This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the rise of K’naan, M.I.A. and grime MCs like Tinchy Stryder, but there’s been some pretty exciting, forward-looking music coming out of the developing world and its diasporas over the past few years. Stuff like eight-bit Afrikaaner rave-rappers Die Antwoord.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Those are some inspired slow-mo shots of dude’s junk trying to escape his Dark Side of the Moon boxers.

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London-based Afrikan Boy, whose flow on the M.I.A. track “Hussel” pretty much stole the show. He’s just released a video for his song “Lagos Town”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya, whose collaborations with Radioclit are well-known by now. “Kamphopo,” his elaboration of an Architecture in Helsinki track, is one of my favourites.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then there’s Logobi, an infectious combination of break-dancing, mime, and the kind of dance moves you see at Mbalax clubs in Dakar — a minimalist break-dance popular with the kids of French West African families in the suburbs of Paris. Here are a couple of clips of the Black Kitoko crew.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem’s awesome essay on Liberia, “Goodbye, Babylon King”, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Chernobyl Stalker from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

The people most affected by the explosion of Reactor Number Four on the morning of April 26,1986, soon learned that the event known as Chernobyl was predicted by a feature film made seven years earlier. Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, explored the limits of our technical power against the backdrop of a mysterious force that can only be approached on foot, by forest “stalkers” who have learned to accept its risky gifts.

Today, real stalkers live inside Chernobyl’s official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables.

This short film by Donald Weber documents their twilight existence as scavengers of our newest Lost Civilization. Our grand technical vision, the city as pure laboratory, quickly recedes into the hunting and gathering primitivism of a future stone age.

See Donald Weber’s Stalker photo essay.

China almost bankrupted Rome through its aesthetic craving for imported silks, and wrenched the British Empire apart with the chemical high of costly teas. Now the West faces a metaphysical addiction to its “toys.”

Story by Larry Frolick

Walk into a box store like Toys R Us or Costco and you will see that toys today constitute an overwrought universe, a shrink-wrapped house of affliction parallel to our own. The tall aisles are packed with violent pinks and piercing reds and hard, mean yellows, all clashing like brass cymbals. You are quickly overcome by their frantic urgency and charmless glitz.

The toys glare out at you from their blister packs and window boxes, demanding that you stroke their fireproof furry tummies to produce a negligible burp, or wiggle their horns to extract a tinny roar. They’re immune to feeling, hard packed as proof against shipping error, “shrinkage” and kiddy-traffic.

There are too many boxes. And besides, your kid wants the CheeDor or HyenaGor, and according to the geeky clerk you’ve finally managed to find, these were sold out months ago. Why? Cuz they dint makinuff, he mumbles through his wad of Extra gum as he restocks a 9-foot shelf of greenish Star Wars fighters.

He looks greenish himself in the jittery store-lights. Working in a toy store, and he’s exhausted. A toy store is anything but fun.

Why are toys such hard work today? Why are kids involved in endless schoolyard Ponzi schemes with their Pokemon cards, trading scores and codes from Lego’s Baraka at recess as if were so much black market currency? What are China’s endless pastel boxcars doing here anyway? Full of action figures bound for suburban box-stores the year round — toys that roar and bleep and refuse to budge from blister packs that will cut your hand badly if you’re not careful? And that’s the real thing.

(“These counterfeits are dangerous,” says a cop whose team has just seized another shipment of fakes from Hong Kong, “They’ve got lead in them.”)

I hold just such an Action Figure in my hand. It is my son’s battery-operated grey camel robot from Star Wars. It’s called Hoth, with guns where its eyes and mouth should be, and a little white starship trooper hiding in his plastic trap-door hump. For Game Theorists, this is closed toy as opposed to an open toy, like Barbie.

Barbie belongs to the old world of dolls—and teddy bears, bats and balls, red wagons, cowboy guns — the kit of the child-narrator, who scripts his own story. Hoth is a closed toy, part of an Operating System external to a player’s life. Hoth’s O/S is free of child’s rule in two ways.

First, Hoth belong to a collection; and as the Star Wars catalogue itself smugly reminds us, “No collection is complete!” without the rest of the collection. This promise of completion is never delivered, because these toy manufacturers sell incompleteness.

Why should they? The real money’s in need. The catalogue begins by seducing kids with coy offers of role deception:

“Your friends will think you are… a gaming mastermind — but only you will know for sure (we won’t tell).”

