal fins slicing the surf

snapping the backs of schooling ideas

with a confident head shake

swallowed in chunks

by rows of replenishable teeth

shards of flesh and scale

left in his wake

while

my boats lay listing in mud

moored to piers casting shadows across their decks

an insurance bill flops about exposed rocks

gills breathing in the terrible oxygen

oystercatchers loud and obvious

stab thick orange beaks at aspirations

hunkered in their shells

gelatinous globs of amorphous phylum

slowly dehydrate in the evening sun

further down the beach

washed up

carried by current from depths that never knew light

a giant squid

milky eye the size of a full moon on the horizon

will be collected by Japanese scientists

studied and dissected

wherein they will find

the half digested body

of a great white