So secondly, Hoth isn’t really a toy at all, but a component, part of a System; and it’s the System who allows the kid to pretend he’s a warrior or gaming mastermind — not the toy.

No, the toy is beside the point. The player quickly understands this, too. He or she understands by age eight that action figures in blister packs are of necessity always incomplete, even when freshly purchased and still boxed. And that his purchase completes nothing but a provisional entry into an anxious system of commercial craving.

Is this stuff any different from the imported silks that threatened ancient Rome with bankruptcy? Or the costly teas that wrenched the British Empire apart? The Chinese have always specialized in providing the West with its pretty addictions; this thrill is more profound and dangerous. It’s a metaphysical hit.

For if the player’s position relative to this unknowable System is vague and subservient, the toy continually reminds the child that he himself is incomplete, too. Hoth requires batteries: a wire plugged into his anus connects him to a power pack, external yet essential. The routinized, jerky movements that follow deny Descartes, disprove Aquinas.

Free will in the West? Forget it. Unlike the wind-up robot of a generation ago, Hoth’s got no autonomy, no place to go. Press On, and he agitates humpily around his grey lump.

The third part of this toy-system, and more important than the camelbot or the anus-battery, is the stand — complete with a moon crater and embedded footprints.

This device keeps the player out of the loop, distancing him as the spectator who “won’t believe the incredible detail!” Even if the kid tries, his attempt is frustrated. The little warrior can’t stand up by himself; he keeps falling down unless his gun his positioned straight over his head, as if surrendering. The player soon learns it’s better to leave the little fellow where he is, lying on his back like a foetus, inside his camel hump.

Some warrior!

The message in the Blister Pack is that futility and powerlessness attaches to any purchaser who attempts to add narrative elements to the program envisioned by the System. This futility quickly makes itself known to every young player, no matter how imaginative. The toy figure arrests and frustrates efforts to produce alternative scripts, refusing them under the totalitarian motto, Resistance is futile, and proving it in his fumbling. His ineptitude (and that of his parents’) is caused by ignorance of the codes of animatism. Arresting the action is the job of action figures.

Why should this cheapo plastic stuff be so important today? The meta-life of objects is now widely felt to be growing out of control: objects have a complete life of their own. What are Edward Burtynsky’s photos of Machine China, but shots of Ground Zero where the old world of artifacts is dematerialized into a bar-coded chimera?

[Edward Burtynsky: Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Jilin Province]

Our anxiety about the secret life of globalization is anxiety about the death of the organic world. Our familiar world is losing its parts.

We once believed that Technology opposed Nature, that technology offered us hope of controlling the bad weather of history. It turns out that technology is exactly like weather. It, too, is subject to fits of pique and catastrophe — as system crashes, software glitches, and chronic metal fatigue constantly remind us. The causes remain mysterious long after power is restored. The lights go on again, but we are still in the dark.

Artists seized on the issue in the 19^th Century. The German painter Max Klinger did a series on the misadventures of a lady’s lost glove in 1881. In 1909 the Italian futurist and artist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti coined the phrase “animatic” for his view that inanimate things are alive. As the output of box-store stuff continues to mount, we can only experience it referentially, and passively. Forget capitalists: nobody today really controls the means of production.

[Max Klinger, "Ein Handschuh" (A Glove), 1881]

The jumble of forever-incomplete toy “sets” littering the bedrooms of generations of children, never mind the slightly-defective printers and monitors and TVs littering landfill sites. My experience, like that of my child’s, is denied by the System that is deliberately creating a junkyard of the landscape. Here’s a summary of just the past year, which I suggest is more important than God in its proofs of a terrible new metaphysic:

1. A week after I bought it, the $175 Panasonic portable phone slipped to the vinyl floor and died without visible injury.

2. Two weeks after my new $2500 PC system was installed by a “geek pro,” it fried itself in the middle of the night – sparks, smoke and everything.

3. The new “digital” answering machine gives such lo-res audio that it takes us multiple Repeats to figure out who called

4. The camcorder began erasing family videos as it played them.

5. The SLR camera freezes on nice days, but never when I take it back to the camera store; a new wireless mouse died at three weeks; the DVD portable player at one month.

I could go on, but whenever you do complain you get a clerk’s recorded answer: more consumption. Toys such as Hoth are here to teach us about this inhuman new world, about the fritzing and frying and freezing.

Don’t blame China for this defective stuff, for its glitches of mass production.

Take comfort from the toys, who offer their symbolic condolences for our loss of the World. The organic world we once knew can longer compete with the coded reality that produces this unending flow of immaculate novelty. Coming to terms with its triumph — the triumph of the arrested image over narrative will — is now a rite of passage for us all.

Carpet Culture from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

A short film by Donald Weber—an insider’s glimpse at red carpet culture and paparazzi during the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.

Russians have for decades fashioned functional objects from such cast-off items as forks, plastic bottles and onion bags. Collector Vladimir Arkhipov sheds light on the artful labours collected in his archive of “post-material folklore”.

Interview by Christopher Frey

Vladimir Arkhipov collects the art of everyday ingenuity: a power charger made from a recycled Polaroid cartridge; a barbell bracketed by elevator counterweights; an abacus repurposed into a back-massager; a short-wave radio receiver constructed from metal scrap; a water boiler jerry-rigged from a pair of razor blades, wire and an A/C plug. All of their component parts previously used.

For more than fifteen years, Arkhipov has been assembling this archive of “post-material folklore”, idiosyncratic DIY tools and toys fashioned mostly by casual inventors in and around the Moscow area. Though he’s reluctant to ascribe the word “art” to these self-made “thingumajigs”, he treasures their accidental poetry in the service of function.

The archive began in 1994, when Arkhipov realized his own conceptual art had little relevance amid the upheaval of the post-Soviet meltdown. As he says, “I still thought of myself as an artist, I just wasn’t making anything.”  Then, while visiting a friend’s dacha, he noticed a coat hook that had been made from a toothbrush warped over a flame. “It was so simple, but it struck me right away. I knew it was important.” For decades, Russians living under communism, cut-off from Western disposable consumer culture, had been fashioning functional objects from such cast-off items as light shades, plastic bottles and onion bags.

Arkhipov remembered his own father’s inventions, among them a TV antenna made from a set of aluminum forks. “Things like these had been around me all my life but were almost invisible to the naked eye.”

In recent years, Arkhipov has been invited to take his enthusiasm for “post-material folklore” on the road. But rather than deliver his Russian objects to galleries in Brazil, Ireland, England and Spain, he spends a few weeks in advance of his exhibitions hunting for local examples of self-made objects. He always discovers something. Like the gas mask a professor in Sao Paolo had created from a coffee canister and funnel—on days the smog was unbearable, the professor filled the canister with essential oils and breathed into it instead of the air soggy with particulates.

Each object tells a local story, in terms of the materials recycled and the uses to which they are put. The Russian pieces, for example, show off the manifold benefits of a Soviet-era technical education. But Arkhipov ultimately holds to a more phenomenological, quasi-mystical appreciation for the ingenuity that post-folk culture represents.

Arkhipov’s collection has been featured in two books: Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts (Fuel Publishing) and Born out of Necessity, 105 Thingumajigs and Their Creator’s Voices (Typolygon)

I spoke with Arkhipov at his friend’s suburban Moscow apartment, in November 2008.

What’s your criteria for including pieces in the archive?

The objects must be functional, visually interesting, one-of-a-kind and not for sale. They must also have an author, someone who can talk about their creation. The form must be unique, unlike anything else. I usually believe the author if he says it’s unique. The less the author thinks about what he’s made, the more interesting it is for the art. Because it’s more pure, not aesthetically loaded. I think things that man makes only for himself can have aesthetic qualities that are not in things made for sale.

Any piece’s uniqueness is usually a coincidence of time, place and the creator. I never know which house will yield an interesting discovery, it’s always accidental.

[Photos: Vladimir Arkhipov. Commode made from a stool by Alexei Tikhonov;
Shovel made from a road-sign by Vladimir Antipov.]

How did you find the first piece in the collection?

I went to a friend’s dacha outside Moscow to help him build a stove. As he was unpacking things I went into the attic. There were some old coats hanging up and when I took them off I noticed the hook — it was made from a toothbrush warped over a flame. Such a small thing! I guess it was a coincidence, because at that moment I was able to see this hook for what it was. It was something important.

It was the answer to the questions that had been brewing in me about what to do next. I decided to start collecting things like this hook. Because usually I saw these things separately, one here at this house, another there, I never thought about it. These self-made tools, gadgets, had been around me all my life, but were an unexplored part of material culture. We just took them for granted.

I wanted to collect them in one place and have the opportunity to reflect on these objects and what story they told. Within a year I put on the first exhibition.

The pieces you collect are, by necessity, tied into the material reality of where they’re made. When you saw that tooth-brush hook, when you began the archive, what were the conditions like in Russia?

After the USSR collapsed, 1993 was the most difficult year for our country. After that everything changed. The social and economic divisions started becoming more stratified, more extreme.

Some of my friends got very rich, and they lost their interest in art. They were more interested in Ferraris and luxury cars. And others didn’t have any money. They couldn’t afford to be interested in anything. The art I was making became irrelevant and unnecessary. I think it was true of all art in this period.

As an artist, the 1990s were the period of looking for an audience, trying to find who is the spectator. Eventually, as some people made money, the art began to develop again, but according to the laws of bourgeois art. It was something shocking and kitschy. It wasn’t interesting to me.

[Photo: Valdimir Arkhipov. Footbridge made from a bed by an unknown author.]

During this time you still thought of yourself as an artist, not yet a curator.

I still thought of myself as an artist, but I wasn’t making anything. I had an apartment in a small town that I rented out for income. Instead, I lived with friends in these condemned houses in Moscow, like a squat. I didn’t need much money to live here. Now where we squatted is the most luxurious part of Moscow, the Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

When I had to make some money I did construction work. It was my dream to have enough money to stop working and just make art.

Here’s a classic story from those times: I was owed a lot of money by this construction company. But it was run by criminals. When I finished my work I never got my last, largest sum. My problem is that I didn’t have what Russians call a ‘roof’ — the people who can look out for you, protect you. In short, I didn’t get the money. I wasn’t the only one. A large group of builders got fucked. You need the courage to shoot people. I didn’t have this quality. Russian business has no recourse for people like me!

[Photo: Vladimir Arkhipov. Summer shower made by Alexander.]

Now that your collection is being noticed outside Russia, art critics and curators tend to appreciate it as either a critique of consumer culture, or as a sociological catalogue of the deprivations suffered here in the immediate post-Soviet era. What do you think about that?

I accept that but only up to a point. I think the more specialized your labour, the less ingenious you become. Consumer societies can lose contact with the material world, with tactile things and the process of creating them. Because if you have money, you need something, you can buy it. But the poor man is more attentive to the details of everyday life. For them this attentiveness is the guarantee of survival.

These pieces do say something about where and when they were made. In Soviet times there was a unique material culture. Because the whole cycle of production, from beginning to end, it was done here. Our technologies and products developed in parallel, but differently than the West. There are certain things that are Soviet-standard that you would never find in the West.

But when I look at these things together, there’s no big difference between the communist and the post-communist times. Yes, they can say a little about when and where they were made, but we should also be careful not to make too much of it.

I prefer to look at it as a phenomenon of contemporary culture — not sociologically, but phenomenologically. For example, I compare these pieces to a sort of folklore by calling it material folklore. But there’s no real tradition of this, not in any conscious sense, you’re not closely following what a whole body of people has done before you. These things are sporadic, occasional. You can’t understand all the why, where, and how, but you can admire them, appreciate their ingenuity. You may even appreciate how they look, although they weren’t necessarily made to look good.

What do you mean by phenomenologically?

These things are traces of the creative force in man. Creativity belongs to everyone, but everyone is different, so the manifestations, expressions of it are different. Some men have a facility with words, others with sound or numbers. And there are others who still understand the world with their hands. Those last people are the people who interest me the most.

Oh, what the broken-hearted will do:

Robber relies on ‘bangers’

A Chinese robber threatened to blow up a restaurant with sausages, disguised as explosives, strapped to his body.

The 23-year-old man ate a meal at the restaurant, in Benxi, Heilongjang province, before grabbing the owner’s daughter. He put a knife to her neck and demanded cash from the till – but the restaurateur and other diners overpowered him.

They called the police – but when officers arrived the man, named He, jumped to his feet and revealed his ‘explosive’ belt. Police managed to restrain He and took him outside to an open space – and called bomb disposal experts, reports the Huashang Morning Post.

“When they experts arrived, they laughed out loud as they quickly realised the explosives were actually sausages,” said a police spokesman. He said he staged the robbery because he was depressed after splitting up with his girlfriend. He told police he had been “inspired” by the shape of the sausages.

Got a notion for a business and need a foreign partner? Looking to out-source production to a country where the wages are cheap and the workers so compliant they’ll break into choreographed flag-waving teams?

Consider North Korea. That’s what three enterprising, albeit drunken, Swedes did. On a lark. Now they’re hawking a brand new line of jeans in their own Stockholm boutique. They even got an exclusive look inside the Hermit Kingdom during their search for a factory.

…They spent the next 10 days visiting textile factories, but without success. They did manage to fit in a trip to the terrarium at the Pyongyang zoo, to which a Swedish TV star had once donated used equipment and a few wild animals. The three Swedes thought that even the crocodiles looked sad.

On their last day in North Korea, they finally met the director of a mining operation that included both a zinc processing and a textile division. The deal was sealed with a handshake, a group photo and Swedish vodka. They decided on black jeans. The Swedes had discovered that the North Koreans were hesitant to produce blue jeans, apparently because they were perceived as an American symbol. On the other hand, the director was very interested in the possibility of the young foreigners perhaps creating a Web page for his business.

by Tyler Stiem

(Originally published in Descant, Issue 145, Summer 2009)

Time, in the Somali desert, exerts itself gently on the visitor. There’s little to mark its passage, such is the constancy of the light, so that the days seem at once eternal and evanescent. Which is to say the afternoon caught us by surprise. We’d spent the morning in the hills north of Hargeisa, filming a pair of doctors as they reminisced about the civil war. They were like joshing schoolboys, each trying to outdo the other with his stories of hasty amputations and midnight supply runs fraught with engine trouble. Who was the first to run for cover when the Somali Air Force strafed their makeshift field hospital? Who saw the worst cases of gangrene? It had been twenty years; they couldn’t agree.

The field hospital, what remained of it, spanned a few acres of thin, sun-washed forest — a string of vanishing footpaths, a few clearings. As we followed the two men, sidestepping acacia bushes and camel dung, I began to grasp the logic of the place. The clearings had been wards: here, beneath this tree, they had performed triage; there, at the foot of that tree, they’d buried the dead. They lingered over every detail, incredulous, luxuriating in dangers past from the safety of the present.

“At night, when the MiGs were gone, this place became a city of light,” the big doctor marvelled. “Cooking fires under every tree. What a sight it was.” His nickname was Bergeel — Camel Liver — on account of his father’s dark complexion. The Somalis love teasing nicknames. The other doctor, the thin one, pried a broken ampoule from the dirt. He coughed and spat. “The children played in the dark while we worked,” he said, scraping at it with his thumbnail. “It was a great relief to hear their laughter.”

Bergeel grasped his forearm. “Remember the old man who used to count the cries of the hyenas?”

The thin doctor laughed. “Every night he said to us, ‘If it is an odd number, we are going to be okay.’ And if there were ten cries, he always heard eleven, even when nobody else could — but we believed him!” The memories of terror and uncertainty were yielding to a pleasurable romanticism, for the doctors’ stories ended happily: they’d fled to the West, reinvented themselves. This last-minute excursion into the desert was going to be our little documentary’s piece de resistance. Now it was time to move on.

And so we found ourselves rattling across plains grey and vast towards the Ethiopian border. One hundred and forty kilometres separate Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, and Jijiga, the capital of the Ogaden — Somali Ethiopia — but the cities are a world apart. Somaliland broke away from Somalia during the civil war, in 1991, abandoning the irredentist dream of Greater Somalia (an ethnic mega-state comprised of Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, and swaths of Ethiopian and Kenyan desert) in favour of realpolitik. Hargeisa, a bombed-out ghost town fifteen years ago, was now thriving. Across the border, though, there was trouble. The Ogadenis were fighting their own, doomed war of secession. Recently the Ogaden National Liberation Front had stepped up its guerrilla campaign against the Ethiopian government, provoking vicious reprisals, and a mantle of military paranoia had settled over the region. I anticipated our passage to Jijiga with grim curiosity.

*

“You are beautiful, no matter what they saaay,” sang the taxi driver, trying to make eye contact with the girl in the backseat. He divided his attention between the girl, the road, and the treats arrayed in his lap: khat, a half-litre of Sprite, a packet of cigarettes. His name was Abdurahman. He was young and spoke English with a North American accent. The girl didn’t look up. Abdurahman pretended to receive a text message. “Words can’t bri-ing me down,” he mumbled. Abdurahman had grown up in the refugee camps across the border and, later, in Canada. He was taking classes at the vocational college in Hargeisa and driving his uncle’s taxi for something to do. Recognizing a missed opportunity, he asked us how much we would’ve paid him to be our translator. I suspected he was what locals would call a dhaqanelis: ‘a person without culture.’ It was an epithet usually reserved for diaspora Somalilanders who’d run afoul of their parents (or worse, the law) and been dispatched here for cultural rehabilitation.

Villages accumulated along the road, a human sediment deposited by the recent flood of cross-border commerce. There were rumours Ethiopia would be the first to recognize Somaliland’s claim to independence. But Hargeisa always buzzed with talk of impending statehood: A visit from a Canadian official two years earlier occasioned feverish speculation that the West would throw its weight behind the aspiring republic. Nothing ever materialized. And so the Ethiopians remained Somaliland’s closest ally and primary trading partner, even as they oppressed the Ogadenis and occupied Mogadishu. Horn of Africa politics were nothing if not complicated.

To the north, rubbly fields yielded to pasture land, erupting into mangy hillocks as the landscape emptied out. Cloudshadow streaked the grass like errant cue-strokes on an old billiard table. When a young shepherd dared to steer his flock down the middle of the highway — by now a loose curl of tracks sketched across the green expanse — Abdurahman lost his temper. He stomped the brakes, whipped the door open, grabbed the boy, and kicked him roundly in the ass. The shepherd threw a hurt look over his shoulder as he ran limping after his sheep. One of the stragglers received a brutal kick of its own.

“Boy,” Abdurahman said. A cruel appraisal. We drove on. The amphetamine effect rolled in on euphoric waves and every so often he seemed newly awake to the world and the possibilities it presented. He savoured everything: the traffic, the sun, even the rancour of his slow-burning argument with a man in the back. When the man thumped the driver’s seat with his fist, Abdurahman only grinned and disagreed more loudly. Another glimpse, perhaps, of his erstwhile delinquency. He described the Internet business he would someday run, back in Ottawa, and the places he would travel. At one point he tried to steer with his knees, the better to defoliate the khat, but another curve in the road sent us briefly, terrifyingly, into the other lane. Experiment over.

Abdurahman had been living in Hargeisa for nearly a year: “It’s amazing, man. They know you’re not a local just by the way you walk down the street. The dudes here have a different kind of swagger, you know? But I love this place, it’s like a second home to me, know what I’m saying?” I wasn’t convinced. He seemed adrift, beset by a deep, undefined hunger that manifested itself physically: in the haggard youthfulness of his face, which pulled at the cheekbones and bibbed around the eyes, in the open parentheses of his bony shoulders. His clothes, probably new and certainly fashionable when he’d arrived, at least by the standards of local kids, looked outmoded, carelessly worn. Abdurahman radiated an aura of anxiety, exhaustion, false cheer. I thought he might be the loneliest person we’d met. Perhaps it was the khat, and this was what acculturation looked like. After all, half the men in Somaliland looked strung-out and underfed by two in the afternoon.

Born a decade earlier, he would’ve sought his fortunes with the Somali National Movement, a teenage guerrilla fighter like the ones we’d met in the dried-out settlements beyond the capital. These were young men who’d settled into middle age by their early thirties, contented, uncurious men for whom the stretch of desert they’d wrested from the once-mighty dictatorship of Siad Barre and could now call their own was world enough. One veteran, an engineer at the water sanitation plant in Gadabiley, had shown me the jagged stump of his arm. He was haunted, still, by the ghost of his hand, which sometimes curled into an invisible fist, but the sacrifice, he explained, squinting at my translated question, had been worth it. “We are free,” he said, “and that is enough.” (The thin doctor admitted he’d performed the amputation: “You can see the tools we used were not made for people.”)

Another veteran bore a shrapnel scar that bloomed, caramel-coloured, around his misshapen bicep. Half the muscle was gone and what remained squirmed up his arm like a vine. He’d been at the front line on the outskirts of the capital when his unit was strafed by MiGs. By the time he saw a doctor, the wound was badly infected and the muscle had to be cut away. It was strange, he said, but he’d seldom dreamed about the war, even during combat.

Almost to a person, the Somalilanders we’d met believed statehood was their right and their future. Demographics played a role in this. The older generation recalled the postcolonial fever-dream that had unified Somaliland and Somalia in the early sixties with a certain nostalgia, but for most people the civil war was the defining moment of their lives. It helped, too, that Somalilanders belonged overwhelmingly to a single, persecuted clan — the Isaaq. They had suffered the most under Barre and been the first to rise up against him. But we met others (Issa, Gadabursi, Darod) who shared their sense of grievance and their optimism. The beginnings of a national identity, one that might some day supercede clan, had been forged in the crucible of war. It was a rare thing in Africa and boded well, I thought, for the future of the breakaway republic.

I asked Abdurahman what he remembered of the fighting. “I remember the camp where I lived with my family. I remember having fun because there was no school, and I remember my uncle going away to fight against Siad Barre. My father and my brothers went to Jijiga and they bought scrap metal. The Ogadenis, they looted our empty houses and sold them back to us, piece by piece. It’s weird, but those were happy days.”

No one wanted to talk about the crisis in the Ogaden. Somalilanders regarded the ONLF as a band of dreamers and criminals, but towards the Ogadenis they felt an estranged kinship. They owed them nothing but they didn’t feel right about the way they were being made to suffer, either. In Ethiopia itself, the Ogaden wasn’t — couldn’t be — talked about. At an airport bar in Addis Ababa I’d met a relief worker headed back to Jijiga. I was reckless with my questions: What kind of work was he doing there? Had he seen evidence of a scorched-earth campaign? He smiled. The situation was not good, he said. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and excused himself.

*

The mood was light as the taxi pulled into the border town of Wachaale. We’d arrived in time for a football match between local teams. The khat vendors had locked up their stalls and a moneychanger was bagging huge, filthy bricks of currency in a plastic sheet. The roads were gutted, the day’s rain filled the potholes. A yellow froth scummed the puddles. But the pitch, around which a crowd began to form, was striking: a neat white grid laid over manicured grass. The players, too, in their immaculate kits, green and black, red and gold. I wanted to stay for the game but we had too far to go.

We said goodbye to Abdurahman (he tried to sell me his iPod, settled for my email address) and hired a wheelbarrow-boy to port our equipment across the border. The Ethiopian customs officer was an elegant man in his thirties, better dressed, in his shirt and tie, than he probably needed to be, managing a provincial outpost like this one. Pasted to the filing cabinet behind his desk was a photo of two little girls, their hair in plaits, giggling.

“Why did you go to Somaliland?”

“We were making a tourist video,” said Sean, hopefully.

“Moment.” The customs officer stepped into the back room.

From my seat against the wall I watched him consult with a man who lay curled around a bowl of steaming wat on the floor. The soles of his feet were cracked. I stepped outside. Past the low wooden houses, with their bare, churned-up gardens, a pack of ruderal children chased a soccer ball. Locals wandered in no man’s land.

We left Wachaale in the dark. Inside the bus the women held their children close and the men pretended to sleep. There had been a fight for the last seats: Everyone was anxious to move on. Outside a storm was gathering. Bean fields swished under a hard, crystalline sky. Then: a roadblock, manned by Ethiopian soldiers. They were fit, well-equipped, their expressions grim. We stepped off the bus into wind. Distant clouds drifted across the sky like a smack of luminous jellyfish, aswim in spectral light. Lightning tentacled from their blackening underbellies.

The women lined up first, documents in hand, and they were searched while the men looked on in silence. The soldier tasked with the pat-downs was careful, almost deferential. Old and young, slender and stooped, the women cut austere figures. Their dresses — flickering yellows, reds, turquoises, purples — bled into the dusk, a mess of colour expressing what their inscrutable faces did not. They were a pageant of ghosts. I was taken aback by their beauty. So, I think, was the soldier. As they climbed back onto the bus they were apparitions become flesh once again: mothers nursing bug-eyed infants, old women minding arithritic joints.

The men were frisked and shoved. A soldier climbed atop the bus and made the conductor pick through the luggage. They were on the lookout for arms coming across the border to supply the ONLF. “This is yours?” the soldier yelled down at us, tugging at one of our bags. Sean nodded. The soldier gestured for the key. He rooted through toiletries, clothes, notebooks. I was glad of the stock footage we’d recorded.

Half an hour later the storm was upon us. I watched my reflection float just beyond the window, disfigured by the rain. People were falling asleep. I thought about my wife, how in the heat of the Toronto summer we drag a mattress downstairs and sleep on the floor. Our own little island. The hiss of summer rain and the relief it brings. The sound of her feet peeling from the hardwood as she rises, an hour before I do, to wash and dress for work. It was the first time I’d thought of home in awhile.

*

The sky flinched and there it was: the second roadblock. A man with dreadlocks and a kerchief wrapped around his face boarded the bus while another guarded the door. These weren’t soldiers. If their masks didn’t give them away, their equipment did. A ragged satchel and an old Kalashnikov hung from the man’s back, their crisscrossed straps burrowing into his chest.

“What is this?” Sean whispered. There wasn’t the same alienated calm inside the bus this time.

“Nothing,” I hissed. “Don’t talk.” I hoped we’d be leaving the checkpoint with our cameras and tapes.

The man strode down the aisle, stopping halfway to loosen the kerchief. Something caught his attention (his own disembodied face, suddenly strange?) and he stared out the window. His long fingers caressed a seatback. He was a little younger than Abdurahman, about twenty, and in that instant reminded me of him. The same yearning look, the fuzziness around the edges. But it passed when he shook his reverie, and anyway the comparison was probably fanciful: there was a look of real impoverishment to him. He was counting us with his eyes.

The man spoke to the conductor in hushed Somali and the conductor handed over a wad of bills. I guessed now that such contingencies accounted for the higher nighttime fare. The man stepped off the bus and we pulled away. For awhile no one spoke. Then a cellphone flared in someone’s hand, illuminating a row of weary faces. Somali faces. A murmur issued from the broken silence and drifted through the bus. Rain struck the roof and settled into a thrum. Again the small talk dissolved into silence. In the distance I could see Jijiga, a smear of light along an invisible horizon. In the foreground, another roadblock.

By Craille Maguire Gillies

Unable to stand the crowds after spending several days in Barcelona over the holidays, I scoped out another vantage of La Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s enormous, yet-to-be-completed church. Lines of people waiting to enter snaked around one corner and, turning that corner, I discovered that they snaked around the next, too. I found a clearer panorama at the entrance to a KFC, where the lines were also long and spilled out the door. I tripped over a pigeon eating a French fry as I staked out my spot.

You can’t seem to walk three blocks in Barcelona without running into a Gaudí masterpiece — though by masterpiece I am referring to scale. In architecture, as in cities, grand has more than one meaning. This premise was challenged a week earlier in Vienna when I came upon the marble façade of Alfred Loos magnificent, but relatively diminutive Loos-Haus, directly opposite the grand palace, the Hopfburg, where Hitler declared Austria part of Germany in 1938.

[Loos-Haus, Vienna]

Despite the striking façade, Loos-Haus is unornamented and spare, a few flower boxes are the architect’s sole concession to then-emperor Franz Joseph, who is said to have called the building the “house without eyebrows.” One hundred years after the Loos building went up, after modernism and post-modernism, Loos’ iconoclasm is difficult to reconcile — until you realize that the plain façade of Loos Haas with the neo-Baroque apartments across the street were built at the same period. Masterpieces are often, but not always, large.

When seeking out suggestions on what to see in Barcelona, almost everyone I spoke with gave a list that included a few sights by the Spanish architect, prefaced with, “If you like Gaudí, you might visit…” In Paris, no one would suggest you visit the Eiffel Tower “if you like hideous, tall buildings.” Even Frank Gehry, an architect prone to odd shapes and a nearly monolithic style, doesn’t provoke the same response. As in, “If you like shiny, amorphous buildings that look like they were crafted from aluminum foil you might stop by the Guggenheim.” Gaudí, though, Gaudí is different. Which made me wonder, what do locals think of Gaudí? Do they think of Gaudí? Is he not simply there in the way that a birthmark is there, irrevocable, unnoticeable?

And yet his legacy is so recent. Few European cities have such a large catalogue of work by one architect who worked not so long ago.

Cranes and scaffolding are seemingly permanent fixtures along one side of Sagrada Família. Take or leave the buildings, but this is the most transparent metaphor for cities that I’ve seen these last few weeks in Europe: a city always in progress, never finished, crafted from layers of concrete and stone and glass. I like the idea of a city that is more of a collage than one person’s artistic statement, and this is where, during my outsider’s archi-tour of Barcelona, I find Gaudí’s iconoclasm difficult to square.

Alfred Loos is said to have proclaimed something along the lines of, “Ornament is crime.” The only ornament should come from the materials, he believed. This sentiment came to mind I stood in front of the KFC in a territorial battle for “view” with tourists and that lone pigeon. For Gaudí, the ornament was also in the materials. His buildings look like they were carved from enormous hoodoos by a violent wind, like the one that whipped gravel into my eyes when I jogged along Platja de la Nova Icària.

With some shame and embarrassment, I’ll admit that I prefer “pretty” buildings and would give up waiting in line for hours to see the inside of Sagrada Família to instead wander the barrios of Barcelona. I do not always find what I am looking for, but it never seems to matter.

[Bryce Canyon, Utah]